Stewardship in all of life rests on the knowledge that all we are and all we have has been given to us by God through Christ and belongs to God. We are therefore under His lordship. Laziness and selfishness are acts of ingratitude and betrayal toward God, and they portray a lack of trust in the very God who has given us all things pertaining to life and godliness.

Asteward is one who manages or administers the estate, affairs, or goods of another. Inherent in this definition is the fact that a steward is not the owner of what he manages and is therefore accountable to the actual owner. Biblical stewardship is based on the concept that God is the owner of all things and that the human race has been created to manage what He has created. This is seen in the creation accounts in Genesis. God creates the earth and all things therein. Man is created by God in His image and is commanded to have dominion over all that God has created. Genesis 2:5 captures the essence of man’s role as steward over God’s creation in succinct terms: “No bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.” The command in Genesis 1:28 to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves on the earth” further amplifies the fact that God is the Creator-owner and man is the creature-servant. Psalm 24:1 is even more emphatic in making this point: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”

God’s ownership is all-inclusive—He owns everything and everyone. The fall is about (among other things) man’s failure to exercise dominion over the serpent (one of those living things), rebelling against the commands of the Creator-owner concerning the tree in the midst of the garden, and taking upon himself the prerogatives of ownership (“You will be like God”; Gen. 3:5). The fall is a rebellion against God’s ownership of and authority over all things. Seen from this perspective, stewardship is the responsibility not just of Christians but of all humanity. The difference is that Christians by virtue of our regeneration have been given the capacity to comprehend God’s ownership of all things, and as a consequence we have also been given the capacity to recognize our accountability in our use and management of what God has given over to our care.

I say that we have the “capacity” because our Christian faith does not mean that we will automatically recognize properly and fully the extent and implications of our stewardship. As regenerated sinners, we are still prone to the sort of self-centeredness that cries out “me, me” and “mine, mine.” In fact, we live in a world that promotes, nurtures, and celebrates the autonomous self, as if the individual were free to do whatever he chooses to do as long as no one is hurt. The 1970s R&B group the Isley Brothers provided the theme song “It’s Your Thing” for that mindset. The rationale for abortion advocates is that a woman has a right to do with her body whatever she desires. The point is this: Like a biblically accurate understanding of the gospel, our responsibility as stewards in all of life is a concept that is foreign to our fallen nature. We therefore need to be reminded over and over again that God is the owner of all things and we are just managers or overseers of what He has entrusted to our care.

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