I bring back to mind your sincere faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and I am convinced, in you as well.(1Timothy 1:5)
A legacy is a birthright or inheritance bequeathed upon an individual by virtue of family placement. It is something you get by default; no one asks your opinion before handing over a legacy. Much greater than any legacy we come across in scriptures is this legacy of faith handed down from Timothy’s grandmother-Lois to his mum and then him. A fact worthy of note is that Paul was so sure that the sincere faith which he’d noticed in Timothy’s grandma lived in him as well.
We all ought to pay particular attention to the kind of legacy we hand down to our children. It’s not all about the property, stocks and material resources we leave behind. Some say the best legacy you can give to a child is education; although education is good and indeed desirable, it is not the best legacy. A greater legacy is found in this verse of scripture- ‘sincere faith’.
Remember, you cannot give what you do not actually possess, so if you want to breed a lineage of faith, you have to work on your faith! Sounds strange right? Working on faith? “I thought works were supposed to be produced by faith and not the other way round”, you say.
Well, working on faith here simply means making up your mind to trust God better than you’ve ever done before. You would have to consciously walk by faith and not by what you see around you. Let your children see that you trust in God by your actions. Let God be a part of your home talk; you can gist about Him and how He demonstrated His might in your day by dinner time so the legacy is passed on to the whole family. For those who have not started their own family yet, the time to build a legacy for your unborn children is now- develop yourself in your faith-walk and ‘see’ yourself, your spouse and the children the Lord would give you living a life of faith and trust in God.
The Israelites referred to God as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because Isaac picked up the knowledge of Jehovah from His father Abraham and passed it on to his own son Jacob. Isaac trusted God would keep his son Jacob in a strange land because he’d seen how his father … – Abraham’s trust and obedience had yielded a replacement sacrifice in his own stead when he was but a boy. Demonstrations of faith are easier to replicate when one has seen it displayed; therefore, to produce faith filled offspring, parents and would-be-parents need to walk by faith!
– Dr. Ifelayo Ojo
