Our Scripture reading today Genesis chapter 23 verses one
through 619 through 20 and 25 Chapter 25 verses 7 through 11.
Sarah lived to be 127 years old. She died at curieth Arba, that
is Hebron in the land of Canaan. And Abram went to more.
Abraham went to mourn for Sarah and to weep over her.
Then Abraham rose from beside his dead wife and spoke to the
Hittites. He said, I am a foreigner and
stranger among you. Sell me some property for a
burial site here so I can bury my dead.
Afterward Abraham buried his wife Sarah in The Cave in the
field of Machpelah near Mamre, which is Hebron and the land of
Canaan. So the field and The Cave in it
were deeded to Abraham by the Hittites as a burial site.
Abraham lived 175 years. Then Abraham breathed his last
and died at a good old age, as an old man and full of years,
and he was gathered to his people.
His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in The Cave of
Machpelah near Mamrie, in the field of Ephron, son of Zohar
the Hittite, the field Abraham had bought from the Hittites.
There Abraham was buried with his wife Sarah.
After Abraham's death, God bless his son Isaac, who then lived
near Bayer. Lahai Roy.
May the Lord add his blessing to the reading and the hearing of
His Word. We're talking today about this
question. What do we really owe to the
past and future generations? Now I'm going to start with some
shocking news that no one has heard before.
I'm sure this will be quite scandalous.
Sarah and Abraham died. You all knew that already.
If you didn't know it before, which you did, you would have
known it after I read it just a minute ago.
This is shocking though. In one sense, Sarah and Abraham
played such a huge role in the story of faith, in the story of
history. I heard someone say once, years
and years ago, that another way of saying history is his story,
his being God's story. And in God's story, Sarah and
Abraham played a much larger role than most people do.
They were, it was through them and through their faithfulness
that God has been able to bless all the nations of the world
through eventually the birth of his Son, Jesus Christ, through
their faithfulness. It's a, it's a big role.
And yet, and yet, right here, it's still the first book in the
Bible and Abraham and Sarah dead, dead and buried.
More text, I think. I haven't done actual line
counting, but I think we get more text devoted to Abraham and
Sarah than anyone else in the Bible up to this point.
Noah got a lot. So maybe, maybe Noah had a
little bit more Noah. Noah has died too, but Abraham,
Sarah, Abraham, Sarah died. And it's just that far into the
book, and then the story goes on.
That's part of what I want us to keep in mind, not only
throughout this sermon, but throughout our lives, that no
matter how big a role that we play in his story, we're going
to die. If Jesus doesn't come back
first, we're going to die. And the story will go on.
The story goes on after us and the story was going on long
before us. This is a very, very long story
that we're in that Abraham and Sarah, It's the same story we're
in. It's very long.
In fact, this story is going to go on forever and ever and ever
and ever in the Kingdom that God establishes, has already
established and will make real and present and full on this
earth. And, and our role in that story
is in reality quite small, quite small.
The story we're in is a long one.
And each one of us plays only a very small part.
Now, the truth of that statement, I think is, is almost
undeniable. Think about it this way.
Can you tell me the name, first name of your great, great, great
grandfather? Probably not.
I couldn't tell you the first name of my great, great, great,
great grandfather, or grandmother for that matter, on
either side of my family. One of these days, one of these
days, there won't be a person alive that remembers my name or
yours. Now, they might come across a
plaque someplace with our name written on it and they'll say
who's that? And someone will say, I don't
know what. They must have left some money,
their names on a plaque. They probably left some money.
We play a very small part and a very long story.
And that truth is important for us to keep in mind because it
humbles us, keeps us from thinking more highly of our of
ourselves than we ought to. But that truth can have some
pathological kinds of outgrowths from it, twisting it in some
ways. There's a philosophy that's it's
an older, it's an old philosophy, but it's growing in
popularity again. The philosophy called nihilism
sometimes pronounced nihilism. Either pronunciation is correct.
And no matter how you pronounce it, nihilism is a a pretty
insidious kind of thing. The basic premise of nihilism
is, is, is none of it matters life.
There's no purpose, there's no meeting, there's no point.
We're here for a little while by accident, then we're gone and we
never come back, and eventually our atoms just get scattered
throughout the universe. There is no point.
There is no purpose, there is no meaning.
