Series: Stewardship
Category: Core Seminars
Detail:
Panel Q&A
PRAYER
Welcome back to the 8th week of the Stewardship core seminar. My name is ______, and today, we’ll be concluding our segment on stewarding our wealth and money with a panel discussion. But before we get to our panel, I just want to give a quick review of what we’ve learned during the past seven weeks.
In week 1, ______ taught the basics of stewardship by looking at Jesus’s parable of the talents in Matthew 25. The two big takeaways were 1) God owns everything and 2) we don’t own what we own but are stewards. And the goal of our stewardship is faithfulness with what God’s given us.
We then continued the theme of faithfulness in week 2, when ______ picked up the parable of the talents again. We learned what faithfulness looks like in our stewardship. We said that it’s not about results but being faithful, trusting in God and his promises. Our stewardship ultimately speaks volumes about God and his faithfulness.
And that’s where we can often fail in our stewardship. So in week 3, we looked at the enemy of our stewardship, which is idolatry. We learned that idolatry is a matter of our heart, and that we can often be tempted to make idols out of the good things God’s given us to steward. And we talked about how fighting idolatry involves loving something more, which is God.
Then in week 4, we started to get more practical in how to steward our money, as _____ led us through giving. We went through the why, what, and how of Christian giving and learned that it’s better to give than to receive and that giving shows off how generous God is. We discussed the change of the tithe in the Old Testament to the New. Remember that we don’t just give 10% to God as though that’s his portion and the rest is ours. No, it’s all God’s, and as stewards, we must assess the best way to use what God’s entrusted to us.
Moving to week 5, ________ took us through how we spend as stewards. We discussed budgeting, but we also discussed choosing a lifestyle and how our choice of a lifestyle has implications for our spending. God’s not calling us to spend more than we make but is calling us to make wise spending choices to glorify him. Every dollar we spend should have a job description attached to it.
In week 6, we thought about how stewardship decisions with our money today impact the future. We discussed how having the availability of credit is a kindness from God but how debt can also cripple our stewardship and so we want to be wise before we mortgage the future. We then discussed saving for the future and how it’s wise to plan ahead but there are dangers to trusting in our wealth rather than trusting in our God.
Finally, last week, _________ took us through the dangers of materialism and valuing created things over the Creator. We talked about how to rightly enjoy the things that God’s given us and how to keep our hearts from the love of things and money.
With that overview, let me invite our panel guest to come up. Thank you for being with us today. Would you please introduce yourselves by giving your name, vocation, and whether you’re single or married?
The goal for the remainder of our time together is to ask you some questions and hear how you practically apply this idea of stewarding our money for God. I’ll be asking you some questions, but we’ll also open it up to the audience for any questions they might have.
Questions:
Can you each give us a brief history of your relationship with money? (e.g., Has money generally been plentiful or scarce; have you generally struggled with being too generous or too thrifty; etc.)
What scriptural truth about stewarding money has been most helpful to you and why?
When have you made a poor decision in stewarding your money and what did you learn from it?
For the married: How has managing money become more difficult in marriage? What have you learned about that?
What has helped you grow in the grace of giving?
Of all the financial decisions that you’ve made, which may have seemed most foolish in the eyes of the world—that you made because you were a Christian?
