Part of our walk with Jesus is a responsibility we have as believers is to be good stewards of what we’ve been given by Him, and by stewardship, I don’t mean just money.
The management of His money is part of our walk with Him, but I’d like to concentrate on the ‘spiritual’ nature of stewardship.
To that end, we should be thinking in terms about what it means to make Jesus not only our Lord, but also our Sovereign.

When we repent of the our sins, we are supposed to be turning away from our allegiance to sin and to the things of this world, and ‘switching’ that allegiance to Jesus.When we give our allegiance to Jesus, we accept His gift of salvation as our Savior and Lord. When we submit everything in our lives to Him, we are acknowledging Him as our ‘Sovereign’ Lord and Savior.

Most dictionaries will define a sovereign as one who exercises supreme, permanent authority, or something along those lines. So if God is our Sovereign, He owns everything, which means that we own nothing. He exercises supreme authority. We don’t even own our bodies, or our souls within them. He does.

The Bible tells us,
For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. 1 Cor. 6:20

And in 1st Peter 1:18,19 the Word says,
“knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, 19 but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”

We were freed from slavery to sin and death, because Jesus paid for our sins with His own precious blood. We’re not supposed to be concentrating so much on our rights as freed slaves, but on how we now have a responsibility to manage well, what we have been given in that freedom. Knowing this is essential to being a good steward. Everything must be submitted to Him. We can’t be good stewards of His gifts without our submission.

When we know this, and we know that everything we have, and everything we are, belongs to Him, we know that this means our money, our homes, our very selves, even our time, and it also means ‘how’ we invest these things into an effort to glorify God. The wise management of these things is ‘good’ stewardship.

I have a friend who is a pretty Godly guy. I only know some of the things he has to does. If you knew just what I know, you’d wonder how he manages it. It’s because he is a wise steward of what God has given him.

So how do we learn to be wise stewards? Well, one lesson that many Christians still need to learn, is that Father knows best.

I know that I can’t give you an accurate count of how many times in my life I’ve messed up on that one. Times that I’ve either acted reflexively in a situation, when just a time of prayerful reflection would have made all the difference in the decision I made.
Let’s just say that I’ve made that mistake a lot. It took me a long time to realize that I was not moving in a Biblical direction where the stewardship of God’s gifts to me were concerned.

Let’s say for example, that without submitting the idea to God for His direction and approval, I decided to go to Sudan, and be a missionary to people there. I could go there because I am unsubmitted to Him, and it might be out of His specific will for me. What would happen?
I don’t know really, but God is merciful. He would probably honor it and use it and some folks might come to know Him because of it.

But He sees the bigger picture, and He set aside works for me to do ahead of time. The works may not seem as glamorous as leading thousands to Christ in one evening at a large gathering of seekers. It may not seem as glamorous as being a well-known and respected Christian educator or writer. But He sees the bigger picture.

Maybe His specific will for me is going to work each day, because I'm a single mother whose child needs support to go to college some day, to be in God’s specific will. Or maybe His specific will for me is to be the guy who is willing to go to the church after hours and help clean the toilets and mop the floors, because the small church I belong to can’t yet afford a janitor.

We can save ourselves lots of trouble when we pay closer attention to the book in our laps on Sunday mornings. We call it His Word, after all, and He knows everything. This world that we live in is hostile toward God, and its people have largely rejected Him as their Creator. While we belong to Him, we are visiting here, and we aren’t immune to the temptations that we are bombarded with in the media, and the trials in our day-to-day lives.

Somebody I know recently gave a short Bible study. She said,“The key to adversity is your response to it. Adversity also shows us where we stand in our faith. Many times we get so blinded by our trials that we do not remember to call on the Lord.”

When we get ‘bombarded’ and when we go through trials, we come to realize that the decisions we’ve made without submitting to Him don’t seem to work out. We grow, hopefully, and we repent of trying to do things on our own, ask His forgiveness and for Him to change our heart towards His sovereignty in our lives. We ‘submit’ to Him.

As Christians, we’ve all wanted and received Him as our Savior. He saved us. But if we truly want to be His disciples, we need to submit ourselves to His Sovereignty. How do we do that? We simply give to Him that rightful place in our lives that He deserves. That rightful place He requires, and turn from our ‘old’ way of wanting our ‘own’ way.

We have a relationship with Him, but we want that relationship to be more than just an association with Him. We want our relationship to be strong with Him, and pleasing to Him.
Jesus alone offers the way to have a relationship with God the Father. Jesus alone offers life, and a way to have purpose for that life that can never come from anything we can do of our own accord.
He offers us His Lordship, and His Sovereignty.