Stewardship Bible
The Making of Wise Stewards
Wise people devote themselves heart and soul to seeking more and more wisdom. Wisdom helps us know the truth and love the lovely. In New Testament terminology, we come to recognize Christ as the wisdom of God (see 1Co 1:24,30; Col 2:2–3), a treasure of supreme worth we are to seek (with mind, heart and soul) at the cost of all else (see Lk 14:33).
Best-selling author Philip Yancey reflects on the position of the believer in relation to Jesus’ supreme sacrifice:
The author and preacher Tony Campolo delivers a stirring sermon adapted from an elderly black pastor at his church in Philadelphia. “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Comin’” is the title of the sermon, and once you know the title you know the whole sermon. In a cadence that increases in tempo and in volume, Campolo contrasts how the world looked on Friday—when the forces of evil won over the forces of good, when every friend and disciple fled in fear, when the Son of God died on a cross—with how it looked on Easter Sunday. The disciples who lived through both days, Friday and Sunday, never doubted God again. They had learned that when God seems most absent he may be closest of all, when God looks most powerless he may be most powerful, when God looks most dead he may be coming back to life. They had learned not to count God out.
Campolo skipped one day in his sermon, though. The other two days have earned names on the church calendar: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Yet in a real sense we live on Saturday, the day with no name. What the disciples experienced in small scale—three days, in grief over one man who had died on a cross—we now live through on cosmic scale. Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment. Can we trust that God can make something holy and beautiful and good out of a world that includes Bosnia and Rwanda, and inner-city ghettoes and jammed prisons in the richest nation on earth? It’s Saturday on planet earth; will Sunday ever come?
That dark, Golgothan Friday can only be called Good because of what happened on Easter Sunday, a day which gives a tantalizing clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter opened up a crack in a universe winding down toward entropy and decay, sealing the promise that someday God will enlarge the miracle of Easter to cosmic scale.
Proverbs 23:23 calls us to “Buy the truth and do not sell it.” We have been handpicked by God as trustees of the wisdom of the cross. Whatever else we do, we owe it to our Creator, Savior and Lord not to sell out.
Think About It
- What can you do to “get wisdom”?
- In what way is Jesus the “wisdom of God”?
- In what ways do you feel we live on Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday?
Pray About It
Lord, sometimes it’s so hard to live here on earth. I long for your redemption. In the meantime, I will wait and seek to live wisely.