“Your money was never really yours. It passed through your hands on its way to the nations.” Peter Jerry

Listen to how we talk about money, even within the Church, and you will hear a language of ownership that has quietly shaped how we think about giving, long even before we ever sit down to decide what to do with a single naira.

You’d hear things like:

“My salary. My savings. My investment portfolio. What I worked for. What I earned.”

Every phrase carries the same hidden assumption and that is, this wealth originated with me, I generated it through my own effort, and that it therefore belongs to me to dispose of as I see fit, with perhaps a portion set aside, out of obligation or gratitude, for God.

I want to challenge that assumption today and I believe I’d be able to do so at its foundation, because I believe it is the single greatest barrier standing between the Church and the resources the UNREACHED PEOPLE GROUPS desperately needs.

When we go through the Scripture, you will find a completely different framework, one so consistent that it cannot be dismissed as an isolated proof text.

The Psalmist says:

“The earth is THE LORD’S, and EVERYTHING in it, the WORLD, and all WHO live in it”

He did not write that as poetic flourish, but as a statement of fact about the structure of reality. He is saying by the reality that:

EVERY RESOURCE YOU POSSESS, SKILL THAT GENERATES INCOME FOR YOU, EVERY OPPORTUNITY THAT OPENED A DOOR FOR YOU, THE BREATH THAT HAS KEPT YOU ALIVE LONG ENOUGH TO WORK AND EARN AND ACCUMULATE; ALL OF IT ORIGINATED FROM THE SUSTAINING HAND OF A GOD WHO GIVES LIFE AND BREATH AND EVERYTHING ELSE TO EVERYONE.

You did not create the intelligence that allowed you to pass the exams in school that got you that job or solve the problems at work that earned you that promotion and raise in income. You did not create the body that allows you to perform labour. You did not create the economic system, nation, family, and the historical moment into which you were born. All of these somehow shape what opportunities were even available to you.

Pull back far enough on any success story, accumulated wealth, or financial security, and you will find, at the foundation of it all, gift that was undeserved, yet given.

IF EVERYTHING ORIGINATED WITH GOD, THEN NOTHING YOU HOLD IS ULTIMATELY YOURS.

You are not an owner. You are just a manager which the Bible prefers to call STEWARD – someone entrusted with resources that belong to another, responsible for using them according to the owner’s purposes rather than their own preferences.

A steward who begins treating the master’s resources as personal property has fundamentally misunderstood their position, no matter how diligently they may otherwise be working and this particularly reframes the entire conversation around giving to missions.

We typically approach giving as a question of generosity, asking questions like, “how much of my money am I willing to give away?” But if the stewardship framework is correct, that question is built on a false premise. The real question should not be “how much of my money I am willing to give away?” but “what does the Owner want done with the resources that were always His, temporarily passing through my hands?”

And here is where it becomes specifically relevant to missions: if you trace the purposes of God throughout Scripture, you find a consistent, unmistakable priority of Him desiring to reach all nations with the knowledge of His glory.

From the call of Abraham, through whom all nations of the earth would be blessed, to the prophetic visions of every tribe and tongue gathered before the throne, to the Great Commission itself, God’s stated purpose for history has always included the nations.

IF THE RESOURCES PASSING THROUGH YOUR HANDS BELONG TO A GOD WHOSE PRIORITIES ARE THIS CLEAR, THEN A PORTION OF THOSE RESOURCES FLOWING TOWARDS THE UNREACHED IS NOT A GENEROUS EXTRA BUT ALIGNMENT WITH THE OWNER’S ACTUAL PURPOSES.

I have watched what happens when a believer genuinely grasps this at the level where it actually changes behaviour. I think of individuals in our own network of partners who, once this truth settled into them, stopped asking “how much can I spare for missions?” and started asking an entirely different question: “how much of what passes through my hands should I be redirecting toward what God actually cares about?”

People who once gave occasionally and reactively, moved by a particularly emotional missionary presentation, now began to give systematically and proactively, treating partnership for frontier workers the way they treat their mortgage or their utilities: a fixed, non-negotiable commitment, because they had come to see it not as charity but as obedience.

Imagine a partner whose business experiences an unexpectedly profitable year. The old framework would process that profit entirely in terms of personal benefit such as reinvestment, lifestyle upgrade, savings, perhaps a token year-end gift to a cause that moved them; but the STEWARDSHIP FRAMEWORK will process it differently. The profit will never be theirs to begin with. It will simply be passed, for a season, into their management, and so a significant portion of it will be redirected, not as an afterthought, but as the natural response of someone who now understands whose money it actually was, towards funding a labourer’s relocation to an unreached community that had been waiting, in some cases for years, for the resources to make the work possible.

That is what it looks like when the truth of this quote actually lands:

YOUR MONEY HAS A DESTINY THAT EXISTS INDEPENDENTLY OF YOUR PREFERENCES.

It can be absorbed entirely into comfort, accumulation, and the steady, invisible erosion of an opportunity that will never come again, or it can be released towards the nations, the nameless communities described in the days before this one, towards eternity itself. Only one of those destinations will matter when you stand before the Owner and give an account of how you managed what was always His.

You will spend money today, spend money this week, this month, this year. None of it was ever fully yours to begin with, and recognizing that does not diminish your dignity or agency. It rather restores you to your actual position of not being an owner anxiously guarding a possession, but a steward joyfully participating in the purposes of a God Whose plans are bigger, better, and more eternal than anything your own ownership could have produced.

Your money was never really yours but always on its way to the nations and the only remaining question is whether you will let it arrive.

Grace to you.