Some people take nihilism and say, then eat, drink and
Mayberry for tomorrow we die. And others take nihilism and say
ravage, kill, plunder and maim, for tomorrow we die.
And others say, why do anything for tomorrow we die.
There's no point and anything that we do.
So whatever I do, there's no point to it.
Whatever I don't do, there's no point to it.
And there's no negative, there's no positive.
It's all just meaningless. It's a philosophy that's growing
in popularity, particularly among our younger generations.
It is a philosophy that within the context of our faith and our
hope that we have received from the countless generations that
have gone before us, we can easily reject that philosophy as
followers of Jesus because we know there is meaning, there is
purpose. We're not here by accident.
We're here on purpose. God intends us to be here.
There's not a person, whoever has or ever will live and
breathe on this earth who is not here on purpose.
By God, God knows everyone's name.
Everyone's name. Life is not meaningless.
History is his story, and it is going somewhere with meaning and
with purpose. But how do we pass that on?
How do we pass that on? One of the things we need to
remember as we're pondering this is that we owe a debt to the
people who have gone before us, those who were in the past that
went before that, passed that story on, so that we even know
the story, so that we know the faith, hope, and love in God.
Abraham and Sarah are among those folks.
They lived lives of faith, believing in God and obediently
following God, not perfectly. They made some mistakes.
They made some small mistakes. They made some really big
mistakes. They did some small sins.
They did some really big sins and yet they persisted in their
faith in God, following where he led, obeying him as they could.
And because of their faith, Isaac was born.
And because Isaac was born, the promise continued and eventually
Jesus was born. And eventually someone built
this wonderful building right here and Meigs County, Ohio, and
made these pews and, and, and we're sitting here worshiping
God today. And we owe a debt to every
person who has gone before us on this long, long journey because
we're not starting from the beginning.
We're starting a few thousand years in and we know things that
Abraham and Sarah didn't know. We know how their story went.
For one thing, they had to live it to find out how it went.
We get to read about it. They had to live it to see that
God does keep his promise and can keep his promise and will
always keep his promise. They had to live.
We can. We've read about it.
So we start from a point further down the road because of the
people that were traveling on this road before us and we owe
them a debt. We owe have a responsibility to
the future, future generations, those who will come after us.
We have a responsibility to them in the same way that Sarah and
Abraham had a responsibility to Isaac, that they knew the story
wasn't going to end with them because God had told them.
You're going to be the the parents of a great nation and
all the nations of the world will be blessed through you.
And when they died, when they died, they had one son from that
promise, one child from that promise, Isaac.
Abraham had other kids. But it was only through the
promise that God made to Sarah and Abraham together, one of
their descendants, a child of their union, that this promise
would come through. They have one kid, one kid.
And we're told, you know, Abraham lived to a ripe old age.
Sarah LED both of them. I mean 120 sevens old, 170 fives
really old unless you're an Abraham's family.
Are you aware? Are you aware?
I did not realize this till I really started digging into the
Noah story. Actually I'm researching for
this time, preaching and teaching through it that Shem is
still alive when Abraham dies. Noah's son Shem, Shem, Ham and
Japheth, Noah's son. Shem outlived Abraham by 25
years. He's hundreds of years old at
this point, I can't remember exactly how many.
I feel like it's somewhere around 450 when he died.
Abraham died young for his family.
He died young with one son and the only real estate they owned
was a graveyard big enough for two people.
That was the only land they owned.
They were strangers in a strange land.
Their entire lives of faith following God and they had one
son and yet they passed it on. They had a responsibility to the
future. And they, they, they, they left
Isaac a legacy, legacy of faith, a legacy of, of, of loving him,
a legacy of hope for what God would do in the future.
They, they understood that responsibility.
We have that same responsibility.
We have a responsibility to the generations that will come after
us. It is true that Jesus might come
back in the next 10 minutes before I finish this sermon.
Jesus might return and and everyone will say good, we got
to go home early and really home this time 'cause Jesus's ear.
Jesus might not come back for another 1000 years and and we
have a responsibility to do 2 things.
To live like Jesus might come back tomorrow and to live for
the sake of our children, grandchildren and great
grandchildren like they will have to live in this world too.
And what kind of world are we passing on to?
