Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.1
When I think of faithful men, I think of my father. In his late teens Dad was thrown into the role of provider for his mother and four younger siblings when his father died of TB at an early age. To help with family income, he started working for a title insurance company in Los Angeles at the age of twenty and retired from the same company forty-five years later.
Dad was married to my mother for fifty-five years until she died, and he lived in the only home he ever owned for fifty years.
But the most amazing thing of all was his commitment to the Lord and to the church he attended. Dad became a Christian as a young teen and was a member of his church for eighty-four years, until he died at the age of ninety-nine. And he did all of this in the tumultuous twentieth century culture of Southern California.
Through the depression, WWII, Vietnam, riots, the sexual revolution, the Cold War – it didn’t matter what, Dad was always the same, faithful man of God. He was, in the deepest sense, truly countercultural.
Your team has been given a trust. The widow widower or single parent that has been assigned to you has infinite value in the sight of God. As C. S. Lewis has pointed out, if we could see them just for a moment in the glorified state they will soon be in, our first impulse would be to fall prostrate before them in fear and awe.
Like my father, this trust you have been given has one requirement: faithfulness. It is not how your team is doing right now that will determine your success, but how your team is doing five or ten years from now. Will your team be faithful to the end?
It is this long haul view of service that is absolutely critical to an effective expression of the love of Christ for your care receiver. And it is this long haul view that is so revolutionary and distinctive in our ephemeral, throw away culture.
In the hands of faithful stewards, the love of Christ becomes a powerful and potent medicine that brings healing to the hearts of people who have been torn by grief and despair.
This post first appeared in New Commandment.org and in Doing Good Well, by Herb Reese
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Learn how to form teams of men for every widow, single mom
and fatherless child in your church at NewCommandment.org.
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