We would be crazy NOT to take God up on His promise to shower unfailing love and faithfulness on one thousand generations of those who embrace the new life He offers us through Jesus Christ. We have NOTHING to lose – and EVERYTHING to gain!
But where do we begin?
Maybe you’re already on the road – you just didn’t realize it. You have a godly heritage from parents (and/or grandparents and great-grandparents) who have raised you in the Christian faith. Maybe you’ve taken it for granted, but now you recognize that in passing the faith on to you they’ve gifted you with a life-giving dynamic that can change you, change the people around you, and can help you and yours to change our world.
Now it’s up to you to claim your heritage, to embrace wholeheartedly this living, breathing connection with the God of the Universe with which your forbears have blessed you and your posterity, your descendants. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, your actions and responses to God’s gracious Holy Spirit will add layer after layer of blessing to your life and the lives of those who follow you. You may not know until eternity the enormous ramifications of God’s blessings on one thousand generations of your biological, adoptive and spiritual descendants!
But — maybe you are a first-generation Christian. Maybe your past and your family connections are messy, ugly, and broken. Trust me – it doesn’t matter! We serve a God Whose plan for us includes a fresh slate, a brand-new start when we commit to letting Jesus enter our lives. Whether you’re single, married, widowed, divorced, a biological parent, an adoptive parent or a spiritual parent, you can begin NOW to appropriate the blessings God has promised to add to your life and the lives of those you touch – all because you’ve made the choice to belong to and follow Him.
Why is this possible? Because Jesus paid the penalty for our sin on the cross of Calvary so that every human being has the chance to start over, to begin again, to get it right.
In 2 Corinthians 5;17, the Apostle Paul (who, even with a heritage of strong, God-fearing ancestors, needed to claim plenty of Jesus’ redeeming do-overs for himself), writes, “Anyone united with the Messiah [Jesus] gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All of this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins” (The Message, emphases mine).
And in Ephesians 4:22-24, Paul adds to this concept: “…everything connected with that old way of life has to go,” he says. “It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you” (The Message, emphases mine.)
Not only does God offer us a fresh start and a new life based on Jesus’ forgiveness: He also promises to “accurately reproduce his character” in each of us. In other words, once we choose to embrace God’s promise of 1000 generations of love, He delights in relating to us so intimately that His very character – His personality – begins to be formed in our personality and inner spirit. Constant, daily two-way dialogue with Him makes its mark on us, changing us until we become more and more like Him!
As C.S. Lewis put it, “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. “
North Point Inside Out’s stirring song “Death Was Arrested”* expresses both the truth of Lewis’ words and the 2 Corinthians 5:17 “new life dynamic” beautifully:
“Alone in my sorrow and dead in my sin
Lost without hope with no place to begin
Your love made a way to let mercy come in
When death was arrested and my life began….
You have made us new
Now life begins with you.”
You see, 2 Corinthians 5 is not just applicable to my personal salvation and walk with Christ, or yours, as stunning and life-changing as that application is. What Jesus did on the cross for us has arrested the curse of death and decreed new life for our generations, present and future, as well, setting up a blessing and anointing that makes it possible to for us to change the ending of story – to change the potential for the future of our children and grandchildren, biological, adopted and spiritual.
The curse of death that sin brought into this world – a curse that effectively doomed everything vibrant that God had planned for our past, present and future generations — has been stopped. Ended. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross means that He has redeemed your future and mine – including the hopes, prospects and dreams of and for our biological, adoptive and spiritual descendants.
Where do we begin? Right here. Right now. Claim His new life, His new creation for yourself AND for those men and women who will issue from the biological and/or spiritual image of the Creator God in you. It’s all a part of God’s promise of unfailing love.
*”Death was Arrested,” North Point InsideOut, from the album “Nothing Ordinary,” c. 2017.
