Bleak and colorless.  November calendar photos are invariably the blandest of the entire year.  October boasts vivid fall colors.  December is trimmed in bright red and green.  But November is muted grey and brown with somber landscapes and usually fog.   You might expect January to be the least interesting, but November always takes last place.  

As a child something else characterized November.  It was “Stewardship Month.”  To avoid the unpleasantness of preaching on ‘giving,’ our church confined the topic to the month of November.  The rest of the year preachers and hearers were off the hook and could rest easy.   No one invited friends to church during November.  And we all girded up the loins of our minds for the deep dive into ‘stewardship.’ 

‘Stewardship’ was our euphemism for the giving of tithes and offerings.  The November series resembled a spiritualized fundraising campaign preparing us for the new year’s budget.  Stewardship month jaded us that the topic of ‘giving’ was an unpleasant but necessary part of the Christian life.  And so, we missed out on one of the most joyful aspects of covenant life and treated ‘giving’ as an embarrassment to our apologetic for a life well lived.

But even more problematic, if we limit the realm of our stewardship to giving or finances alone, we miss the larger picture of the life God purposes for us in Christ.  All that we have, all that we are given, all that we experience, all we say, all we do, and all that we are, it all belongs to God.  He is the giver of every good and perfect gift.  Even those gifts he knows we need, but we might rather return.  He entrusts it all to us to use in ways that enable us to fill and subdue the earth for his glory.  Nowhere is this dynamic expressed more clearly than in our Doxology.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise him all creatures here below;
Praise him above, ye heav’nly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

‘Grace and Gratitude’ is the Reformed rubric which animates our Doctrines of Grace.   God gives us grace in Christ.  We respond with all our heart, mind, soul and strength in loving gratitude.  We see this basic trajectory in all the great Reformed catechisms; saving grace leading to love for the law.  But never the other way around.

We are to be stewards, caretakers, shepherds of God’s grace in all the ways it unfolds in and through us.  In our things.  In our hopes, dreams, and aspirations.  In our vocations.  In our experiences and actions.  In our words.  And in our care for ourselves and others.  The Bible, and especially the New Testament, is filled with admonitions to faithful stewardship of God’s grace.

In Mark 12, we meet Jesus on the Tuesday before he goes to the cross.  The trajectory from “Hosanna” to “Crucify” is animated by what theologians call the “Temple controversies.”  Jesus confronted the scribes and Pharisees in Galilee, but now he takes on the entire Sanhedrin on their home turf in the Temple courts.  The hour is late.  The moment is crucial.  Jesus minces no words, pulls no punches confronting the men claiming to be the under-shepherds of Israel.   They are unfaithful stewards of God’s covenant of grace and have rejected the One True Shepherd King.

In a shocking twist on the Isaiah’s “Song of the Vineyard,” Jesus paints the religious leaders into a despicable portrait of unfaithful stewardship.   And in so doing, calls us through a terrible warning to faithfully steward of the grace of God.  So, how are you doing as a steward?  Are you employing the gracious gifts of God for the glory and service of your Master?  Or are you redirecting them for your own ends?  Or burying them in the ground out of fear not love for your master?

Join us as we examine Mark 12:1-12 and consider its call to take seriously faithful stewardship of God’s gifts. We meet Sundays at 10:30 am on the square in Pottsville, Arkansas right next to historic Potts’ Inn for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join our livestream on YouTube.