We have a responsibility to pass on a world that has a livable
environment, a livable political system, a livable culture, and a
livable faith. We have that responsibility to
those who are coming after us. But what do we really owe them?
You see? Because with these
responsibilities, just like the, the, the notion that that we
play a small part can have negative outgrowths from a good
seed, from the seed of truth, negative things can come.
And the devil can take anything and twist it.
Any truth the devil can twist and God, the devil can twist
these truths as well. This truth that we owe a debt to
past generations and we owe a responsibility to future
generations, the devil can twist that too.
When it comes to past generations, it's important that
we honor the past without trying to rigidly preserve it or repeat
it. I used to say this a lot.
I haven't. I, I, I've said it less and less
over the years because I think folks are like, I think folks,
we all get this right. The 1950s and 60s are not coming
back. We we get that right.
It's never going to be 1965 again.
This is tragic news for my dad who thinks there has been no
good music since 1965, but it's never coming back.
Those days of how life and culture and community and work
and church were then never coming back.
We're on a journey and that journey we only get to travel in
One Direction and it's not backwards.
It's not backwards and and one of the things, one of the tragic
things that can happen in a church and our desire to honor
the past is we end up getting rigid and try to preserve
everything and make it like it was then.
The worship wars of the 80s and 90s in churches in America is a
great example of that. I don't know if you all went
through the worship wars here. It was all sorts of argument and
fussing about what style of music are we going to have in
worship. And there were two general
camps, was one camp that said, let's bring in the guitars and
the drums and sing new songs. And I've been in a church where
people said, well, I don't know how we can call a church when
there's drums in there and, and we've been in a camp.
The other camp is we got the old hymns.
And those old hymns were good enough for our parents and
grandparents and great grandparents are good enough for
us. We've got to preserve this and
pass it on to future generations.
And people fought over that. We fight over crazy things in
the church sometimes color of the carpet and the style of the
music. But the folks that were saying
we've got the hymnals, we're going to stick with the old
hymns. They were good enough for the
people that you realize every song in the hymnal was once a
new song, right? Right.
Every single one of them was once a new song.
We have this heritage, John. Charles Wesley wrote so many
wonderful hymns and, and my goodness, and I heard this one
too. We've got to be singing the
hymns of Charles Wesley. That's our heritage.
That's our legacy. You know what else is our
legacy? Someone who wrote new hymns.
Charles Wesley wrote all these new hymns and people weren't
saying, well, maybe they were. I don't know if you ever got
any. Why can't we just sing the old
songs, Charles? Why do you got to write these
new songs? He could have said, well, just
wait, they'll be old songs eventually.
When we fight about those things, we're not honoring the
debt that we owed to the past. We're just calcifying that we're
taking a living thing and turning it into something rigid
and unchanging. And and there's there's one
unalterable truth about living things.
As they change, they change. There is no life without growth.
There is no growth without change, and it's not our job to
rigidly preserve the past, but to honor the faith that we've
received from the past, that that gift of hope, the legacy of
love, and then pass that on to future generations.
And that's talking about future generations.
We owe to future generations. I owe a lot to future
generations. But the negative thing that
comes actually, I move too soon on to that one.
The negative things that can come when we think about what we
owe future generations is, is we can and, and I'm, I'm sure you
see this in social media in the news these days.
We can get neurotically, even pathologically obsessed with
fear about what's happening in the future.
Oh my goodness, it's just a global warming and climate
change and, and all of the desk in order.
And what about, you know, the, the politics that that's going
on in the world and in our country today and, and, and who
gets elected and what awful things are going to happen?
And in the wars that are out there in the world, in this
artificial intelligence thing and in the machines going to
rise up and kill us all. And we get neurologically, even
pathologically fearful about the future.
And that's we've forgotten we get in, people are obsessing
about that. And we, we've forgotten that
just a few years ago, we were obsessed about genetic
manipulation and cloning humans and designer babies, which is
all still on the table out there too.
There's so much in the future that the world tells us we need
to be afraid of and what's going to happen?
And it's all going to, you know, it's all going to just just fall
apart and, and it's all going to be terrible.
It's not it's it's not bad things are going to happen in
the future like bad things happen in the past.
