Managing Me

The sermon opens the month’s focus on stewardship by turning the lens inward: before managing money, opportunities, or relationships, believers must learn to manage themselves. Using 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, the preacher frames stewardship as living under the ownership of God, recognizing that believers do not ultimately belong to themselves and therefore must live differently with their bodies, choices, and priorities.

He begins with a personal story from 1992 when his father bought him a 1977 Chrysler Cordova. Although he paid his father back the $600 cost and acted as though the car was fully his, he later realized his father still held the title, carried the insurance, and even supported him with gas money. The lesson became unavoidable when he missed curfew: his father told him to leave the keys on the table, explaining that if he could not come home on time, he could not drive his father’s car. That moment clarified the principle that access to what is provided is tied to the ability to manage oneself.

From there, he lays a theological foundation: God exists as sovereign Creator; Jesus Christ’s deity and resurrection are true; Scripture is authoritative; and, crucially for stewardship, God owns everything. He supports this with multiple Old Testament references (Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Job, and Psalm 24), then makes the personal implication plain: God owns everything, and that includes each person. He reinforces the idea with quotations from Michael Huffington about the temporary nature of earthly possessions and from C. S. Lewis about every human capacity being given by God, underscoring that even what people offer God is already His.

Returning to 1 Corinthians 6, he explains that although Paul’s immediate context is sexual immorality in Corinth, the principle extends beyond sexuality. Paul’s question—“Don’t you realize”—is meant to wake believers up to a broader truth: the body belongs to God and is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The preacher introduces a hierarchy embedded in the text: God is the owner, believers are the managers, and the Holy Spirit functions as “quality control.” This calls believers to “live in the reality” that they do not own themselves; the owner sets the agenda, and attempts to maintain control while claiming to follow God produce stagnation and spiritual inconsistency.

He then urges the congregation to “live with the regulator,” explaining that the Holy Spirit was given by God to protect what belongs to God. He illustrates this with the idea of a vehicle governor that keeps a company car from exceeding a set speed. In the same way, the Spirit restrains and warns—through conviction and inner checks—when someone is moving toward harmful words, decisions, spending, indulgence, or temptation. The Spirit guides and convicts, but does not manage the believer’s compliance; the manager must respond. Ignoring the Spirit’s regulation is framed as disregarding God’s ownership and treating life as if it were self-directed.

Finally, he calls listeners to “live out your responsibility” from verse 20: because God bought them with a high price, they must honor (glorify) God with their bodies. Stewardship is not primarily about what God puts in one’s hands; it begins with the responsibility of living under God’s rule. He presses the application with practical examples—mismanaging a job through lateness, relational patterns that repeat because the person refuses to confront their own habits, and wanting more provision while demonstrating poor self-management. Echoing his earlier stories, he notes that just as a parent would not upgrade what a child has already mismanaged, God will not entrust greater resources to someone who will mishandle them due to failing to manage themselves.

He closes by emphasizing that many believers fail to manage themselves because they believe they are in charge, but Scripture insists otherwise: “You are not your own.” He invites those who need to begin or renew a relationship with Jesus Christ, or those seeking a church home, to come forward and respond, reminding the congregation that following Christ means living under His direction and embracing the disciplined life that decision requires.