I admit I’m taking a bit of a risk with this article. It may ruffle some feathers. But I strongly believe we need to discuss it.
Many people who hope and plan for an “early retirement” practice extreme frugality. Others, because they want to save as much as possible for retirement, even if it comes later, do also. For many, frugality and saving for retirement go hand in hand. But I know wealthy retirees who would also consider themselves frugal or very frugal. Why all the emphasis on frugality?
People in Christian circles often link frugality to moderation and self-discipline and associate it with wise biblical stewardship. So frugality is usually understood and practiced as good, and often is. But like any good thing, frugality can have a negative side, and I think that’s what we need to discuss.
In this article, I’m questioning whether frugality in all its forms aligns with biblical stewardship. My short answer is no, and I’ll try to make my case.
We’re all frugal, right?
I have friends, both old and young, who describe themselves as “frugal.” Some are more “out front” about it than others, often telling people what they did or didn’t do to save money.
As far as I know, I’ve never described myself as “frugal” to anyone. As I’ve thought about it, I’m not sure why not, since I’ve thought of myself that way at times. I have, however, written about this before in an article titled “Spending and Retirement Stewardship”:
Based on my writings, you may have the impression I am a very frugal person. If you ask my wife and others who know me well, they may say something like, “yes, he is somewhat, but not extremely so.” They’d be right. I don’t mind spending money, but I try to be careful about it — certainly for bigger ticket items.
On the other hand, I don’t pinch pennies; I don’t think I’m “cheap.” Cheap people don’t enjoy their money, nor do they derive much pleasure in using it to bless others. Cheap people don’t tip extra, give more than a tithe to their church or other ministries, or pay just a little extra for a product or service to help out a struggling small business person.
Cheap people nickel and dime themselves, their families, and those they transact business with, to the point of exhaustion. And worse, they become hoarders, only deriving joy from accumulating more and more — much more than they need — instead of putting their money to good use (Ecc. 5:13).
You’ll see how those thoughts from that earlier piece strongly influenced this article.
What is frugality?
Before going much further, we need a solid understanding of what “frugality” is (or at least how I define it for this article).
Bible Hub defines frugality as “the practice of being economical with resources and avoiding waste,” and adds that “the Bible encourages believers to exercise wisdom and restraint in their use of material possessions, emphasizing the importance of stewardship and contentment.”
That certainly gets to the heart of it and emphasizes the very positive aspects of frugality. But Webster’s 1828 Dictionary adds some important qualifiers:
Prudent economy; good husbandry or housewifery; a sparing use or appropriation of money or commodities; a judicious use of any thing to be expended or employed; that careful management of money or goods which expends nothing unnecessarily, and applies what is used to a profitable purpose; that use in which nothing is wasted. It is not equivalent to parsimony, the latter being an excess of frugality, and a fault.
Still another definition, from Charles Buck’s Theological Dictionary (1802), describes it as “the wise and moderate use of resources, maintaining the proper balance between wasteful extravagance and stingy parsimony.”
You may notice a similarity between the previous two definitions: I italicized “parsimony” to highlight the contrast. Parsimony isn’t a word we hear every day. I wasn’t especially familiar with its meaning, but Buck’s definition makes it clear — “stingy parsimony.” Parsimony, in other words, is much like frugality: being careful with money or resources, but with “stinginess.” Hmmmm…
This brief word study characterizes frugality as generally a good quality, but suggests it becomes a fault when it crosses into parsimony. The distinction isn’t about a dollar amount or a spending or savings rate—it’s about identifiable characteristics and behaviors that signal a heart attitude has crossed from discipline (good) to selfishness (bad).
And since we’re talking about the heart, Proverbs 16:2 says, “All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the spirit.” We can easily convince ourselves we are being frugal when we are actually being stingy. The Lord, however, weighs what is in our hearts—the motivations behind the behavior.
Let me give you an example with scriptural support. Suppose someone invites you to dinner. Instead of a nice, prepared meal (which you were expecting), they feed you bean-weenies from a can, even though they could easily afford better. Proverbs 23:6–8 advises against eating the food of a stingy person, “for he is like one who is inwardly calculating.” They may say, “Eat and drink,” but their heart is not with you. In other words, a picnic with a parsimonious person is no party.
