After years of building up a PC platform juggernaut that has become so dominant that physical PC games have basically ceased to exist, Steam is finally sharing the truth at checkout that was hidden in plain sight all along… Steam is not a shop where you go to purchase PC games, it is a library of licenses that you pay for the rights to access. Now, to anyone that has been paying attention to all of the fine print whenever they buy something off of the Steam store, this isn’t very surprising news. But for many gamers who were under the mistaken belief that they possessed hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars worth of PC games in their virtual libraries, this information that clearly states that they are renters rather than owners is not welcome news… we don’t technically own anything we have downloaded on Steam. We have simply paid the access fee to download and play these games for as long as Steam grants us access to them. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing… after all, Steam has made finding and playing PC games easier to access and more affordable than ever. We just have to be clear on what it is we are truly getting from this relationship, and what we may have assumed to be true that was never promised to us in the first place.

Before we allow the true nature of the Steam storefront to disappoint us, let’s consider a more pressing and inconvenient truth… we don’t truly own or possess any aspect of our material lives in any form of permanence. At best, we purchase the equivalent of “usage rights” for these items until we reach our own expiration date, at which point our “ownership” of everything that we thought we possessed will be passed on to someone else. From the clothes that we are currently wearing to the device you are using to view this, none of these things truly “belong” to us even if we “bought” some of them at a store… we simply have access to them for the period of time that we have been granted on this planet. And the understanding of being a “renter” rather than an “owner” on this plane of existence goes beyond the items that we see and hold and into something much more important… who WE as created beings belong to.

For as long as there have been humans walking this planet, we have been determined to live our lives on our own terms… from Adam and Eve to the present day, humanity has been raising their tiny little fists at their Creator and shouting the equivalent of “It’s My LIFE!” at the top of our lungs like the chorus to a Bon Jovi song. But the reality couldn’t be further from the truth, as disappointing as that may be to reconcile. Whether we are following in the footsteps of Christ or trying to “go our own way”, we are not the owners of our lives in any way, shape, or form. And while that may be a disturbing and polarizing concept to process, it is a fact nonetheless. The definition of the word “own” is “to have or hold as one’s own, to possess”… and by that definition we cannot call ourselves owners of our lives or anything else down here because we have to give all of these things back when we are done with them. Our bodies return to the dust that we came from (Ecclesiastes 12:7), our physical souvenirs of the lives we lived end up getting passed down to others or auctioned off (Ecclesiastes 2:18-20)… we don’t truly possess any of this. We are “renters”… we enjoy the use of goods or services of these things we call “our bodies” for a fixed period of time… and after that we are returned to the owner. But if we are just renters with a license to play, then who actually owns us? The plot thickens…

1 Corinthians 6:19-20 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.

1 Peter 1:17-19  And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear; knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. 

Let’s start with the words of the Apostle Paul, who makes it abundantly clear that believers in Christ do not belong to themselves, but that we have been purchased at a price by the Lord. Peter goes a step further by describing the transaction that took place as the giving of “ransom money” to buy us back. But that begs the question… why were we ever “for sale” to begin with? And the truth about our lives comes into clarity… these were never “our lives” to begin with. From day one, we were not our own… we were slaves to sin itself and its’ horrific consequences, both the death of our physical lives as well as our eternal ones (Romans 6:6-18). And because of this, we are left with only one of two alternatives… to continue to live in bondage to the sin that destroys us, or to accept the redemption of our lives and choose to serve the God who purchased us from that death. We are renters either way, the question is whose ownership have we accepted?

While there are a handful of ways to purchase digital PC games outside of Steam, the reality is that all of them have the exact same limitations in common… they don’t own what they are offering, only the license to access them. And since they do not actually possess what they are selling, at whatever point they lose the rights to offer those licenses, our ability to access them also disappears. But this paradigm of paying for the “license” rather than true digital ownership serves as an important reminder of the fleeting nature of our existence on this planet… similar to these games that we can pay to play but never truly own, we are each piloting a vehicle on this big blue marble that we will have to return at the end of our rental period. Much like the real-life version of “steam” itself, our lives are just a vapor that we don’t possess or fully control… and one day our breath will return to the very God who gave it to us in the first place and we will give an accounting for what we did with it.

Whether we choose to yield our lives to Him on not, we are not our own and we never were… we are merely renting time and space on this planet until our license to access this physical realm expires. The only question that remains is will we choose to obediently place our lives back under the ownership of the God who holds eternity in His hands, willingly submitting to His authority over these fragile, temporary vessels in all we say and do? Or are we deceiving ourselves into believing that any part of our lives or our time on this planet is ours to control? Sure, it can be disappointing to realize that we, much like our Steam library of games, were never ours to begin with. But we should also be encouraged that despite our status as mere “renters”, our Creator loved us so much that He chose to pay the price to not only buy us back again, but to ALSO give us back the purpose and destiny that we were designed for in the first place. We will all live our lives in service to a “master”… but only one “Master” has the power to offer permanent rewards that extend beyond this mere “vapor” of our earthly existence and into an eternity that we can never lose.

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