This World Is Not Our World

It’s been two years since we’re without a called pastor and I know some are getting a little anxious as to what the future holds. One thing that I can guarantee all of you is that your faithful Pastor Nominating Committee (PNC) members are committed as ever, hard at work, trying to discern God’s will for Riverside’s pastoral leadership.

However, as people of faith, we also know we are a people of hope, and we know we can trust God’s steadfast love — which endures forever — to get us through this transitional time. So, even though we don’t know what the future holds, we know who holds the future, and we need to reach deep down inside each and every one of ourselves to see what we can and should do to better serve our community, state, country, and yes, even the world; and to look up to God to bind up our brokenness, to bring about healing. To know the One who one day will wipe away our every tear.

Actually this realization is very important for us as Christians because it once again puts us in our rightful place — in our rightful relationship to God. We can no longer take for granted that we have control over what happens to us, that this is our world. We have to come to grips that if God is indeed in control then this is really God’s world and we are, at best, stewards of God’s world. And this should make a real difference in our relationship to God as we must then live our lives accordingly. Otherwise we would be just like the tenants in the following story:

According to a January 15, 1989 article in the Lexington Herald-Leader, the family living in a home in West Palm Beach, Florida, told a film crew it was okay to use the front lawn as a set for an episode of the “B.L. Stryker” television series. They knew cars would be crashing violently in front of the house.

While the front yard was being blown up, the owner of the home was tipped off and called from New York, demanding to know what was happening to his house. It seemed the people who were living in the house were only tenants and had no right to allow the property to be destroyed as the cameras rolled.

Many times we live our lives under the mistaken impression that they belong to us. Paul tells us we were “bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23). We must then live as those who know God will call us to account for the ways we have used this life entrusted to us.

This realization should also help us to better understand and appreciate the biblical concept of stewardship.

Very often when we think of stewardship, we only think of money. For example, when I looked up “stewardship” in the Index in one of my Bible encyclopedias, it referred me to look under “money.” But we know that’s not all there is to it! The proper understanding of biblical stewardship brings with it the concept that all that we have and all that we are actually belong to God, which include our time, talent, and treasure.

So, let’s live faithful lives as we allow the Holy Spirit to live in and through us, to understand that God’s timing is the perfect one!

Yours in Christ,