Legacy

A couple weeks back we focused on legacy. We looked at how David planned to leave his legacy and how important this is in God’s plan. To listen again to the talk click here and a full transcript is below. Here are this week’s questions….

1. Ralph Sockman, a pastor in New York in the 50s put it this way, “What makes greatness is starting something that lives after you.” In your mind, what does legacy mean to you?

2. What are some barriers to building legacy? How should we guard against only being focused on the here and now and not what God is doing in the long term?

3. Where do you want to sow a spiritual legacy?

4. What legacy do you see the GUV leaving?

5. How can we best achieve that legacy? What practical steps can we take today to move towards building a spiritual legacy?

6. How does it feel to know you are God’s legacy?

—————————————————————————————

20th November 2011

David: Legacy

This morning is the last in the series on David. I hope that you have found this series helpful, I hope you have found challenge and insight, and I hope that through your own study and meditation that God has spoken to you in some way about your life.

This morning we will be talking about legacy.

The 28th President of the United States was a man called Woodrow Wilson and he once said this, “You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.”

Ralph Sockman, a pastor in New York in the 50s put it this way, “What makes greatness is starting something that lives after you.”

The first line of The Purpose Driven Life is “It’s not about you”. But do we really get that?

Do we understand, believe, and act in a way that is more about what we are building into others, than what we are building in ourselves?

This morning, as you came to church and as you have chatted with people, have you talked more about your own opinion, your won agenda, your own stories, your own life, or have you asked about them? Have you come with an attitude to give to others this morning? To encourage those sitting around you? To build them up? Or are you here to bless yourself?

There is nothing wrong with receiving blessing.

However a combination of society and modern church culture has meant that our worship is measured by how much we get out of it. Not by what we give. Our experience of church has become intrinsically linked to a personal encounter, rather than a communal movement.

As I have said regularly, we are here not to consume church, but to commune with church.

To journey together.

To build one another up.

So, this is my first point this morning. In order to build a legacy, we must first take our eyes off ourselves and onto others.

I believe that it is a leader’s role to put themselves out of a job. To build up and resource those around them and to enable and release them to lead. We should be a church of leaders. Not necessarily leading the church, but leading in the areas of our lives that God has called us to. Our families, our work teams, our Union Group, our community.

David understood the value of legacy.

He had been chosen by God to become only the second king in the history of Israel.

He had been given the tools and life experience as a shepherd boy to be equipped for the role to lead a nation.

God saw potential. David delivered.

However, it would have all been a waste of time, if that legacy ended when David died. Yes, there might have been a few stories to tell and at least Israel had regained some national pride, but if all that were to finish once David had passed on, it would have been meaningless.

David needed to build on the legacy passed to him. He needed to think strategically. He needed to invest in the next generation. He needed discernment from God as to who had the potential.

Let’s read 1 Kings 1:32-37.

David had a plan. He knew who the successor should be. And the prayer from Benaiah was that, not only would Solomon be successful, but that he would be more successful than even David had been.

If David had not valued legacy, he would have probably felt a little insecure about a prayer for his successor to be even more successful. He would have wanted his legacy to be more about how people remembered him, than what the future leadership would look like.

But here is is praying along, saying “Amen” to the request that the reign of Solomon is better, bigger, stronger, than his own.

This is why we feel it is so important that we invest time and money into our kids and young people.

This is why we do not view the work we do with our young people as glorified child care, manned by a team of parents. This is not the responsibility of a select group, this is the responsibility of us all collectively.

This is why we want to employ a youth worker who will think strategically about how we build solid foundations.

If we were only to focus on how big or how fun or how friendly this church could be in our lifetime, we would be short sighted.

If we focus on how we can build into the lives of our kids and young people, we can release those kids to have impact in business, in politics, in families, in communities, in churches. We can equip them to be leaders, preachers, social workers, and parents, and we can teach them the value of building legacy for the generation that follows them.

Where are your motivations?

You could think anywhere on the spectrum from wanting to become a big shot and living for the fame and recognition, to living completely in your own world detached and uninterested in anyone else. But both are misguided.

Both are focused on the self. Neither are strategic. Neither build legacy.

So, we need to shift our eyes from ourselves to others.

But, we also need to equip, advise, and encourage those who we are building up.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here, I am not just talking about one generation passing the baton onto the next.

I am talking about the community of Christ actively seeking to be a part of the process of building those around them. Helping others find their freedom in Christ, their identity in Christ, and their skills and gifting.

Reading from 1 Kings 2: 1 – 4.

