Practical Legacy-Building Blocks

Dannah Gresh: Parents give things to their children. A lot of things. Jani Ortlund challenges you to look beyond the physical stuff.

Jani Ortlund: The best gift you can give your family is your own personal integrity before your heavenly Father—not tons of money, not social prestige, not the best kids’ soccer team, but your actual life as you reverently accept God’s call upon you. The best gift is a life that turns decisively away from self-centeredness and sin, a life that turns toward Jesus and His way. It’s a life that says, “Lord, I’m all yours! I’m all in. Whatever you ask, the answer will be ‘yes.’”

Dannah: You’re listening to the Revive Our Hearts podcast for May 7, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh. Our host is the author of Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, you don’t have to be a parent to love children and to want to invest in coming generations. So today’s program is, yes, for parents and grandparents, but it’s really for all of us. 

If you missed what Jani Ortlund shared yesterday on Revive Our Hearts, you can still go back and listen at ReviveOurHearts.com, or on the Revive Our Hearts app. Jani’s a pastor’s wife, a mom, a grandmom, an author, and a sweet friend of mine.

She’s talking about the whole concept of building a spiritual legacy for your children and theirs—to the tenth generation. It's something that I've known Jani to pray for, for as long as I've known her. "Lord, bless our family . . . to the tenth generation." (Which she figures is at least two hundred years.) Oh, that more women were praying that for their family.  

That mandate to pass on God’s truth to coming generations is beautifully seen in Psalm 78, where the psalmist writes, 

He [the LORD] established a testimony in Jacob
and set up a law in Israel,
which he commanded our ancestors
to teach to their children
[then the psalmist casts the vision for why God’s aw / His Word, should be passed on]
so that a future generation—
children yet to be born—might know.

They were to rise and tell their children [why?]
so that [their children] might put their confidence in God
and not forget God’s works,
but keep his commands. (CSB)

The Lord has always intended for His truth to be handed, like a baton in a relay race, from one generation to the next. In God's wise design, families are the context within which that happens best and most naturally.

So let’s pick up where we left off yesterday. Jani Ortlund is talking about ways we can let the gospel set the tone in our home.

Jani Ortlund: When our children were little, we were on an extremely tight budget, and we didn’t have funds to purchase a lot of books. So I’m going to show you some things that we’ve used in our family with our kids and our grandkids. Some things we’ve purchased. You can start very young.

I did bring a book I’ve just received as a gift; it’s called Psalm 23. Do you see the colors? It says, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (v. 1). And you teach the color brown.

“He makes me lie down in green pastures” (v. 2). I don’t know if you can see this in the back, but you learn colors. You can start at six months with this, with a child, just on your knee. I wouldn’t recommend this with ice cream with a child that young. (laughter)

Every home should have a copy of this: Jesus Storybook Bible. Those of you who have it, when you go home read Daniel to your family and say, “Oh, we learned about this, this weekend!” I read through it once a year. It’s so encouraging! I mean, it’s just a wonderful resource. The Jesus Storybook Bible. If you don’t have one, get one. You need it if you have children in your home!

There are all sorts of books you can buy. We would use this one, The Exodus, and we would just take a page each night for our devotional. It was on a different passage of Scripture. We’d have those of our children who could read, look up the passage.

This is on Exodus 1:22ff, when Moses was found in the bulrushes. You can see the beautiful artwork. You can read it, talk about it together. All sorts of things like that which you can do. I would also just show you a few things that we’ve done in our family. 

How many of you can afford a poster board? It costs a couple dollars. So this is not expensive, for those of you who are thinking, I can’t go out and buy a bunch of books, Jani! In one of the books I’ve written—CrossWay published it—called His Loving Law, Our Lasting Legacy. It’s about living the Ten Commandments and giving them to your children.

And in that, after each commandment, I tell you how it’s God’s Law to you and then I try to show you how to give it to your children, and I show you how you can write it on the heart. In the first chapter, the first lesson together, we talk about how the law is a mirror. Charles Spurgeon taught us that. It shows us where we’re sinning. 