Frugality is commended in Scripture
Scripture commends frugality as we initially defined it. Jesus himself had few material goods or money to be frugal with, but after feeding the multitude he instructed his disciples to gather up the pieces so that nothing would be lost (John 6:12)—frugality in practice. Luke 16:10 reminds us that faithfulness in small things prepares us for larger ones: “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.” And 1 Corinthians 4:2 establishes the basic standard: “It is required of stewards that they be found faithful.”
Proverbs consistently praises wise resource management (Proverbs 6:6–8; 13:22; 21:20). The prayer in Proverbs 30:8–9—”give me neither poverty nor riches”—puts contentment at the center of the financial question before frugality even enters the picture.
Frugality is certainly the wisest path for those with limited resources; indeed, it’s the best way to make full use of whatever God has provided. An individual or household with a limited income needs to be frugal out of necessity. Without it, basic needs could go unmet, and Scripture commands us to provide for our families’ needs (1 Tim. 5:8).
I recently counseled a young man in my church who had recently graduated, gotten married, and started his career. He had significant but not overwhelming student loan debt, a good income, and a working spouse. They will need to be especially frugal over the next five to eight years if he hopes to pay it off in that time. That was my advice, but I tempered it with, “Enjoy your money once in a while too.”
A retired couple with only Social Security and perhaps a few hundred thousand in savings may need to be more frugal than they’d like, but that will be necessary to sustain a reasonable lifestyle for as long as both of them live. I could give many more examples, but I think you get my point.
Spending is also commended
Economic activity is woven into God’s created order, and spending money is a legitimate, even beneficial, part of it. All the biblical evidence suggests that spending is good when it promotes human flourishing and strengthens relationships (Luke 16:9). Our personal financial decisions reach well beyond our immediate families—spending money with others enhances their productivity and contributes to their flourishing (Prov. 11:24).
When you spend, you bless not only yourself but also those on the receiving end — from the small business owner to everyone along the supply chain. In that sense, spending is also a kind of vote for the products, services, and values of the people and companies you patronize. Keep that in mind when we choose where and how we spend.
Consider a personal example. I bought a house almost 30 years ago, and the couple I bought it from had an older gentleman named Bill mowing the lawn. Bill was retired from the Navy and did lawns because he needed the money in retirement. He was in his early 70s and a kind, godly man. I let him mow my lawn for many years, not because I couldn’t do it myself, but to bless him and use the time I saved for other things. We also became friends and often spent time talking in the yard. This was a small thing, but it meant a lot to him. But was it frugal in the strictest definition of the word? Probably not—I could have saved some money each week by doing it myself. (I did do all the other lawn care myself, by the way.)
My friend Bill had to retire because of early-onset dementia and has since gone to eternity with Jesus. As I think about him and our chats out in the yard, I have no regrets even though my savings didn’t grow as much as they could have.
Frugality and good stewardship aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes the right use of money is to spend it — generously, wisely, and with others in mind.
Frugality and stewardship
Stewardship is managing the resources that God entrusted to us for our good, the good of others, and especially His glory and the advancement of His Kingdom. It is the unifying principle for all our financial decisions.
We usually equate frugality with good financial stewardship, but as I stated at the outset, they aren’t always the same. Scripture commends frugality as wise, but for reasons we’ll discuss, it doesn’t always lead to true peace or model true stewardship. Plus, Scripture warns us about our motivations and heart attitudes, especially in how we handle money, which can cast frugality in a different light.
Frugality means being careful with our resources — spending less than we earn, saving money, and making economical choices. Some embrace it as a lifestyle (often to the chagrin of other family members who prefer less penny-pinching). Frugality embodies virtues like self-control and patience. Benjamin Franklin’s well-known phrase, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” supports the idea that financial restraint is often wise. In my blog and books, I often encourage others to save for the future, pay down debts, and avoid overspending as part of wise stewardship, and I often discuss how it pertains to saving for and living in retirement.
