It All Belongs to God

King David was an old man. He had wanted all his life to build a house for God, a temple in Jerusalem, and God had told him no. His son Solomon would build it. So David did the next best thing. He spent his last years gathering the materials: gold, silver, bronze, iron, timber and precious stones, in quantities that are hard to imagine. Then he gave his own private fortune on top. The leaders of Israel saw it and followed his lead, and the gifts poured in until the treasuries overflowed.

If ever a man had the right to feel proud of his generosity, it was David that day. Instead, he stood up in front of the whole assembly and prayed. And in the middle of the greatest offering of his life, he said something that turned it inside out.

“To You, LORD, belong the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory and the majesty; indeed everything in heaven and on earth is Yours. The kingdom is Yours, LORD, and You are lifted high as head over all. Riches and honor come from You; You rule over everything. In Your hand are power and might, and it is in Your hand to make anyone great and to give strength to all. And now, our God, we give You thanks and praise Your glorious name. But who am I, and who are my people, that we should have the means to give as freely as this? Everything comes from You; what we have given You came from Your own hand.” (1 Chronicles 29:11-14)

David had given away a fortune, and he knew he had not given God anything that wasn’t already God’s.

God is the owner

The Bible’s teaching about money starts here, and if we get this wrong, nothing else will come out right. Everything belongs to God.

“The earth is the LORD’s, and all that fills it, the world and everyone who lives there.” (Psalm 24:1)

Not some of it. All of it. The land, the oceans, the cattle, the bank in your town and the money in it. God says through the prophet Haggai, “The silver belongs to Me, and the gold belongs to Me, declares the LORD of Armies” (Haggai 2:8). In Psalm 50 He gently mocks the idea that He could ever need anything from us: “Were I ever hungry, you are not the one I would tell, since the world and all it holds are Mine” (Psalm 50:12).

When God gave Israel the promised land, He made a striking rule. Land could be leased, but never sold forever. “No land is to be sold for good, for the land belongs to Me. You are only outsiders and residents living with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). The Israelites lived on the land, farmed it and passed it down to their children. But the title deed was always in God’s name.

That is still true. Your house, your car, your savings, your income, your skills, your time: you hold them, but you do not own them. You are a resident in God’s world, living on what He provides.

We are managers

If God is the owner, what are we? The Bible’s word is steward, an old word for a manager. A steward ran a household or an estate on behalf of the master. Joseph was a steward in Potiphar’s house. He had keys to everything and authority over everything, and he owned none of it.

That is our position. Paul says, “Now what is looked for in household managers is this: that each one proves trustworthy” (1 Corinthians 4:2). Peter says the same about every gift God gives: “Each of you has received a gift; use it to serve one another, as good managers of the richly varied grace of God” (1 Peter 4:10).

This changes the question we ask about money. An owner asks, “What do I want to do with my money?” A manager asks, “What does the owner want done with His money?” Those are two very different questions. The first one puts me at the centre. The second puts God there.

It also changes how we think about giving. Most of us quietly assume that the ninety percent we keep is ours, and the ten percent we give is God’s. But if everything belongs to God, then the question is not how much of my money I should give to God. It is how much of God’s money I should keep for myself. The whole hundred percent is His, and all of it is to be used in a way that pleases Him: the rent and the groceries and the holiday, as well as the offering.

The danger of forgetting

Moses saw a danger coming. Israel had spent forty years in the wilderness, eating manna one day at a time, completely dependent on God. Now they were about to enter a rich land of wheat and vines and copper mines. Moses warned them that prosperity would bring a temptation that hardship never had:

“And you may say to yourself, ‘My own power and the strength of my own hands have won me this wealth.’ Remember the LORD your God instead. It is He who gives you the ability to grow wealthy, in order to carry out the covenant He swore to your ancestors, as He is doing today.” (Deuteronomy 8:17-18)

That is the self-made man’s prayer: “My own power and the strength of my own hands.” It sounds like common sense. We did work hard. We did take risks. But who gave us the strength to work? Who gave us a mind that could learn a trade, a body that could get up in the morning, a country with roads and a market, parents who fed us? Paul asks it bluntly: “What do you have that was not given to you? And if it was given to you, why do you take pride in it as though it were not a gift?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

Forgetting God is rarely a dramatic decision. It is a slow drift that comes with comfort. The more we have, the easier it is to think we did it ourselves.

Freedom in being a manager

This might sound like bad news, as if God is taking something away from us. In fact it is wonderfully freeing.

If I own everything, then everything depends on me. I have to protect it, grow it, worry about it. Every loss is my loss. But if I am a manager, the weight sits on the owner’s shoulders. My job is to be faithful with what He has given me, and to trust Him with the rest. When the market falls, it is His money that fell. When a bill arrives that I cannot pay, I can bring it to the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

Job understood this when he lost everything in a single day: his flocks, his servants and his children. He fell to the ground and worshiped:

“I came naked from my mother’s womb, and naked I will go back there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be blessed.” (Job 1:21)

Only a steward can pray like that. An owner who loses everything has lost everything. A steward who loses everything still has the Master.

A voice from the past

George Müller never asked anyone for money. He believed that the orphan houses he ran in Bristol belonged to God, and so did every penny that came in to feed the children. His biographer, Arthur Pierson, summed up Müller’s view of giving like this:

“Enlightened believers look on all things as inalienably God’s, and, even in the voluntary diversion of money into sacred rather than selfish channels, still remember that they give to Him only what is His own!”

Arthur T. Pierson, George Müller of Bristol

Practice this week

Write a short list of everything you think of as “mine”: your home, your car, your phone, your savings, your income, your skills. Then at the top of the page write the words of Psalm 24:1. Take a few minutes to go through the list in prayer, giving each thing back to God by name. You might pray something like this: “Lord, this is Yours. Thank You for trusting me with it. Show me how You want it used.”

For groups

• What is something you own that you would find hardest to think of as God’s rather than yours? Why?
• How would your spending change this week if you really believed you were managing someone else’s money?
• Read Deuteronomy 8:17-18 together. Why do you think prosperity makes us forget God more easily than hardship does?
• Is the idea of being a manager rather than an owner a relief to you, or a burden? Why?