Forerunners

I was reading about how Rachael asked Jacob to sleep with her servant in a bid to “raise a family through her”, since she herself couldn’t conceive. Reading that gave me a flash back to Sarah’s time too, when Sarah asked Abraham to sleep with her own servant so she could raise a family through her.

Something in me made me think that Rachael might have been more encouraged and comfortable to do it because she has heard that Sarah in the generation before her had done it.

Even though slaves of that time belonged to their masters, it was Sarah who started the culture of expanding the ownership to include sexual relations with the masters in hope of raising a family.

I pondered so deeply on this handed down culture from Sarah’s time to Rachael’s time and it became apparent to me that generations to come are actually waiting to hear and be impacted by how we walked with God in our own generation. They will be looking to know how they should walk with God in their own time.

It was one of the reasons God chose Abraham specifically to bring Israel through. The bible says that God knew that Abraham will “lead his children and descendants in the way of the Lord”.

We aren’t only responsible for our time and generation. We are equally responsible for the quality of the view that the next generation has about God. This is why we pray for preservation of mantles, this is why we continue to teach and emphasise on holiness and righteous living, this is why we insist on seeing and witnessing the miraculous in our time too. So that beyond Gods revelation of Himself to the coming generations, they will also have a practical blueprint from generations past and how we walked with God.

We’re here and walking the paths we walk for reasons greater than ourselves. There’s a whole generation in wait to hear of our own encounters and experiences of God.

We cannot present a weak or frail God to them, we must present the same powerful God we received from the generations that came before us.

It doesn’t mean we walk with God only in a bid to have something to hand down, it means we realise the importance of the walk we have with Him, because we play a huge role in how they see and view God based on how we’ve walked with Him.

This is why God commissioned Adam and Eve to raise “godly seed”. If God was going to put himself in every generation in an automatic way, there won’t be need for the family unit where parents are encouraged to “train up a child in the way he should go…”.

After seeing how a mistake from Sarah became a norm in the culture of the traditions after her, I began to pray for our generation of Christians, that we will walk our walk well with God and present the fullness of God to the next generation.

That we will “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself against the knowledge of God… and we will make them obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), because if we do not, in ignorance, the coming generation will take it as a norm and live it out when it was never Gods intention or desire.

We’re presenting God to the next generation. We should daily be thinking of what exactly were presenting based on how we’re living, the things we’re endorsing and the battles we’re fighting.

Our living now is an introduction to the generation after us, how are we introducing God to them?