Lent day 35 - inheritance

Heard two things yesterday.  One was my friend Bryan talking about his Mum Gladys at her funeral.  Bryan is a general in God's army.  He has authority, humility and lives a life more submitted to God than probably anyone I know.  He lives by faith as a missionary and has daily stories about how God has looked after his every need and made a way for him through seeming impossibilities.  Im privileged to call him a friend.   But the reason Bryan is the man that he is is because he had the mother that he had.  ( And quite probably the Father, but his dad died a long time ago and I never knew him)   Bryan had a mother who prayed for him, believed in him, discipled him and loved him.  When Gladys died she had next to no earthly possessions.  I know because I helped to clear out her room and her entire life fit into a couple of bin bags and boxes.   But what she left behind was a son who has won hundreds and hundreds of people for Jesus and who sees miracles on a regular basis as he goes into unreached places to tell people about God.   Bryan has not inherited anything physical from his mother except her wedding ring, her Bible and some very old fashioned prints of landscapes and a lady from Ghana carrying a baby on her back!   But his spiritual inheritance is immense.   Today I am feeling seriously challenged to pray much more for my kids. 

Then on the radio coming home from Gladys's funeral I was listening to a lady talking about her father who had been an exile from Franco's Spain.  She said ' I inherited fear'.   Wow.  What a statement.  She recognised that because her father had lived in fear in Spain and then left Spain in fear and lived in fear in exile, she had inherited fear.   Despite the fact that she was English and the Spanish Civil war has been over for a generation, she still knew that fear was in her DNA because it had been transmitted to her by her father.

What have you inherited?

If you are blessed to have had praying parents or grandparents you have probably inherited godliness and strength.  You are incredibly fortunate if that is the case and I do hope you are making the most of every blessing that has passed down your family line and are building on them for the next generation.   DO NOT squander the spiritual legacy which has been handed down to you.  You have a responsibility to take the baton and run further with it than your predecessors did.

But perhaps you have inherited something not so Godly?  If your family is hallmarked by anxiety or chronic illness, by financial disasters or persistent relationship breakdown......  well maybe you have inherited a curse instead of a blessing.   Good News!  Jesus became a curse for us when he hung on that cross at Calvary so that you can be released from that nasty inheritance.   And more Good News - you can be the start of a whole new line going forward.   Even if you dont have children of your own you can still pray for and invest in the next generation , growing generals for the future.