Today we shift our gaze from the past to the future; from the Spiritual Family Farm we have inherited and the legacy we were given, to the one we are leaving behind. We had no choice in the land we were left; whether there were weeds or fruit, but we CAN choose what we will sow for the next generation. As the old saying goes, “When you know better, you do better.”
What if “legacy” wasn’t relegated to finances and death, but emerged as an intention for 2019? An item on our to-do list? Something we could grow and cultivate today? A filter we used as we walked into every relationship? A story we told with our lives now?
We get to sow into the fruitfulness of those God puts into our lives and that just may be the most important work of all.
We can sow seeds into our children if we are mothers. We can influence the lives of our students if we are teachers. We can pour into our friends, into our community, into our co-workers. They will feast on the fruit that is being produced in our lives or
What’s it going to be this year?
I am humbled and blessed to tell you (again) that my own mother is a mighty woman of God. She sowed a deeply rooted love for the Word into my life in childhood. I watched her study and teach. I saw the books on prayer by her chair. I heard her say no to many things so she could say yes to pouring into an ever-growing group of women on Wednesday mornings- FOR DECADES. That is my Spiritual Family Farm and I will never take it for granted.
I couldn’t inherit Jesus from her, just like our children, friends, the next generation will not inherit a relationship with Jesus from us. They will have to choose for themselves. But we can sow the seeds and they will matter.
The most important tool my mom left me in the gardening shed on the Family Farm was Bible Study. In fact, it saved my life. It saved my marriage, my mind, and our legacy. After I got married and moved thousands of miles away from all I had ever known, my life began to unravel. I was betrayed by my own unrealistic and sinful expectations of marriage and put too much of my happiness and identity on my very young husband.
I lost my way.
For the first time in my life I found myself actually NEEDING the Jesus that I had committed my life to all those years before. And I knew where to find Him. I knew where to look. My mom had shown me the way.
Listen to me, If I had started from scratch with God in those desperate days and years, my story may have turned out differently. What my mother had sown into my life, both in her words and deeds changed my life, my future, our legacy.
So now it is my turn. This is what I desire to pass on to my own four children. If nothing else, they will see their mother’s nose in her Bible every morning when they wake up. Every. Single. Morning. They may feel a little sting of sacrifice as she commits to teaching the Word she loves. They will be challenged from an early age to spend their own time reading their Bible daily. I’m okay with it being merely a checkbox during these early years. It was for me too and I trust God with those seeds. What I do know is that it is my responsibility to pass on the legacy that was left to me- to my own children and to those that are in my sphere of influence. I will make sure that the Spiritual Family Farm is intact when I hand it over.
Prayer, church membership, social justice, evangelism, worship, giving… these can all be a part of the legacy you leave. The hard reality of this world is that we usually reap exactly what we sow, but on the Spiritual Family Farm we have the privlege to provide for others what they didn’t have to work for, for themselves. We can give them a leg up.
I believe a stunning example of a legacy left is found in I Chronicles 28. In my parallel Bible, with several versions side by side, I see a slightly different heading above this chapter in each; “David’s Instruction to Solomon,” “David’s Plans for the Temple,” and “Solomon Instructed to Build the Temple.” In just comparing the headings, we know that there are two key players in this passage with one objective; David, his son Solomon, and building the Temple.
Here we read the story of King David summoning all the officials of Israel to Jerusalem to let them in on some important plans and an important change in plans! I Chronicles 28: 2-3 says,
“King David rose to his feet and said; ‘Listen to me, my fellow Israelites, my people. I had it in my heart to build a house as a place of rest for the ark of the covenant of the Lord, for the footstool of our God, and I made plans to build it. But God said to me, ‘You are not to build a house for my Name, because you are a warrior and have shed blood.”
King David had his heart set on building the temple as a permanent dwelling place for the ark of the covenant and the glory of God. Not only that, he had even begun the process by making plans to build it. David had a dream. A good, God-honoring dream. He had plans for this fruitful endeavor in his life.
God had other plans.
In Verse 6, God says,
“Solomon your son is the one who will build my house and my courts, for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his father.”
I Chronicles 28: 11-18 goes on to list all the plans, instructions, and materials that David passed down to Solomon concerning the temple. He literally passed down the dream of his heart to his son.
But was it just his dream? After all, God basically said that David was unqualified to to build the temple.. that his resume didn’t line up with that kind of work. Where did the dream, the plans, come from in the first place?
Verse 12 screams of legacy when it says,
“He (David) gave him (Solomon) the plans of all the Spirit had put in his (David’s) mind for the courts of the temple of the Lord and all the surrounding rooms, for the treasuries of the temple of God and for the treasuries for the dedicated things.”
It seems that it was God’s plan all along for David to receive the instructions, and for Solomon to carry them out. It was a multi-generational kind of harvest. It was literally a temple of legacy!
We may not have physical blueprints from God for something we are to pass along to the next generation or to those we are allowed influence over, but all of us will leave a spiritual legacy behind. What will it be? We get to choose.
As 2019 begins, my prayer is that we will always have a view of our Spiritual Family Farm in front of us… that we will take some time here at the beginning of the year to plow those fields as well. In I Chronicles 28:19 David says, “All of this I have in writing as a result of the Lord’s hand on me and He enabled me to understand all the details of the plan.” What if we pushed pause on the “tyranny of the urgent” and wrote down a plan for our legacy as well? If we are not intentional about putting some thought and prayer into what we want it to be, we may miss important opportunities to sow into others.
What is the “asparagus” you can plant today that someone else will gain nutrition from in years to come? Pray to provide some of those “large flourishing cities (they) did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things (they) did not provide, wells (they) did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves (they) did not plant” (Deut. 6:10-11) for someone in 2019.
After all, legacy is a story where we will never read, “The End.”