However, while frugality can be part of financial stewardship, biblical stewardship is much, much bigger than frugality, and it calls us to something richer and more purposeful. Frugality alone may bring self-satisfaction and financial prosperity, but it doesn’t guarantee peace—and can even create fear and anxiety—because it doesn’t recognize God’s ownership of everything we have (Psalm 24:1) or Christ’s Lordship over our finances. Christian stewardship, and the real peace it brings, rests on shifting the focus from ourselves and simply reducing our expenses to honoring God with our resources.
Jesus puts it plainly in Matthew 6:19–21: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” First Timothy 6:6–10 sharpens the point further, distinguishing the love of money from money itself and tying contentment to godliness as the proper disposition: “There is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.” Paul calls the love of money—not money itself—the root of all kinds of evil.
Frugality can certainly help us save money on earth, but it won’t bring eternal rewards on its own. True rewards come from a better approach: surrendering your finances to God and using them for His purposes. Frugality is a method, a tool, but it must align with faithful stewardship. Pursued for its own sake, it can lead to pride, selfishness, and even greed, and those things can be hard to spot because we focus so much on frugality’s apparent virtue.
When frugality becomes something else
What makes frugality virtuous, or exposes it as less so, is the frugal person’s heart condition and the fruit it produces in their own life and in the lives of others.
Two people can have nearly identical spending patterns, and one practices wise stewardship while the other practices greed disguised in the respectability of frugality. The behavior looks the same from the outside. Only the heart, and the fruit it produces, reveals the difference. If its only fruit is a growing account balance with no outward direction, it isn’t biblical stewardship in its fullness.
You may think I’m being legalistic. I agree that this may sound like legalism, but I don’t believe it is. Legalism focuses on outward behavior and self-righteousness and cares less about the heart’s inward condition and the effect our behavior has on others. Here, we’re talking specifically about the heart and the decisions and actions that flow from it.
I’ve said that frugality, when it becomes something else, can be hard to diagnose. So let’s look at some revealing signs that it’s going the wrong way.
The clearest sign that frugality has become something else is a lack of generous giving.
Virtuous frugality enables generosity; you spend less on yourself precisely so you have more to give away. When frugality suppresses generosity and instead only increases personal wealth, something has gone wrong. The frugal person who finds a reason never (or seldom) to give, or who gives very little even though they have the means to be more generous, or who can always explain why a particular occasion doesn’t warrant a generous gift, has revealed that their frugality isn’t stewardship—it’s just selfishness. If frugality always wins the internal contest with generosity, it’s no longer a spiritual discipline; it’s a spiritual problem. Hebrews 13:16 puts it simply: “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”
Many people practice frugality to save and invest for the future, sometimes aggressively, as the “financial independence, retire early” (FIRE) movement promotes. But this can also apply to everyday folks like you and me. We can become captivated by the wealth-building margin frugality gives us. God wants us to use our money for His purposes and His glory, especially for generosity. So we wrongly scrimp and economize not to create additional margin for generous giving, but to save mainly for ourselves. This is the rich fool Jesus describes in Luke 12:16–21. Scripture doesn’t condemn saving; it condemns excessive saving — way beyond what is “enough” — at the expense of generosity, which puts us at genuine spiritual risk.
Another “tell” is what’s driving the frugality in the first place.
The prayer in Proverbs 30:8–9 and Paul’s testimony in Philippians 4:11–12 both frame prudent financial behavior as rooted in contentment, which is a settled, faith-based trust in God’s provision. Parsimony, by contrast, almost always stems from pride, fear, or greed. Distinguishing between them shows that they produce similar behaviors from very different places in the heart—and because they are heart issues, they can be much harder to discern.
Fear-driven parsimony is defensive: it hoards out of anxiety about the future, driven by the relentless “what if”: what if the market drops, what if I lose my job, what if it isn’t enough? This accumulation is meant to manufacture a security only God can provide. Greed-driven parsimony is acquisitive: it isn’t afraid to lose what it has; it simply wants more, and more never seems enough. It finds satisfaction in the growing number itself, in the discipline of keeping rather than spending, and in the pleasure of accumulation as an end in itself. Ecclesiastes 5:10 states plainly, “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money.” Both conditions amount to idolatry, as Colossians 3:5 makes plain. One worships money as protection, a shield; the other worships it as a prize. In either case, money has moved from its proper place as a tool held loosely in service of God and neighbor and has taken up residence at the center of the heart — which is precisely what the Bible calls idolatry.