Good things are going to happen in the future like good things
have happened in the past. That the the reason why we don't
need to be neurologically, neurologically, neurotically, I
don't know where I got either one neurotically obsessed and
fearful about the future is we know God and we also know that
no matter how big a role any of us play, how big a role any of
we play a very small role in a very, very long and large story.
One day Elon Musk and and and Jeff Bezos and and Donald Trump
and and and Zoran Mandami, I can might get his name.
All those names are going to be forgotten too, and they're going
to play. They're going to have a much
bigger impact than you and I will on politics and culture and
economics and all of that sort of thing, though this story is
so big and it's God's story. It's God's story.
And that's where our legacy comes in.
And what we really owe to the future, we owe to the past that
we honor the faith they have passed on to us.
And we owe it to the future to pass on that faith to them, pass
on the faith to them, that trust in God.
Isaac's parents told him. Isaac, whatever else happens in
the world around you, we know you don't own an acre of land
beyond these tombs. You're a stranger in a strange
land. You don't have a government
that's supporting you. You don't have anyone out there
enforcing your legal rights. You don't have anyone out there
guarding and defending you and providing secure borders.
You don't have anyone doing any of that.
You're a stranger in a strange land.
But God, you can trust God. And God says that our family is
going to become a great nation, and through us all the nations
of the world will be blessed. And Isaac, we know God can and
will keep his promise because you're here.
Against all odds, you're here, Isaac, and you're alive.
Trust in God, trust in God, and we know that story and we know
that we don't know exactly what the future is going to be next
50 years. I hope I live long enough to see
some of the crazy changes that are going to happen.
It's going to be wild. At least I hope it's if after 50
years I'm still bored, then I'm going to be really disappointed
if I live another 50 years and and and and not much has
changed. But whatever change has
happened, God is still God. And God has promised that we are
not going to be the end of this world.
You and I, no matter how bad we mess up, we're not destroying
it. We can't.
God has already said what's going to happen.
His Jesus will come back. He will establish his Kingdom on
earth just as it is in heaven. And we know we know God can and
will do that because we know that God keeps his promises.
Because Abraham and Sarah taught us and Isaac taught us, and
David and Elijah and Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Jesus
and Peter and James and John and Paul and Mary and and all of
these folks have left us a legacy of faith.
And that's what we can leave to our children.
Oops. We owe the future a legacy of
hope. Like I see so many voices
screaming gloom and doom and destruction in the future and
trying to make people afraid because scared people are easy
to manipulate and easy to control and scared people give
money to people that have power and wealth and weapons and all
of these kinds of things. And, and people, the world wants
our children to be afraid and to feel like the, the future is
hopeless without so and so or such and such.
We can pass on a legacy of hope. No matter what happens, your
hope is in God. No matter who's in the White
House, our hope is in Jesus Christ.
No matter who gets elected to this position or that position,
no matter who the wealthiest person in the world is, no
matter what the average global temperature is, we have this
hope in our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ that again, He will
come. He will establish His Kingdom on
this earth just like it is in heaven.
And one day, one day, we know there's tons of suffering, We
know there's tons of pain, there's tons of Arctic.
One day all of that's going to be wiped away.
Every tear will be dried. All injustice will be undone.
People won't go to bed hungry. They won't go to bed cold.
They won't go to bed afraid. They won't live their lives
degraded and dehumanized by people or systems or
institutions. They will have the lowest of
people on. The king in the Kingdom of God
will be lifted up and given greater honor than the wealthy
and the powerful today. That is our hope.
That is our hope, and that's the hope that we can pass on to our
children. And then finally, love, a legacy
of love. Paul said it.
Three things will endure. Faith, hope, and love.
And the greatest of these is love, to pass on a legacy of
love. Abraham and Sarah loved their
son Isaac, and they passed that love on to him.
And it was imperfect and he, Isaac, loved imperfectly too.
None of these folks were perfect people.
This legacy that God loves, God does not stand and God is not.
God is not eager to destroy. See how bad Sodom and Gomorrah
had to get before God was willing to destroy it.
There was no one left there that loved, but they passed on.
Legacy of love and we passed that on as well.
Kindness and gentleness. Not keeping records of wrongs,
but loving patiently and enduringly whatever we face.
We show that to our kids. We show that to the community so
that they can receive that legacy into the future.
Faith, hope and love. I want to play a song.
