How to Achieve True Stewardship of Gifts
A few years ago someone told me I was a good encourager. Not a writer, not a speaker. An encourager. Honestly, my first reaction was to brush it off. It didn’t feel like a gift in the way I understood gifts. And it certainly didn’t feel like something that would fall under my stewardship of gifts. It felt like just being kind. Something anyone could do.
But when others said the same thing here and there over the next several years, it made me think. Eventually, I started paying attention to what happened in conversations when I allowed myself to stop hesitating and start leaning into that tendency rather than dismissing it. Things shifted for people. Doors opened in relationships. Opportunities appeared that I never saw coming.
It turned out the thing I had written off as ordinary was something God had placed in my hands with intention. I just hadn’t been stewarding it.
What Stewardship of Gifts Really Means
We tend to think of stewardship of gifts in narrow, specific terms. Like we’re defining the act within the framework of an expected outcome. The dramatic talents, the obvious skills, the things that show up on a resume or a stage. But stewardship is really just faithful tending. Taking what God has given you and using it with care, with intention, and with an awareness that it all came from Him in the first place.
Psalm 90:17 frames it this way: “Establish the work of our hands.” The work of our hands. All of it. The writing and the encouraging and the teaching and the listening and the showing up consistently for the people in your life. All of it qualifies. All of it matters.
Stewardship of gifts begins when you stop ranking what God has given you in measured levels of importance and start taking all of it seriously.
The Gifts I Almost Missed
Looking back, some of the most significant gifts God placed in my hands were ones I initially underestimated or outright dismissed. I was so focused on my goals or pursuits, I often missed what was right in front of me.
The gift of story, for instance. I spent years treating it as a hobby before realizing it was actually a calling. The gift of connection, which I used to see as a personality trait rather than something to be intentionally developed and offered. Even the gift of the hard seasons, which produced empathy and depth I couldn’t have manufactured on my own.
Every single one of those required a moment of recognition before they could be stewarded well. I had to see them as gifts before I could treat them like ones.
Stewardship of Gifts and the FAVOR Connection
This month’s FAVOR theme asks us: How do I steward what God entrusts? And I think part of the answer is simple. Take inventory before you take action.
What has God placed in your hands that you’ve been minimizing? What tendency, what skill, what capacity keeps showing up in your life that you haven’t fully offered back to Him? Because stewardship of gifts isn’t just about using what you have. It’s about using it in relationship with the One who gave it.
That’s the obedient relationship toward which FAVOR points us. Not performing for God, but partnering with Him. Bringing what you have, asking Him to establish it, and watching what He does with an open and willing set of hands.
Join the Conversation
What’s one gift or capacity you’ve been underestimating or dismissing that might actually be something God placed in your hands on purpose?
Take a few minutes to journal or record a voice memo finishing this: “Something I’ve been treating as ordinary that might actually be a gift is _____, and one way I could steward it more intentionally is _____.” You might be surprised what comes to mind when you give yourself permission to take it seriously.