When spending even a small amount of money produces genuine apprehension or anxiety, when penny-pinching feels less like godly discipline and more like compulsion, you may be placing more faith in your savings than in the God who promises never to leave or forsake you (Heb. 13:5).
Pride is another motivator. Earlier in the article, I mentioned friends who describe themselves as frugal and bring it up in conversation from time to time. The question is, why? Are they trying to encourage one another, suggest ways to save money, or subtly commend themselves for their restraint, self-discipline, and self-reliance? A casual observer can’t know, but we have to be careful because pride can creep into our spending attitudes and habits just as it can in any other area of life. As we all know, pride—even when it’s for a “good” thing—can be destructive.
Cortines and Baumer get at this specifically in True Riches: What Jesus Really Said About Money and Your Heart, where they describe the difference between mechanical financial behavior and the heart God is actually after:
Fundamentally, God wants our hearts. When he has our hearts, financially and otherwise, proper behaviors flow out naturally. Because of this, mechanical obedience to a rule is not what he’s seeking, and it is totally inadequate to just take the normal financial wisdom of the world, slap on a tithe (10 percent giving), and assume that this constitutes Christian financial wisdom. God has far more of a joyful adventure in mind, an adventure that shapes not just what we do but what we become. As Jesus said, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil.” We try to ask ourselves regularly, What is deeply within my heart, underneath my financial behaviors? If our hearts are full of gratitude for who God is and what he has given us, then we’re poised to experience the joy of God with our money. If our hearts are full of pride at what we can experience or accomplish, we’re on a road that tragically leads away from the true riches of life with God. (p. 26; Kindle Edition)
Another sign: frugality is taking up too much of your time.
Time is a limited, irreplaceable resource, and stewarding it matters as much as stewarding money. If you spend hours each week hunting for the lowest possible price on everything you buy, tracking spending to the penny, or driving across town to save a few cents on gas, you may be penny-wise and time-foolish. You could spend that time on something far more meaningful, enjoyable, or productive — time with family and friends, serving others, ministry. And stewardship includes your own well-being and your family’s. Skipping necessary medications to save money, eating food well past its safe date, depriving yourself of basic needs, or refusing necessary home repairs aren’t expressions of prudent frugality — they are self-neglect, and they confuse thrift with an unhealthy fear of spending anything at all.
Perhaps the subtlest sign is when the language of stewardship itself becomes a self-justifying rationalization for excessive frugality.
William Spurstowe, the seventeenth-century Puritan, observed that Satan’s craftiest strategy is to dress up evil “with a superficial tincture of virtue.” His example was exactly this: a greedy person convinces himself he is only practicing frugality, gathering fragments so nothing is lost, using Jesus’ own words in John 6:12 as cover for hoarding. “I’m just being a good steward” can be perfectly true. It can also be how a person talks himself out of letting go of some of his money. The tell is whether the frugality ever actually produces fruit for anyone else, or whether “stewardship” has simply become a respectable word for hoarding.
I’m reminded of the story in John 12, set in Bethany, where Mary pours out a jar of expensive perfume worth about a year’s wages on Jesus’ feet, and Judas immediately objects: “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?” It sounds like a model stewardship argument — frugal, responsible, even charitable.
But Jesus rebukes him: “Leave her alone… You will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” John adds the devastating editorial note that Judas said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief who helped himself to the money bag (John 12:6). There it is in full: Judas is using the language of stewardship and generosity as cover for covetousness, and Jesus explicitly defends what, by any ordinary measure, looked like wastefulness. The irony hits home when we remember that within days Judas sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. The man lecturing about three hundred denarii worth of “wasted” ointment then sold the Son of God for a fraction of that. His frugality was never about stewardship or the poor — it was about money and what it could do for him.
