Legacy

Genesis 5:22-24

Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.

Our legacy.... How will we be remembered? What will our friends and family say about us when we have left this earth? Will we stay in people’s minds or just vanish as a distant memory? I think we have all wondered these things at one point.. Whether it be actual death, moving away, graduating high school or college with thoughts about if you made an impact, or anything else. We have wondered how people will remember us. Death is not something that people usually like to think about, for Christians, death has no sting because we have eternal life to look forward to, our life does not end here, it is just beginning when our physical bodies die. We have God’s promise of resurrection, whether you believe in soul sleep or instantaneous resurrection with the Father, the ending place is all the same. But going back to our legacy,  I have found myself wondering this. I have wondered what impression I have had on people. I wonder if I am not just another face, but a friend that made an impact. So often, I find myself having regrets based on not doing what I know I could have. For not being the friend that I ought to be, not being the example I should, not doing all I could have done for every person I came in contact with, because at any second, it could be over. Most of these questions I asked at times with selfish intentions behind them, but the past year, I have, for the most part, pondered these questions through God’s perspective. Not wondering about the impression I have made on them, in wondering if they thought I was nice, or cool, or whatever it may be, but wondering if they saw Jesus in me. Wondering if they had seen God’s love through me. Wondering if I had been an example of Jesus to them. I don’t know these answers, but I know that I can only live more and more for Christ and the legacy no longer is of importance to me, just Christ. Chances are that if you seek Christ with all of your life and bless people like He would, praying for people all the time, talking and caring for people like no one else does today, that a legacy will follow. But this life is not about a legacy, it is about God. I don’t really care what people think of me, I care about what my God and King thinks about me. Though reputation is important, we get too caught up in maintaining it and lose sight of our God. I want to have people know that I truly walk with God, if they think I am funny or nice or whatever else, then that is fine, but I want them to know my Jesus. If they don’t know Jesus, then, as tough as it is to say and think about, but hell is in their eternity. That is just reality. I don’t want my life to be lived for maintaining reputation, making friends, setting records, dating, getting good grades, being a good person, pleasure, comfort, fame, or anything else that will fade away with this world. I want to live for eternity, not for vanity. Enoch only has a handful of verses about him in the whole Bible, but we know instantly that Enoch walked with God. He walked with God for 300 years on this earth and will walk with Him for all eternity. I want my legacy to be one that is like Enoch’s. I want to know that people know that I walk with God. Everyone that we come in contact with either needs to know Jesus or needs to grow with Him. But this starts in us, we must live all for God, completely dedicating our life to Him. Having God live through us instead of us just living to do what God says. We are mixed up so often, we believe that because we are living a good life and have said a halfhearted prayer that we are ok in life. I did this. I thought that I was good with God because I had prayed a prayer, went to church and was a good kid that knew his Bible well. But it was never real, God was not my EVERYTHING. I did not cling to Him in the good and bad. I did not resist temptation because God hates sin, but because I didn’t want to do it and thought that it would harm my image. We need to make God our everything and grow with Him and seek Him, legacy may or may not come, but God will be pleased. If God is pleased with us, do man’s thoughts really matter? We can misjudge, condemn, hold grudges, and make assumptions about people that establish their legacy in our minds, we can be fickle with our thoughts. God’s opinion is all that matters if we are His child. Should we not seek to please our Father rather than others? 

Legacies don’t last, God does. We have eternity to spend with Him, let’s spend  our time here seeking Him above all else with even the innermost, the core, of us.

Blessings