A Life Well Spent: Genesis 12:1-4, etc.: What Will Be Your Legacy?

What difference will it make a hundred years from now that you ever lived? Maybe more than you can imagine.

GENESIS 12:1-4, PSALM 90:17, REVELATION 14:13: WHAT WILL BE YOUR LEGACY?

INTRODUCTION

A little girl in a church junior choir was chosen to lead a procession for a Christmas candlelight service.

She felt it to be an awesome responsibility to carry her candle and lead that long procession down the aisle of he church.
After the service she said to her mother, “I looked back and saw all those people coming behind me, and I was scared!”
Do you ever think of all the people who follow behind you—and will follow behind you to the end of time?
Some are members of our family; some are not yet born.
Yet how we have lived influences the lives and decisions of all who follow us.
It is a great responsibility to be leading such a procession.

Long before the people of God understood the truth of the resurrection to eternal life, they had a firm conviction that their legacy lived on in the lives of people who came after them.

We see this in God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-4:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. …and by you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

We see this hope also at the end of Psalm 90:17:
"Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish thou the work of our hands upon us,
yea, the work of our hands establish thou it."

The psalmist hopes, as we all do, that the good he did has some kind of permanence. He hopes that his work will live after him.

In the New Testament, in the light of the truth of the Resurrection, we read this:

Revelation 14:13:
And I heard a voice from heaven saying,
“Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.”
“Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.”

Did you ever think about your deeds following you?
Did you ever think that part of you will live on here on earth in the lives of those you have loved?--and maybe even in the lives of strangers?

I. Sometimes we are not even aware of something we do that others remember as an important milestone in their life.

A. Can you remember how a seemingly chance remark by someone you respected helped you make a decision that has made a big difference in your life?

Or maybe it was a kind action—or a good example that encouraged you or inspired you…

B. It is said that James Boswell, the famous writer often in conversation referred to a special day in his childhood when his father took him fishing. That day stood out in his memory and he often thought about the things his father had taught him in the course of heir fishing together.

It occurred to someone to check the journal that Boswell’s father had kept to see what the father had said about that fishing trip from his perspective.
Here is what he found when he turned to that date: “Gone fishing today with my son. A day wasted.”

II. Christian believers are constantly aware that this life is not all there is, and we seek intentionally to pass on to others something that has enriched our lives.

A. The story is told that the great theologian Karl Barth was once asked by a colleague how he, with all his immense learning, could possibly believe the assertions of the Christian creed, he gave this reply: “Because my mother told me.”

This doesn’t mean that in the course of time Dr. Barth didn’t find out that some things his mother told him turned out not to be true—or that he found no evidence to support his faith beyond that his mother told him. But he surely meant that his mother planted the seed and that there was no other factor in his coming to faith more important than his mother’s influence.

By her faithful teaching Karl Barth’s mother passed her legacy on to her son.

B. The preacher and theologian Fred Craddock tells this story:

A young woman said to me, that during her freshman year at college she was failing in her classes, she wasn’t having any dates, and didn’t have as much money as the other students.
“One Sunday afternoon,” she said, “I was feeling so lonely and depressed that I went to the river near the campus. I climbed upon the rail and was looking into the dark water below…
“Then, for some reason or another I thought of the line, ‘Cast all your cares upon him, for he cares for you.’”
She said, “I stepped back, and her I am.”
Craddock asked, “Where did you learn that line?”
She said, “I don’t know.”
Craddock said, “Do you go to church?”
“No…well, when I visited my grandmother in the summers we went to Sunday school and church.”
Craddock said, “Ah…”

C. D. L. Moody was the most successful evangelist of our grandparents’ time.

When Moody was still a small child his father died and his mother and ten children were left destitute.
When he was 10 his brother found him a job in a neighboring town where he would work through the winter months. The child’s heart broke as he left his family to live so far away.
At last he and his brother arrived at the town where he was to work. His brother saw his tears and pointed to a feeble, old, white-haired man and said, “There’s a man that’ll give you a cent; he gives one to every new boy that comes to town.”
Moody says that he planted himself directly in the old man’s path. As the man came up to them, his brother spoke to him, and he stopped and looked at the child. He said, “Why, I have never seen you before. You must be a new boy” He asked him about his home, and then, laying his trembling hand upon the child’s head, he told him that though he had no earthly father, his Heavenly Father loved him, and he gave the little boy a bight new cent.
Near the end of his life Moody said, “I do not remember what became of that cent, but that old man’s blessing has followed me for over fifty years, and to my dying day I shall feel the kindly pressure of that hand upon my head. A loving deed costs very little, but done in the name of Christ it will be eternal.”

CONCLUSION

Perhaps when you were a sophomore in high school you read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as I did.

Our teacher gave us our choice to memorize either Brutus’ speech at Caesar’s funeral or Mark Antony’s.

I learned Mark Antony’s speech—you know—the one that begins:

“Friends, Romans, countrymen,
lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Antony is right that the evil people do lives after them.
But he is wrong that “the good is oft interred with their bones.”
The good that we do also lives on.

A famous saint named Bernard said this:

“Our deeds do not pass away as they seem to. On the contrary, every deed done in this life is the seed of a harvest to be reaped in eternity.”

My purpose in speaking to you in this way is to remind you that you also leave a legacy to those who come after.

You who have lived for God leave a legacy of good that enriches the lives of those who come after—family, friends, strangers—and will go on enriching lives until the end of time—and for eternity.