Episode 1. At the End of the Day
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When we get to the end of our lives, we’d like to believe that we will have made a positive difference in this world. That we’ll be leaving behind a legacy of love, in the lives of those who …
When we get to the end of our lives, we’d like to believe that we will have made a positive difference in this world. That we’ll be leaving behind a legacy of love in the lives of those who matter most to us. Question is, are we living the sort of life today, that’s going to achieve that goal then?
Right now there are just over seven billion people living on planet earth, a number that’s going up every day. Today, just under 360,000 babies will be born and just over 150,000 people will die. So the net population growth of people on planet earth is around 210,000 a day or about 75,000,000 additional people on the earth each year.
They’re big numbers to contemplate especially when all that you and I see is that small sub-section of that seven-billion people that live just around where we live. Granted some see more than others, I know when I’m staying at the hotel I usually stay at in Secunderabad in India I tend to see many, many more people each day than I see back home in Australia.
But wherever we live we really only see a tiny, tiny fraction of all the people living on the earth, being born on the earth and dying on the earth each day. And in all of human history they tell us that just over a hundred billion people have been born on this earth. So of all the people who have ever lived only around 7% are alive today to which when you think about it is rather a lot.
Now each of those 100-billion people have lived a life, some long, some short and each of those one hundred billion people have left a legacy. For many of them they’re most obvious legacy is the children they left behind who’ve had their own children who in turn had children and so the human legacy of people is the most obvious thing they leave behind.
You and I are descendants of an incredibly long line of people, the vast majority who we’ll never have heard of. I knew my parents of course and three out of my four grandparents but beyond that I really have no idea. I’ve seen their names on a piece of paper, a family genealogy, but I don’t know them or anything much about them.
But in a very real sense they’re legacy lives on in me as the legacy of your ancestors live on in you. The first and most obvious thing of them that lives on in you and me is their DNA. Biologically you and I have picked up DNA from an incalculably large number of ancestors. If I take you back just ten generations prior to yourself there were 2,048 parents, grandparents, great, great, great, great, grandparents and so on who are directly part of your lineage.
Go back 80 generations, say to the time of Christ, and that number becomes huge which in mathematical theory 1.2-trillion-trillion people. Of course there have never been that many people on this earth so there’s a whole science that’s grown up to explain the whole numerical ancestry thing. Its amazing stuff and we could rabbit on for hours about this, but we won’t.
Suffice to say that your DNA, the genes laid down, each strand is a complex pea soup made up of the legacy of a very large number of people. So that’s the most obvious legacy that people leave behind but there’s also the legacy of our lives, the impacts that we’ve had on the people around us. Impacts that ripple laterally across to other people and vertically down through the generations.
As an extreme example it’s reasonable to expect that both historically and emotionally Adolf Hitler has had quite a different impact on the world compared to say Mother Theresa, would you agree? Some people have left astounding legacies behind them, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton left a legacy of knowledge that science still uses as its foundation today; medical researchers, teachers, nurses, administrators, politicians, activists, people through whom the course of history has been shaped and changed.
And then just ordinary folk like you and me, we leave behind legacies too. Some of us will leave behind a good legacy, others not quite so good and yet others leave behind a terrible legacy, a legacy of abuse and hatred that reverberates down through many generations to come.
It’s worth stopping to think about these things for a while isn’t it? Because the question that all this stuff causes me to ask of myself is this. What sort of a legacy will I end up leaving behind and you, what about you, what sort of legacy will you end up leaving behind? Have you ever wondered that?
The impact that we have on people closest to us, our parents, our spouse, our children, our friends, our work colleagues, our neighbours, our community, what sort of a legacy will you and I leave behind for them? That’s the question and that’s why we’re kicking off today a new series of messages that I’ve called “Living A Life That Leaves A Lasting Legacy Of Love”.
That’s a bit of a mouthful I know but I guess my central premise here is that if we want to leave something good behind then we have to live the sort of life that’s going to achieve that outcome. And the greatest legacy that you and I can leave behind is a lasting legacy of love, the impact of our love on other people.
Problem is, you and I are a bit of a mixed bag. We have some good attributes, some particular strengths in our makeup handed down in our DNA and shaped and refined by our experience but then we have some weaknesses and not so nice things about who we are. The question is which of those is going to shape the legacy that we leave behind? The answer is the one we allow to dominate our lives.
Each of us will leave some legacy, something that we imprint on our children. If you’re a person whose say constantly afraid, you worry about things all the time, then the chances are that a great deal of that is going to rub off onto your children. On the other hand if you’re a real encourager, someone who’s always building up other people then that is going to totally change how your children see themselves and the impact of that will go down through the generations.
So it’s how we live our lives that impacts not just our children but many other people around us. The smallest act of kindness can change a life, the smallest act of service can totally transform someone’s world and that my friend is something that can ripple across the world and down through the generations in ways that we simply cannot begin to comprehend.
This isn’t just Berni rambling on, it’s exactly what God says in His Word the Bible. Have a listen. It’s in the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20, verses 5 and 6. God says this:
You shall not bow down to worship false Gods for I the Lord your God am a jealous God punishing children for the inequity of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
See it’s true, you see it all the time. Sin ripples down a few generations. A man who is an alcoholic is likely to produce a son who’s an alcoholic. A man who beats his wife or his children is likely to produce a son who does exactly the same. Our sins impact not just us and our immediate family, they impact the legacy that ripples down behind us through the generations.
But note please here the grace and the mercy and the power of what God’s saying. Our unfaithfulness to God only goes down three or four generations but if we’re faithful to Him, if we worship Him and live our lives the best we can for Him then the fruit of that faithfulness is the fact that God shows His steadfast love to the thousandth generation. It’s a way of saying forever. A thousand generations is like twenty-five thousand years.
My friend it may be that you are dealing with generational impacts of sin of your parents, of your grandparents. It may be that there’s a spiritual hold over you of violence, of low self-esteem, of fear, of timidity, of pride, generational sin that has been handed down to you from your ancestors.
But Gods Word is clear, you and I can break that cycle by repenting and turning our lives around and worshipping and honouring Jesus Christ, the Son of God who came to die for us and rise again and that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this series, breaking the power of generational sin and leaving behind a lasting legacy of love.
Comments
Harold Burke
Really helpful I feel encouraged every time I listen.