Last week we discussed that laziness = profanity. We are called to be fruitful stewards, multiplying the investment entrusted to us. In today's and next week's posts I would like to suggest another type of profanity in our work and that is when we make it all about us.

It’s amazing how some believe they have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. This idiom by the way, suggests an impossibility; “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” is often applied to those who have managed success on their own without the help of others. A closer look at anyone’s story of success, however, reveals that people’s accomplishments have always been due to a number of factors—the families they were born into and where they were born, the economic environment of their time, the education available to them, and the people surrounding them among others. 

The reason for considering this point is that often those who believe in their self-made success also believe they have no responsibility to use it for the good of others. Since they “made” that money on their “own merits,” therefore there is every reason to spend it only on themselves. Nothing could be farther from the truth in a Kingdom economy. God is King over all the earth and everything we have been given or entrusted with was ultimately his in the beginning. We are stewards of his resources tasked with building his Kingdom for his glory.

(By the way, have you ever tried to pull yourself off the ground by yanking on your shoestrings?)