This Sunday I am starting a new sermon series on finances called LO$T. Many people feel lost when it comes to handling money, they have a great deal of stress around their personal finances.
The church term we use for properly handling finances is stewardship. Christians are to be good stewards of their money.
What does it mean to be a steward?
A steward is a person who manages another persons’s property or financial affairs or a person who administers anything as the agent of another or others. When we put this in the context of God, we are created in His image to be His representatives, or stewards, in this world. We are to manage God’s good creation.
The implication of this reality is that everything belongs to God. The money that we have isn’t really our money, but the wealth that God has given us to manage and leverage for His Kingdom.
This reality isn’t just limited to our finances. It also applies to all areas of our lives. It applies to our talents, to our relationships, to our property, and to our lives.
One of the truths that we need to accept is that we are not our own, we are God’s people. We belong to Him.
Since we belong to God we need to take care of all the blessings He gives us. That includes our health. We are to be good stewards of our physical lives.
An obstacle that we run into with both our finances and our health is too much information. There are tons of books, websites, and podcasts that offer information about managing money and taking care of our health. We can paralyze ourselves by thinking that we don’t know enough or that we need more knowledge before we can make a decision.
Being a steward isn’t about having all the right answers, it is about making the best decision you can with the information that you know. Acting is often better than remaining still.
This new bout of blood clots I am experiencing has forced me to face the fact that I need to do a better job at managing my health. I need to take my stewardship responsibility for my health more seriously.
I was complacent because I thought since I was on Eliquis I wasn’t going to have a problem with blood clots again. I relied on a medical fix to the problem rather than focusing on what I could do to minimize the risk.
When we are good stewards of our health we will do those things that we know will promote a healthy life and minimize things that might contribute to disease and other problems.
For me this begins with losing weight. The reality is that being overweight contributes to all sorts of health issues, and while losing weight isn’t a guarantee to stay disease free, it does reduce some of the risk. To loose weight requires proper nutrition and activity.
Second is to drink more water. I know that one of the reasons I eat as much as I do is because I am thirsty, but I have trained myself to grab food rather than grabbing a glass of water.
Third on my list of being a good steward of my health is better sleep. As long as I can remember I have had trouble sleeping. I know that I need to increase the amount of sleep I get, but also the quality of sleep I get. One thing that has helped me so far is no eating an hour before bed. By tracking my Fitbit sleep score I have noticed a 10 point difference in my quality of sleep between the nights I eat right before bed and the nights when I don’t eat.
We are God’s stewards, managing His possessions. One of those possessions is our lives. We need to make an effort to take care of the lives God has given to us.
