How Does A Steward Pray? - Part 1
June 25, 2008
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
R. Scott Rodin is a consultant and former President of Eastern (now Palmer) Seminary. His book Stewards in the Kingdom is available at Amazon.com.
As God’s people we are called to be people of prayer. We are also called to live as godly stewards. And there is a powerful integration of these two callings, a rich interconnectedness that can ignite both a deeper prayer life and more passionate pursuit of godly stewardship.
Scripture gives us an illustration of how we should pray and a theology of what it means to be a steward. As we look at each we can see how they can so beautifully work together.
As recorded in Matthew 6, the pattern of the prayer Jesus taught us can be understood as a spiritual progression of eight parts. It begins with praise acknowledging God as our Father and Creator. It moves to an appeal for God’s kingdom to be manifest on the earth and God’s will to be accomplished in and through God’s people. The prayer then asks God to meet our needs. This is followed by an appeal for forgiveness and a heart to love and forgive our neighbor. The prayer concludes with an admission of our need for God’s strength in the face of temptation and our deliverance from evil which can only come from him.
Scripture also teaches us what it means to be a steward in the kingdom of God. We learn that our creation in the image of God means that we were originally created to live in harmonious, meaningful and joyful relations on four levels; namely, in our relationship to God, to ourselves, to our neighbor and to creation. We also learn that the Fall of humanity into sin destroyed our relationships on all four of these levels. Finally, rejoice in the knowledge that in Christ, all four of these relationships were redeemed and given back to us as precious gifts. Our call as stewards is lovingly to nurture these relationships, remembering the price that was paid to redeem them for us, and how they reflect our created purpose as image bearers of our triune God.
How then should a steward pray? If we apply the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer to the four-fold nature of our calling to be stewards of God, we will see a beautiful and powerful prayer-life emerge. Here is what I think it might look like.
The prayer of the steward begins at the first level at the intersection of our praise to our triune God and the acknowledgment that our relationship to God has been bought for us with the blood of Jesus Christ. To be a steward of this relationship should inspire praise, thanks and gratitude. And so we pray in praise to the God who created us, redeemed us and continues to draw near to us as his beloved children. From here our prayer will ask that God’s will for us and all creation will become ever more present as we seek to be obedient to his call. We will continue by praying that God will provide all we need, equipping us that we might remain close to him. ‘Our daily bread’ in this way might mean our daily devotional time, prayer time and study of the Scriptures.
We will follow with a prayer of repentance of all we do that separates us from God and impedes the intimacy he wishes to have with each of us, and we pray for our neighbors who struggle with the same. We close by acknowledging that, left to ourselves, we will repeat the sin of Adam and go our own way. And so we fervently ask God to keep us close to him, to help us resist all attempts by the enemy to lure us away, and to deliver us each day from the trials and snares that lay in our path. The close of this prayer should leave us with a deeper sense of intimacy with God, equipping us to cleave to him daily and live out our calling to be stewards of our relationship at this first and most important level.
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