Ongoing frugality beyond having “enough”
This is tricky because each of us has to decide what “enough” is, and that assumes we are willing to set some kind of savings finish line. To be clear, reaching “enough” doesn’t mean abandoning wisdom or spending thoughtlessly. Good stewardship doesn’t expire just because you have enough. But if your frugality primarily serves accumulation —i.e., if the discipline of spending less mainly produces a larger account balance with no godly purpose for the surplus—it’s worth asking honestly whether you have quietly crossed the line from frugality to hoarding.
One helpful framework is the “finish line” concept I learned from Cortines and Baumer in their earlier book, God and Money. They propose three personal ceilings that work together: a lifestyle finish line (how much you need to spend annually), a wealth finish line (how much you need to save or accumulate), and a giving finish line (what you commit to give). The proportions between spending, saving, and giving aren’t fixed — they shift as you approach each ceiling.
Before you reach a wealth-building finish line, standard responsible frugality and saving apply to things like buying a home, children’s education, and retirement. Once you do, you face a different set of decisions: you can slow or stop saving, and you can redirect the surplus entirely to giving and other good purposes. Your resource allocation fundamentally changes once you reach “enough.” Cortines and Baumer are clear about this: frugality is good and godly up to the finish line, and continued frugality beyond it (frugality that only grows the pile rather than redirecting to giving) has crossed from stewardship into something else. The finish line is what separates the two.
Frugality that only serves oneself has also crossed a line.
The rich man in Luke 16 was presumably careful enough with his money; Lazarus lay at his gate and received nothing. His “careful management” served only himself. The Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12:16–21 offers a related warning: a man accumulates impressive stores for himself and congratulates himself on his prudence, only to have God say, “Fool! This night your soul is required of you.” The warning is not against wealth or even careful saving; it’s against accumulating for yourself without being “rich toward God.” The same dynamic appears in smaller ways: letting frugality bleed into relationships where someone depends on your generosity — not tipping a server generously, driving a hard bargain with someone who has less leverage, withholding what is genuinely owed. Stewardship is not just about minimizing costs; it includes caring for the people around you.
Finally, frugality can be a discipline or an identity, and the difference matters.
You can lay down disciplines when the occasion calls for it. Identities you cannot. A person whose frugality is a genuine discipline can give extravagantly when the moment demands it, the way Mary poured out the costly ointment without counting the cost in Mark 14:3–5. A person for whom frugality has become an identity (who takes pride in never wasting, never splurging, always getting the deal, and often telling others about it) cannot do that. The discipline has become a prison. The Parable of the Talents makes the same point from the opposite direction (Matt. 25:14–30): the servant who buried his talent out of fear, keeping it safe but unproductive, was not commended. He was condemned. Frugality as fearful inaction is no more virtuous than wastefulness.
If you find yourself hoarding items just because they were a good deal, skipping legitimate needs to avoid any expenditure at all, or spending disproportionate hours to save a few dollars while neglecting better uses of your time, it may be worth asking honestly whether frugality still serves you, or whether you now serve it.
Understanding the source
Before moving on, I want to pause and say a few important things about frugality. I have cited the ways that frugality can be a “negative,” not reflective of wise stewardship as biblically defined. But that doesn’t mean that just because you tend to be frugal in those ways, you are in sin. We rarely relate to money through conscious, intentional decisions to spend too little or too much. And as followers of Jesus, we don’t want to sin (especially not intentionally) in how we handle our money. Our background and experiences, especially our family relationships, can shape our attitudes and actions.
Financial counselors and coaches who work at the intersection of faith and money often use a tool called a “money genogram,” which is a family map that traces the money beliefs and behaviors of parents, grandparents, and siblings. The idea is that long before you ever earned a paycheck, the people who raised you were already sending you messages about money. A parent or grandparent who lived through the Great Depression and kept cash hidden in the walls quietly passed on a posture of fear. A household where money was always a source of conflict, or was never discussed at all, left its own marks. Proverbs 22:6 cuts both ways: the way a child is trained up tends to stay with him, for good and for ill.