But it’s God’s love letter to us, in that it shows us how He wants us to follow Him—but it points us to the cross—so then we have a lesson on grace and how the Law points us to Jesus. And every time we sin, as we look to Jesus, that’s what God sees as He looks at us. He doesn’t look at our dirt that we see in the mirror.

You can keep going through here. There are a lot of different ways that you can teach each commandment. So something like that. It’s also on my podcast, He Restores My Soul, where I talk about the Ten Commandments, teaching them to your children.

Do you see how you can do that? Very simply. You don’t need a lot of money, but you could take time and teach your kids the Ten Commandments. One year we decided to take our kids through the Bible . . . actually, it was going to be about eighteen months. We were going to learn a Bible verse day—uh, no! per week—are you kidding?! So we chose a verse from each book of the Bible, sixty-six weeks, and we took some extra weeks to review. We told the kids we’d have a good prize when they finished.

Of course, we planned it out because we knew there was going to be a family reunion in California near Disneyland . . . but we didn’t tell the kids that! But they worked and worked, and we kept holding this prize over them. So they learned a different verse each week.

I got this at the Home Depot, or Staples, or some stationery store for a few dollars. You don’t need to spend a lot of money. What you need to do is spend your heart on your kids. 

There are a lot of resources out there: online, the Resource Center here, and between you and the Holy Spirit. You will never regret any time you spend teaching your children the Word of God. Let the gospel set the tone in your home.

Another way that you can live with future generations in mind is to make your home an outpost of heaven. What’s the atmosphere permeating your home? Does love saturate your relationships, does peace penetrate through your problems? Is kindness king in your home? 

Ask God to help you develop the power of a gospel culture within your four walls. It doesn’t matter how correct doctrine is if that doctrine is not enticing to your children. Do they see you love to live out what you believe?

 

When you talk about obedience or kindness or honesty, are your children seeing you live these out as well? Do your kids enjoy being at home? Do they want to invite friends over? Try to make your home their first outpost, their first resting place on their journey to heaven—that tastes a little bit like heaven. The Lord will help you there.

A third way you can let the gospel set the tone in your home is to immerse your family in a faithful, living church. Your family needs a gospel community to help build their faith for the future. Do not give up on the church of Jesus Christ! There is no perfect church. Any church you go to will have some sort of imbalance, some sort of problem.

There is no perfect church, but here are some things you can look for: 

• Do they honor God’s Word as eternally true? 
• Do they invest great effort to faithfully teach His Word to all ages? 
• Do they present the gospel message graciously and with an open invitation? 
• Do you experience healthy relationships among the staff and members and visitors?

If you are not immersing your family in a healthy church, you are risking your children’s faith for the future. Please, do not give up on the church of Jesus Christ! He died to make us one. I know we fight a lot within the church, like any family does. Don’t give up! Find a good church and bring your kids.

Another way of helping to live ten generations out is to rejoice in biblical marriage. Some of you may be divorced, some of you may be single raising children, but you can still rejoice—wherever you are in your life—in God’s plan for marriage. 

Now, if you are married, cultivate a happy, beautiful marriage as best you can, that makes the gospel attractive to your children. God’s Word is unashamedly pro-romance, so why shouldn’t you be?

Think of all the love stories in it, and some of the passages that are erotic, like the Song of Solomon or Proverbs 5. God values and celebrates love and sex in marriage, and He calls for married women to enjoy their God-blessed romance. 

Your marriage is so much more important than your own happiness. It took me years to figure that out. Marriage is an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person. That means at times you will be unhappy. Being unhappy is not the worst thing in life.

There is so much more at stake in your marriage than your personal fulfillment. Ask God—the One You promised on that day you married, you made your promise before Him—for the grace and strength to live above your own hurt feelings, your disappointments, your frustrations, your resentment, your bitterness.

 

This isn’t always easy, but it is worth it! God will build something great out of two people who just keep working at fulfilling their promise to Him about how they would treat each other throughout their whole life together.

Give your children a visual of what this could look like. Coach your children for their own future marriages. Talk to them about keeping promises and let them see you keep your promises day to day, both big and small.