I'm going to utter a sentence that 20 years ago would have
been absolutely meaningless to me.
Some of the best Christian music you can find anywhere out there
today is written by Jelly Roll. That some people know what that
means. Others of you were going on that
doesn't make any sense to me now.
I don't know whether I don't know what I'm assuming Jelly
Roll is not the name his mom gave him when he was born.
I don't know what his, his mom given name is.
I don't know whether he goes by Jelly or Mr. Roll when you're
talking to him privately, but I know he's been through some
stuff and he's written some beautiful music of faith and,
and I, I'm guessing he wrote this song after the birth of it,
one of his children. I don't know.
I'm assuming that's when he wrote this just from the context
of it. But he takes what I've been
trying to say for the past 2025 minutes here and he says it's so
elegantly in just two short minutes.
I'm going to play this song. It's a made a lyric video of it.
Not for us to sing along, but for us to listen and be able to
see or the see the lyrics as we hear them.
Donna, can you give us a little more volume back or or adjusted?
It might be too louder. You might need to make it louder
or quieter. Whatever you think is best.
That's fine. There's the the it's it's we
don't need dim lights for this one.
I don't think so. But let's listen to this song
and think about the legacy that God is calling us to leave to
those who follow after us. Your blood is my blood.
Him poison runs deep. Knowing your minds gets the hell
out of me because hurt is a sickness and trauma is true.
I'd rather die than to pass it to you because that's my cross
to carry. My's cross to heal, my pain to
bury, not yours to feel. I pray every day I can love you
enough so my cross to carry won't be yours to pick up.
I hope to God you don't get my addictions, don't deal with my
demons, make my decisions. I hope the apple falls far from
the tree and the sins of the Father stop right here with me
'cause that's my cross to carry. My cross to heal my pain to
bury, not yours to feel. I pray every day I can love you
enough so my cross to carry won't be yours to pick up, won't
be yours to pass down. And when you make mistakes on
your own, I hope that you know you'll never go through it
alone. That's my cross to carry, my
scars to heal, my pain to bury, and not yours to feel every day
I can love you enough. So my cross The Cave won't be
yours to pick up, won't be yours to pick up, won't be yours to
pick up. You know, in this nation we live
in, we all get to vote, and who we vote for matters.
And it's important we get one vote each one of us.
We have a very small voice and a very large nation.
We have a very small place and a very large story.
And who we vote for while we met, while it matters, let's
face it, it doesn't matter a lot.
But what does matter is whether we deal with our stuff.
We deal with our brokenness. We deal with our sin so that in
faith and with hope, we can pass on love to our children and our
grandchildren and the people around us in schools and in
workplaces and in neighborhoods and wherever we go.
That we deal with our stuff, the sin and the brokenness and the
addiction and the pain in our life.
So that so that when we're acting in the lives of others,
we're not acting out of our brokenness, but we're acting out
of the faith and the hope and love that we have received from
previous generations so we can pass that on to future.
How will someone in this community, no matter how much we
speak about a God who is faithful, how will anyone be
able to trust in the faithfulness of God if they
don't see us living faithfully? How will anyone have hope for
the future when so many voices shout fear, fear, fear, fear,
fear? How can anyone have hope for the
future if we're not living in that joyful hope that we know
Jesus is going to come one day and establish his Kingdom here?
And how can anyone know that they're loved if we don't love
them? If we don't lay aside our fear
and lay aside our worry and lay aside our anxiety and simply
reach out and love the people that are around us?
So we don't pass on our brokenness.
And this is aspirational. This is aspirational because
we're always with Abraham and Sarah passed on brokenness.
Isaac passed on. We, we, we'll never going to get
this perfect this side of the return of Jesus.
But can we deal with as much as what we can so that our kids are
starting standing on our shoulders rather than us
standing on theirs? You know what I'm saying?
That they're starting further down the road than we started.
Whether that's economically further down the road is, is a
nice thing, but that's not the key thing.
The key thing is the faith, the hope and the love as we launch
them into the future. When we launch them from a point
of faith, hope and love, That's the way we honor the past is by
passing it on to the future. To those who don't know yet from
their own experience that they can trust God, that God will be
faithful, that there is hope and there is love in this world.
That's what we owe the past. That's what we owe the future in
Jesus name, Amen. Amen.