Genesis 12:1-4, Psalm 90:17, Revelation 14:13: What Will Be Your Legacy?

INTRODUCTION

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

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 the 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.”

Abraham was faithful. Abraham walked with God. And Abraham’s legacy lived on through Moses, and the Old Testament heroes, and finally through Jesus, our Savior.

Each of us has  the opportunity to leave a legacy to our children and those we have loved and served.

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 hoped, as we all do, that the good he did would have some kind of permanence. He hoped that his work would live after him. And it did.

In the New Testament, in the light of the truth of the Resurrection, we read this in Revelation 14:13:

And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.”

“Yes,” says the Spirit, “that they will 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…

The summer after I finished my freshman year at the University of Kansas, I spent August at a little Bible school that was held over a drugstore in south Chicago.

I had just begun to seriously live for God, and I was hungry to know what it meant to follow Jesus. We had three instructors. One taught us about how to teach Sunday school. One taught us the book of Romans. And the third one taught us Bible doctrine.

It was Mr. Sherwood who taught us Bible doctrine. It seems to me that he had the hardest task, but he made the subject interesting—not only interesting but exciting.

After class I would bring my questions to him, and he was always willing to take time to patiently explain things to me.

The thing that impressed me most about Mr. Sherwood was that he knew Greek. He would stand before us with his Greek New Testament and translate on the spot the passage he was teaching about. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to learn Greek too.

More than 20 years later, I finally was able to take a couple of correspondence courses in Greek. I could work through my New Testament in the original language and learn many things I didn’t know.

One day—after many years—I wrote Mr. Sherwood a letter telling him how much his course meant to me.

He wrote a letter back. So many years had gone by that I don’t think he even remembered who I was. But it was an encouraging letter. I remember one thing that he wrote in that letter. He wrote: “I didn’t think that summer was spent to any great profit.”

It was a surprise to him that I remembered him so fondly and appreciated so much what he had done for me. So the summer he thought he had spent “to no great profit” was profitable after all.

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 their 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. As Christian believers we must be constantly aware that this life is not all there is. It is up to us to intentionally pass on to others what has enriched our lives.

A. The preacher and theologian Fred Craddock tells about a young woman who showed up at his church for the first time. After the service he engaged her in conversation.

She told him 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,” the girl said, “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…”

I wonder whether the grandmother realized how important it had been to take her granddaughter to church with her during those summers.

B. Dwight L. Moody was the most famous and 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 Dwight 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.” (Those were days when a penny would really buy something.)

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 speech on the same occasion from that famous play.

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: the evil people do lives after them.

But he is wrong that “the good is oft interred with their bones.” The good we do also lives on.

A famous saint, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 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 have left a legacy of good that has enriched and will enrich the lives of those who come after—family, friends, strangers—and will go on enriching lives until the end of time—and for eternity.

 And even as we near the end of our earthly journey, we can still bring blessing into the lives of others, and we do.

A hundred years from now no one may remember that you ever lived, but if you have lived for God the good you have done them will live on in the lives of others and bless them—even into eternity.