What Do We Really Owe Past & Future Generations? (Rock Springs UMC)

Our Scripture reading today Genesis chapter 23 verses one

Genesis 23 · chapter mention

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.