Older children need to hear from us that sexual union is more than mere physical pleasure, wonderful though that is. God created us as men and women, and God designed marriage to be the union of one man with one woman. Your children are being raised in a culture where that is confused. You need to speak to them about this. You need to be encouraging your children that you’re praying for their spouse; you look forward to the day when they marry.

Now, let me suggest one final way for you to live today with your future generations in mind, and then I’m going to bring us to close. 

Teach your children to obey you. There is a lot I could say about specifics about working with children, how we taught our children different things.

But one building block in a family of faith is learning to balance discipline and structure along with play and spontaneity. The danger is to emphasize one over the other. The path of wisdom holds the two together, making obedience both winsome and compulsory.

You are training your children in how they should respond to God by how you let them respond to you! You see, you as a parent or a grandparent stand in the place of God. You are performing God-like functions as God’s special agents. Think of it: loving, providing, caring for, protecting. Second Timothy 3:1–5 shows us that disobedience to parents indicates a corrupt, out-of-control, anti-God spirit.

Is your child disrespectful to you? Then why would you expect him to honor God as he grows? The way your child obeys you now is setting a pattern for how he will obey God later. Help him obey his heavenly Father! 

Everyone is always under some authority figure. Even adults, we’re under governmental authorities and ultimately under God’s authority. Teach your children to honor you even before they completely understand what that means. The fifth commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Ex. 20:12).

The fifth commandment is about the flow of human relationships, and at the very center of all relations is that between the parent and a child. A child’s whole life is shaped by his parents. The family is the first and primary set of relationships in the beginning of all human society.

In that fifth commandment God shows us how to live together in close family units, which will in turn affect every relationship outside the home. God’s desire is to preserve the intergenerational continuance of a vibrant faith in God, which will bear far-reaching effects!

I believe if a child is taught to honor his parents, he will obey them. What is honor, really? It comes from that Hebrew word that means, “weight,” “heavy.” If you honor someone, you give them weight. We need to be good examples here, too. 

How do your children hear you honor others? What do they hear you say about your parents or your in-laws or your preacher or the policeman who just gave you a ticket? (laughter) Well, let me suggest just a few simple ways that you can teach your child to obey you, starting at a very young age.

Decide what is most important to you. You’ll grow weary if you’re trying to correct absolutely everything! In our home it was kindness, honesty, and cheerful, hard work. Those were the three things I wanted to emphasize.

Follow through on your instructions. If they can’t obey you, help them. If they won’t obey you, make them or discipline them. Surviving a firm “no” as a little eighteen-month-old or two-year-old, and all the frustration that follows, will strengthen your baby!

Self-control, endurance, being able to tell himself “no” when he is on his own is learned when you can hear a “no” from your parent and follow through on it. Make the pain of any disobedience outweigh the pleasure of that disobedience, if he were to disobey. Without this, any discipline you administer will be meaningless, it will be fruitless.

Don’t discipline your child unless it works! If you’re disciplining your child for a certain thing over and over and over again, it’s not working! Deal with anger at a young age. I don’t have time to go into that, but we tried to do that when our kids were really young, trying to figure out what was at the root of that child’s anger. Is it fatigue, self-justification, pride, jealousy? We had to teach our kids what was worthy of fighting for. 

And then finally, give many rewards! Children should learn that good and pleasure go together as surely as sin and pain. Reward cheerful, quick obedience and good manners, kindness, respect, hard work—all those qualities that you long to see developed in your child. You will be grateful for every effort you put into helping your child obey you! If you want more ideas on this, I refer to this a lot in my book on the Ten Commandments: His Loving Law, My Lasting Legacy. 

Now let me conclude in this way. Here is what your family needs most from you; if you hear nothing else, here this, this final few minutes.

The best gift you can give your family is your own personal integrity before your heavenly Father—not tons of money, not social prestige, not the best kids’ soccer team, but your actual life as you reverently accept God’s call upon you. The best gift is a life that turns decisively away from self-centeredness and sin, a life that turns toward Jesus and His way. A life that says like Mary, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38 KJV). It’s a life that says, “Lord, I’m all yours! I’m all in. Whatever you ask, the answer will be ‘yes.’”