When the time drew near for David to die, he gave a charge to Solomon his son. I am about to go the way of all the earth, he said. So be strong, show yourself a man, and observe what the LORD your God requires: Walk in his ways, and keep his decrees and commands, his laws and requirements, as written in the Law of Moses, so that you may prosper in all you do and wherever you go, and that the LORD may keep his promise to me: ‘If your descendants watch how they live, and if they walk faithfully before me with all their heart and soul, you will never fail to have a man on the throne of Israel.’

David was equipping Solomon. In this instance he was equipping him through words of encouragement, but I expect that through his life, David would have also equipped him through his example, through practical training, and through encouragement to practice.

As a church, we are committed to equipping people to develop and hone their skills, their understanding, and their passions, in order for them to build up others.

We don’t want to be a skin deep church. We want to be capable at what we do, but there is no point keeping that capability, understanding, and passion to ourselves, we must share it with others.

Chuck Palahniuk who wrote the award winning novel, Fight Club said this, “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”

As a church, where can we be equipping others in our community?

With GUV Love we have talked about using the experience some people might have of DIY, Accounting, Legal Advice, Debt Counselling, within the church.

What happens when we start applying that within the community?

When people who were bound by debt are relieved of that burden, their life direction and ultimately their legacy changes.

When people are living without hope, are feeling suicidal, and alone, when these people find hope and feel loved, their perspective alters and their legacy changes.

When people who are aimless, goalless, and helpless find purpose, their legacy is given purpose.

Hope For Justice want to use the experience they have to train others to spot the signs of trafficking in their local area. The legacy they want to build is the end of human trafficking, but they can only achieve that through training and equipping others in that journey.

So, as a leadership we will be looking to build and train, but don’t let this be a practice confined to us. Let us all be looking to build and equip one another. To encourage one another.

In Hebrews 3:13, it reads “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.”

So, let us focus on others, let us build into and equip and encourage those around us, but ultimately the reason we should value and priorities legacy, is because we serve a God who values and prioritizes legacy.

Our God is the ultimate strategist.

He is the Alpha and the Omega. The Beginning and The End.

It is an incredible reality that we are even a part of his legacy.

What is God’s legacy?

Ephesians 1:18 says this, “ I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.”

We are God’s legacy. We are his rich inheritance.

Everything in the world is God’s. Everything. But He has chosen us to be His inheritance, His legacy.

He sent his Son Jesus to build his legacy. To save his legacy. To see his legacy become holy.

Jesus was supremely focused on legacy.

You would expect, that if anyone had the right to live their life on this earth and focus mostly on building themselves up, it would be the Son of God. The Word Incarnate.

But Jesus spent his whole life, not only leaving a legacy of healing, salvation, and forgiveness to the people he encountered during his ministry, but also equipping, training, and encouraging the disciples to continue his legacyand go out into the world and make disciples of all men.

God could have done it himself.

But God wanted to work through, initially the disciples and then all humankind to bring his Kingdom to earth. Jesus didn’t just die, come back to life, and before he ascended to Heaven, quickly throw in a line about, “Oh by the way, you should go a do this across the world now, see ya!”

He methodically, carefully, and strategically built into the lives of those around him. He talked from his experience. He spoke words of wisdom. He built strong foundations. He prepared them well for what they were then being called to do.

Going back to David, this is the last couple of verses where he features, “Then David rested with his fathers and was buried in the City of David. He had reigned for forty years over Israel— seven years in Hebron and thirty-three in Jerusalem. So Solomon sat on the throne of his father David, and his rule was firmly established.”

In the New Living Translation, it reads that Solomon was “firmly established on the throne”.

I love that picture.

David’s conscious decision to build legacy, meant that by the time he died, Solomon was more than prepared to not only take over his reign, but succeed.

Jesus prepared the disciples so that when he left them, the early church was in good hands. In the hands of those who we fully equipped, although they didn’t necessarily always realize it.

We need to be thinking bigger than the bubble in which we can often live our lives. I understand there are struggles. I understand that there is a time for receiving and being blessed. I understand that not everyone is a confident leader.

But I also understand that when Jesus was asked which was the most important of the commandments, he said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

We are not commanded to love ourselves. We are commanded to love others as ourselves.

I know that many people struggle with self worth. But even those who don’t think much of themselves, spend a lot of time thinking about themselves, even if it is in a negative sense.

We are called to love others or prioritise others or spend time investing into others, just as we do to ourselves. We need to alter our perspective. Allow our priorities to be shaped by what God values.

For some of you this will be a risk. For some of you it may just seem unimportant.

However, I can guarantee you that if we commit this morning to focusing more on others and what our legacy might be (even if we are only a teenager), then we will experience a new fulness to life, a new purpose to life, and a sense of what the Kingdom of God might look like.

I want to finish with a quote from the late Steve Jobs, a man who’s legacy in the world of entertainment, music, communications, and business will be felt for a very long time to come.

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me”