Drawing on research by Professor Eileen Gallo (2001), the Institute for Christian Financial Health identifies three primary orientations people have toward money. Some people are primarily acquisition-oriented, so money feels like something to collect and build. Others are primarily use-oriented, and money feels like a ticket to consume things or experiences. Still others are primarily management-oriented, thus money feels like a to-do list to organize and control. None of these orientations is inherently virtuous or immoral. What matters is whether that orientation aligns with trust in God and the principle of generosity or reflects underlying insecurity or concern, perhaps even fear; these expressions map almost exactly onto what this article has been describing.
At their best, the management-oriented person is the careful, disciplined steward Scripture commends: spending less than they earn, planning well, and providing for their family. But the insecure/concerned version of that same orientation shows up as what the framework calls a “micromanager,” someone who needs to control everyone else’s spending to feel safe, or as “chaotic,” someone so terrified that money will damage relationships that they avoid any financial management structure at all. At their best, the acquisition-oriented person builds wealth with an open hand and a generous spirit. But the insecure/fearful version is what the framework calls “insatiable,” as there is always a higher number to reach, and enough never quite arrives, or “avoidant,” treating money as almost sinful or cursed, in a way that ends up harming themselves and others. These are precisely the patterns I’ve been describing, and they rarely appear out of nowhere. They usually stem from formative experiences absorbed early, hardening over decades into default postures.
None of that is an excuse to not steward God’s resources well. But it is an explanation, and extending that understanding to yourself—and to the parsimonious family member or friend who came to mind as you read—is itself a form of grace. The goal here is not self-condemnation but the kind of honest self-examination Psalm 139:23–24 invites: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” That prayer is a far better response than either defensiveness or despair.
Contentment: The better foundation
If frugality run amok is the problem, the biblical answer isn’t to stop being careful with money. It’s to cultivate a different relationship with money altogether. The Bible repeatedly points to generosity and contentment.
Paul says in Philippians 4:11–12, “I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content… I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.” The word “learned” matters here. Contentment is not a personality trait — it isn’t something some people are simply born with. It is a discipline, acquired through experience and by God’s grace. And as 1 Timothy 6:6 puts it: “There is great gain in godliness with contentment.” Not great gain in accumulation, not great gain in frugality for its own sake — great gain in godliness paired with contentment.
Cortines and Baumer describe what contented living looks like in practice in True Riches:
To be clear, contentment does not mean “pious frugality” — depriving ourselves of all spending, all the time… But it does mean embracing relative simplicity and choosing to thank God for what he has already given us… By living simply, more money is available for giving. We’re so grateful for God’s invitation to discover his way of thinking about lifestyle, and that he has shown us how to enjoy daily life without being consumed by the endless desire for more. (pp. 39–40; Kindle Edition)
That captures it well. Contentment is not the same as frugality, though frugality may serve it. A contented person spends less because they genuinely need and want less, not out of fear of spending. They give generously because they trust God’s provision, not because they’ve calculated a surplus. They hold money loosely because they know it belongs to God, not because they don’t have much use for it. The accumulation doesn’t comfort them the way it comforts the anxious hoarder, because their comfort comes from somewhere else entirely.
The greater purpose of stewardship
Frugality, properly understood and rightly motivated, is one thread in the much larger fabric of biblical stewardship. True stewardship isn’t about how much we save; it’s about recognizing that everything we have belongs to God, managing it wisely, and using it for His purposes and the good of others.
Our finances should reflect our kingdom priorities, not simply our desire to accumulate or our fear of the future. The time we free up by spending wisely also belongs to God and is worth stewarding well. The health and wellbeing of our families are resources to steward, not sacrifice on the altar of a lower monthly bank statement. And the generosity we are called to is not optional or occasional; it’s one of the primary purposes for which God has entrusted us with anything at all.
Jesus sums up the whole orientation in Matthew 6:33: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” When that is genuinely the operating principle — when we truly seek the kingdom first — frugality finds its proper place as a useful servant rather than a demanding master. When it isn’t the operating principle, frugality can quietly become an idol, dressed in the language of stewardship but serving only our own comfort and security.
True peace doesn’t come from saving every penny. It comes from trusting God’s provision and holding what He’s given with an open hand. And if He has blessed you with more than you need, you need less frugality and more generosity. That is what stewardship looks like in a life surrendered to Him and His purposes.