A Legacy of Stewardship

Every good parent or grandparent invariably asks the question, “What should I leave my children or grandchildren?” In my years of estate planning work, I have found two extremes. One extreme is described on the bumper sticker of a new motor home that proclaims, “We’re driving our children’s inheritance.” The other is seen in the elderly, depression-era widower who scrimps and saves his entire life, going without, only to have his children waste his lifetime accumulation within a few short weeks of receiving their inheritance.

We have all heard it said, “There are more important things to leave your children than money.” And, of course, the children would add, “But it helps!” Here are four intangibles you can leave to your children and grandchildren that will empower them to live life as biblical stewards.

A Legacy of Patience

Patience as a virtue can profoundly affect stewardship decisions. If you are hasty to be rich, you will make bad business and investment decisions (Proverbs 28:20). To provide leadership in your home by modeling patience and saying “no” or “let’s wait” will provide your family a framework for business and financial decisions that will result in impressive returns for a lifetime and provide for their needs in the long-term.

A Legacy of Balance

Balance is a universal principle of stewardship. Abundance in life does not come from focusing all of your energy, time, and efforts to fulfilling a single role or reaching a certain goal in life. To the contrary, balance in life leads to abundance. We all know people who have invested and poured their entire life into a business, a ministry, or a person only to find the rest of their life in chaos or ruin. A good steward balances all aspects of life and, through that balance, experiences abundance.

A Legacy of Generosity

Generosity is one of those “church” stewardship words that for some means, “I’ve got something the preacher wants!” Generosity as a stewardship principle has little to do with giving anything up. In the beginning, a seed of faith is sown, a gift is given, but generosity, at its heart, is trusting and letting God multiply that which He has entrusted to you. It is that paradoxical principle of stewardship that does not compute if you put the numbers into your financial planning program or budget. However, it miraculously works in the lives of biblical stewards and their families each and every day. As Gary Moore said in his book, Ten Golden Rules for Financial Success, “The secret for creating riches for one’s self is to create them for others.”

A Legacy of Optimism

Be an eternal optimist. As an optimist, you are not always right. Statistically, optimists are wrong as often as pessimists. Optimists, however, are empowered to achieve; pessimists seldom have the synergy for growth or success. Optimists, empowered by the Holy Spirit, can help reproduce optimism in others as optimism and encouragement go hand in hand; pessimists generally believe they are powerless and embrace despair. Perhaps Ralph Waldo Trine, author of In Tune with the Infinite said it best:

The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining factor in the life of each. It determines whether it is a life of power or of impotence, of peace or of pain, of success or of failure.

Consider what intangibles you will leave your children and grandchildren for an inheritance. Make deposits of patience, balance, generosity, and optimism in your family’s “bank of life”—and live the example. The compound effect will provide rich returns for your family for generations to come.