I spend a lot of time worrying about what my daughter will inherit. She is an only child, and I want to make sure that when I and her father are gone, she will be financially secure and will never want for anything.\u00a0 It is what most parents want for their children.<\/p>\n
However, lately I\u2019ve been thinking that my view of inheritance is too narrow. When I see young people struggling today, it isn\u2019t because they lack material things.\u00a0 They struggle because they haven\u2019t inherited the one thing that really matters \u2013 faith.\u00a0 Faith that there is a God.\u00a0 Faith that He loves them.\u00a0 Faith that is so strong that they want their lives to be in service to Him.<\/p>\n
The greatest gift my parents gave me was to take me to church when I was little. That simple weekly act snowballed in my life.\u00a0 As a teenager, when I no longer was required to go to church by my parents, I kept going to our town\u2019s United Methodist Church anyway.\u00a0 I walked to church in all kinds of weather by myself on Sunday mornings.\u00a0 I also was involved in the youth group on Sunday evenings.\u00a0 And somewhere along the way, I came to realize that God was with me.\u00a0 In my loneliest moments, I knew that I was not alone.\u00a0 And over the years, serving Him increasingly has become the focus of my life.<\/p>\n
When I see young people struggling, I know it is because they haven\u2019t been given that gift of faith. As a result, they don\u2019t live within their means.\u00a0 Instead, they spend their money on things they can\u2019t afford in an effort to satisfy a spiritual emptiness that cannot be fulfilled by material items.\u00a0 They drink too much alcohol or use drugs because they feel sad or alone and don\u2019t know that God is there for them.\u00a0 They don\u2019t work hard, and they fail to hold themselves to a high standard of behavior because their lives are about them \u2013 not about serving God.<\/p>\n
For those of us who know the blessing of having a faith in God, we so desperately want our children to have that same blessing. The problem is that you can\u2019t hit young people over the head with faith.\u00a0 You can\u2019t force them to believe in God.\u00a0 So there are only two things you can do.\u00a0 First, can you expose them to the concept of God.\u00a0 You can take them to religious services, give them books to read about faith and send them for religious instruction.\u00a0 Second, you<\/em> can live a faith-based life.\u00a0 You can set an example of what it means to live a life in service to God.\u00a0 And then hopefully somewhere along the line, they will come to know that God is there for them.\u00a0 And more importantly, they will decide on their own that a life in service to Him is far better than any life they could dream up on their own.<\/p>\n Our responsibility to pass along the inheritance of faith to young people doesn\u2019t merely extend to our own children. It extends to all children with whom we come in contact.\u00a0 Interestingly, I was not the person who started my daughter on her faith journey.\u00a0 It was her grandmother.\u00a0 Out of the blue, her grandmother gave her a book called, \u201cJesus Calling\u201d by Sarah Young.\u00a0 You may have heard of it.\u00a0 My daughter was given the \u201ckids\u201d version, and for whatever reason, the book was very effective.\u00a0 For two years, my daughter read that book every night before she went to sleep.\u00a0 She eventually moved on to other Christian inspiration books, but that is the one that got her started.\u00a0 God works in mysterious and unpredictable ways.<\/p>\n This week, consider the inheritance that you are leaving\u00a0for the children in your life. Are you guiding them toward a faith in God that will sustain them through hard times?\u00a0 Are you setting an example of the benefits of living a life that is in service to God?\u00a0 We can leave our children a multitude of things when we die, but the greatest inheritance we can give them is a faith that God loves them and that serving Him truly is the way to a happy life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I spend a lot of time worrying about what my daughter will inherit. She is an only child, and I want to make sure that when I and her father are gone, she will be financially secure and will never want for anything.\u00a0 It is what most parents want for their children. However, lately I\u2019ve…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":593,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n