Stewardship is a big word and can seem kind of intimidating.

In this article we’ll explore the meaning of stewardship according to the Bible and what that means for us today. To begin, imagine this:

You get a summer job at a local ice cream shop during school holidays. The pay isn’t amazing, but it helps and at least it’s something to put on your resume. While your friends are getting tanned, swimming in the ocean, and living the carefree life; your hands are sticky, the customers are rude, and your manager is confusing.

One day, the manager announces that he’s leaving for a holiday. “Not you too”, you think but wisely hide your frustration. To your surprise the manager throws the keys your way and as he walks out of the door, he shouts: “Shop’s in your hands now. I’ll be back at the end of summer. You’re the manager now.” 

A definition for Stewardship

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, stewardship can be defined as “the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care”. That’s a mouthful. It basically means that you are taking care of something that belongs to someone else. You are a steward. 

Like the ice-cream shop example we started with, you are left in control. Stewardship, therefore, goes hand-in-hand with things like responsibility, oversight, and care. A steward is not hasty, wasteful, or destructive. 

Steward VS Reward

In the Bible, there’s a similar story: 

Matthew 25:14-29 tells us about a master who leaves his servants to take care of things while he’s gone. He leaves one servant 5 bags of money, another only 2, and yet another only 1 bag of money. The first two servants invest the money, work with it, and it increases, but not so the 1-bag-man. Afraid to disappoint his master, he hides the money in a hole in the ground and anxiously awaits his master’s return.

“Sometimes when we don’t have as much as others,
we have the urge to hide away and wait,
but when we start with what we have
it will increase and grow into greatness.”

Let’s pick up the story in verse 19: “After a long time the master came home. He asked the servants what they did with his money. The servant who got five bags brought that amount and five more bags of money to the master. The servant said, ‘Master, you trusted me to care for five bags of money. So I used them to earn five more.’”

It was the same for the servant who invested the two bags of money, but to the servant who buried the single bag, the master said:

‘You should have put my money in the bank. Then, when I came home, I would get my money back. And I would also get the interest that my money earned.’ So the master told his other servants, ‘Take the one bag of money from that servant and give it to the servant who has ten bags. Everyone who uses what they have will get more. They will have much more than they need. But people who do not use what they have will have everything taken away from them.’



If you take the word ‘steward’ and remove the first two letters, replace it with an ‘r’, you get the word ‘reward’. The master in the story rewarded those who understood stewardship, so this is important for us to understand as well.

Being a Steward of God

God calls each one of us to stewardship. Whatever God gave you, it is your job to make it grow. The way you multiply it is by working with it.

Even if you might not have a lot of money, there are resources that you do have. 

• Perhaps you have a lot of TIME in this season of your life and you could volunteer at a local non-profit to serve your community.
• Maybe you have a great TALENT in sports, music, gardening, math, or reading that you could use to share with other people.
• All of us have SKILLS - even knowing how to tie your shoelaces, read, or write is a useful tool that could change somebody’s life.

If you still believe you have nothing to share, your testimony is something you get to steward as well. As Psalm 66:16 encourages us to say: “Come and I will tell you what He has done for me.”

Stewardship of Money

If you think about it: Everything that is yours is really God’s. 

Luke 16:10-11 reminds us powerfully, “Whoever can be trusted with small things can also be trusted with big things. Whoever is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in big things too. If you cannot be trusted with worldly riches, you will not be trusted with the true riches.” 

Becoming a Young CEO is about more than a solid business plan and a good fundraising strategy. If you want to make it and enter the rewards that God has for you, you must first learn the very basics of stewardship. Memorize them. Practice them. Watch them work. 

What does it mean to be a Steward?

In summary, you are a steward if you are put in charge of something and left to oversee something (this next part’s crucial) - something that belongs to someone else. You are not an owner, just a person looking after one of the owners’ belongings.

According to the Bible each one of us is a steward of certain resources that God entrusted us with - time, talents, skills, and money. How we look after our money matters to us because it matters to God.