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Perpetuating Our Family Heritage
As people get older they seem to become more and more interested in their lineage. Such websites as ancestry.com have become popular. Perhaps you have traced some of your history back some generations or know someone in your family who has. More and more, information about our genetic history is becoming an important part of our health plan.
As the people of God, we may be more concerned about our family’s spiritual history and how we can sustain and perpetuate loyalty to the Lord in our children and grandchildren. In the series of lessons that I will be presenting this week (November 12-15), I will be talking about how we can perpetuate our family heritage.
Often when we think about our family heritage, we speak of our fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, or perhaps even our great-grandparents. In this series we will examine God as our Father and our Husband. We will examine how He establishes and maintains His relationship with us on the basis of an unconditional commitment or covenant. We will observe how His relationship with us is founded on His grace. We will learn how He uses His power to empower us and observe how these three forces work in our hearts to draw us into an ever-increasing closeness or intimacy with Him.
Once we understand something of God as the model Husband and Father, we will work to try to understand how to execute His model in our marriages, in our parent/child relationships, in our relationships in the church and in our relations with the world. Psalm 127:1 says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.” There is no better way to build our house than on the blueprint provided by God Himself.
Our parents and our grandparents have served as our most immediate examples of marriage, parenting, and relating to the world. Some were certainly better models than others, and we love and appreciate them very much, but the fact of the matter is they were less than perfect, and sometimes we perpetuate their imperfections in our relationships with others. We are a people that are in the process of “not being conformed to this world, but transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Romans 12:2) into that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
If we model our marriages after God’s model of His marriage to His people . . . if we model our parent/child relationships after His model with His children . . . we can perpetuate a noble family heritage. Covenant, grace, empowerment and intimacy in our family relationships leads to the perpetuation of the same in the church and makes us effective in inviting the world to learn about our Father, a Father who loves them and willingly adopts them into His family.
Yes, our relationship with God is the foundation of all other relationships. The world needs to know Him. We need to teach them, not just by what we say, but also by who we are!
