A Legacy of Faith (Friday Devotional)

 

One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.

- Psalm 145:4

There are certain things which may matter to you, but that no one else cares to hear about. The status of your fantasy football team, for example, may be of intense interest to you, but will make any listener’s eyes glaze over with boredom. Similarly, a story about office drama may make for good gossip within the confines of your workplace, but it’s likely of little interest to those outside it. Updates on what you had for lunch, who you saw at your high school reunion, the deal you got on a used car last month—all of these things may fascinate you, but they don’t necessarily captivate other people.

What does hold people’s attention are stories that really matter. Talk to someone about a life-and-death struggle and they’ll sit with rapt attention. Rope them in with universal themes of struggle, loss, redemption, and overcoming steep odds, and they’ll listen to you all day. Tell them about something transformative and they’ll stick around.

When we talk about a legacy of faith—whether the legacy of an individual or of a church—we can tend to get bogged down in the things that matter to us, but are perhaps of less interest to others. We refer to statistics and accomplishments, things we can point to as quantitative evidence of our faithfulness. We rely on visible, tangible prosperity for evidence that God is with us.

But if we want to tell a story that people want to hear, we’re better off talking less about what we’ve done and more about what the Lord has done; we do well to tell the story of salvation instead of merely listing our own accomplishments. Where our power is limited and fleeting, God is almighty; where our intentions are mixed, God’s are pure.

If your story of faith is built on the foundation of your actions, it may be personal without being powerful. Better then to tell a story the whole world needs to hear, a story that generations can commend to one another: the story of the wonderful works of God.