It’s in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done” (Matt. 6:19). It’s a preapproved prayer! By God’s grace, for His glory, you can give yourself to the future destiny of your family. 

It was God who created the family as a sacred institution, Genesis 2:18–25. It was God who set precedent by blessing Abraham and his family, Genesis 17:1–7. That family grew into the family of Christ Himself, Galatians 3:29. Do you see how God loves family?

It is God who builds families in every generation, Psalm 127. It is your family—yes, your family, broken and messy as it may be—where God’s blessing can come and live and last. 

“For his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation” (Dan. 4:34). To the tenth generation and beyond! You do not need to make it happen. Let God give it to you!

Start where you are, messy as it always is. Turn to Christ moment by moment trusting Him for your next step, and just keep going. He will help you to be the mom or the grandmother or the Sunday school teacher or the auntie that your family needs, and that our future needs. And your imperfect, but faithful, commitment will matter long into the future.

We might feel small at times, even defeated in our day-to-day routines, but the truth is, we do matter. We will still matter even two hundred years from now! “The memory of the righteous is a blessing” (Prov. 10:7). May it be so in each one of our families here! Now, let me pray.

Father, we feel weak, we feel small, sometimes we feel defeated, but we know that is not of You. We know that it’s the weak who need you, so You love the weak! We don’t want to wallow in our weakness; we want to bring it to You. So we do, thanking You that You give strength and power to the weak. 

And Father, some of us are scared. Oh Lord, we bring our anxieties to you over our children or our marriage. We need You! We don’t know what the future is, but we claim our phrase for this weekend, that Heaven rules! And Heaven will rule according to Your good plan, and so we look to You.

I pray for every family represented here today. Lord, would You give them a story that will last even to the tenth generation, for Your name, for Your glory. It’s all for You, Jesus, amen.

Nancy: Amen! Yes, it is all for Your glory. What a wonderful, long-range perspective there, from Jani Ortlund. 

Jani mentioned some resources that can help you in your own journey to gain that kind of outlook. We’ve put links to them in the transcript of today’s program. To find the transcript, just go to ReviveOurHearts.com, click on the title of today’s program, and you can read the full transcript right there.

I hope you’re coming away from Jani’s message with some fresh ideas—maybe a greater measure of excitement for how you can invest in coming generations. You see, God’s eternal Word is timeless and relevant to every generation. That's why we here at Revive Our Hearts have a long-term view. Our desire is to pour into the lives of women who listen to this program so that they in turn can pass on God's Word to those He has entrusted to their care. 

In order to keep this listener-supported ministry going, we depend on the giving of friends like you to continue proclaiming the truths of Scripture, as we call women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. And this month, as a thank-you for your donation of any amount, we’ll send you a month-long devotional called Living Out the One Anothers of Scripture. When we say “one anothers” those are simply the New Testament exhortations that include the phrase “one another,” like:

• Love one another
• Encourage one another
• Forgive one another
• And so on. 

If we want to pass the baton of God’s truth to coming generations, we need to make sure we’re setting good examples for those who follow in our footsteps. This devotional will help you do just that, because it focuses on our relationships within our families and churches—the one anothers. 

Again, it’s Living Out the One Anothers of Scripture, and it’s our gift to say "thank you" to you for your much-needed gift of any amount here in the month of May. To make a donation and request the devotional, head to ReviveOurHearts.com, and click where you see the word “Donate,” or ask for the devotional when you call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Are you ready for a little homework? Here’s how you can get ready for tomorrow’s edition of Revive Our Hearts. Look up 1 Corinthians chapter 3. Read it, and notice the two metaphors the apostle Paul uses in that passage. One is an agricultural, a farming metaphor. The other one is related to construction. Just read it and start thinking about it. Ask God how it might apply to your life. Again, it’s 1 Corinthians chapter 3. We’ll take a look at that tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

Scripture taken from the ESV.

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