Yours, LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. (1 Chronicles 29:11)
Are you really grateful for the things you have? Have you ever had the dining room discussion where your parents told you that you shouldn’t waste food because there are starving people all around the world? At times the comment may have been a ploy to get us to eat something we don’t like but there was a wise underlying principle that if we were grateful for what we had we would wouldn’t waste it (we would be good stewards).
The following excerpt from a Back to the Bible document written by Woodrow Kroll amplifies the important link between stewardship and gratitude:
“When we believe that wealth belongs to us, however, we get ourselves in trouble. We say, “It’s mine, I earned it, I worked hard for it. It belongs to me, and I’ll do with it whatever I want.” If that’s your attitude, you have been duped by Satan in a big way. Satan wants us to believe that everything we have belongs to us and we are not responsible to anyone for how we use it. But the truth is it’s not ours; it’s God’s. Wealth is a stewardship from God. We are just holding God’s wealth for Him, using what we need of it to live on, and investing the rest so that it will bring a greater yield to Him (Matt. 25:14-30). God wants to see what we’ll do with it. So whether it’s money, land or possessions, we will never be rightly related to what we have until we recognize that it is not ours. All that we have belongs to God.
……..All that we enjoy in our lives is ultimately the gift of God to us. Instead of complaining that we do not have more, we would be wise to be grateful that we have as much as we do.”
Do you see a strong link between gratitude and stewardship?