Our Family Inheritance

Transcript

Alright thank you very much, and hello again radio friends. How in the world are you? Doing Alright today? Oh, I trust so, bless your heart. Trust everything’s going Alright at your house. If perhaps you struck a snag somewhere and things aren’t going the way you wish, remember that Jesus is Lord, Lord of all, even the circumstances that surround you and if you’re His child you to look up and say, “Lord see me through this one”. The key word as I’ve told you so often is through, “When thou passest through the waters, they shall not overflow thee”. “Ye though I walk through the valley I will fear no evil”. God brings you through and He’ll do that for you today dear one, yes He will.

Come with me to Colossians 1 and we are looking at verse 12- now we’ve gotten to verse 12, Colossians 1:12. This is part of Paul’s prayer, he says, I’m praying for you people at Colossae, that you might be filled with the knowledge of God’s will which involves wisdom and spiritual understanding, that your lifestyle might be worthy of the Lord whom you serve, pleasing Him in everything, being fruitful in every good work, and in the process getting to know God better”, that’s verse 10.

Then he said, “I’m praying that you might be strengthened with the power that never burns out”, and that just chews up all the opposition, two kinds of power mentioned there. “Unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness”. The three results of God’s power are patience, big heartedness, and joy, and then the next thing that he says is, “Giving thanks unto the Father”. Strengthened unto patience, long-suffering, joy and thankfulness, giving thanks unto the Father, that’s about as far as we’ve gotten the last time we got together, isn’t it?

Now, what are you thankful for? “Giving thanks unto the Father who has made us worthy to be partakers of the inheritance of the Saints in light and has delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us on to the Kingdom of His dear Son in whom”, that is in the Lord Jesus, “we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins”. Thanks to God.

He’s made you worthy to be a partaker of God’s wonderful inheritance. We’ll talk about that a little later on. Thanks to the Father who delivered you from the power of Satan and thanks to the Father who has translated us into the Kingdom His dear Son and then given you redemption through His shed blood.

Now, let’s think about that a little bit, shall we? Giving thanks unto the Father. Stop here long enough to realize that most people don’t bother thanking God for anything.

Nikita Khrushchev is supposed to have said one day as he stood in an Iowa cornfield, “I am an atheist, thank god”. The concept of a deity is rooted very deep in the human mind and heart. I’ve traveled all over the world and I’ve never been in a place yet but that people knew what you meant when you talked about the living God, the God who’s alive and is bigger than all the other idols and fetishes and images and sacred objects that people worship, and still the key sin of the unsaved heart is unthankfulness.

The quarrel God has against the heathen is not that they’re heathen, but that they wouldn’t giving Him His place as God. You read there then in Romans One, “Because that when they knew God they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful but became vain in their imaginations their foolish heart was darkened”, and so on. Neither were thankful, no recognition of the Heavenly Father. Now, thanksgiving, thankfulness, gratitude is something that needs to be learned.

Let me do a little detour here for parents and grandparents. Teach your child to be thankful. Teach the skill of thankfulness to your child. There so many nowadays it seems to me who just grab what they want to go their own way and never bother saying thank you. I’m grateful for a number of things that my father and my sister taught me in the little boy years, when as a motherless boy I was growing up. One of those things that they taught me was to say thank you and to write a thank you note when someone gave you a present.

To be grateful, actually beyond the saying, the idea of gratefulness is something that you can teach your little children, your sons and daughters, and your grandchildren as they’re growing up around you. The way that’s taught of course is not simply by lecturing, but by precept and example. You yourself can model this matter of thoughtfulness in gratitude, thoughtfulness in being grateful. If you’re in management you’ll find that this is a great motivator.

There’s a small book that gives a short idea about management and one of them is this: try to catch people doing something good and praise them for it. Instead, as a manager of catching a person making mistaken and chewing them out for it, find people doing something right, find them doing a good job on some assignment and thank them for it. You’d be surprised at what it does for you and for them and for the relationship you sustain. You know, somebody knocks himself out to do a good job on something and you simply remark, “I know you put a lot of work in that, buddy and I appreciate it. Thank you”. Hey, that’ll make the day for that person. Can you just remember this? You can model the idea of a grateful heart and gratitude in word and deed, if you will, if you just look for occasions where you can recognize that people tried hard and that they can be praised or thanked for it.

Now, at home this means so much. Being thankful at home. How long’s it been since you told your wife or children, since you told mother, that you appreciated that she keeps the house shining and that, or, how long has it been since you told her, “That was a wonderful meal and I know you worked hard to do all that”.

See, many people just never, never do that.

A lot of us live that way, don’t we? Yea sure. Make the effort to recognize that somebody else has worked hard to do something right and thank him or her for it. And of course you can teach the child to write a thank you note when someone gives a present or when you’re visiting somewhere and you have been entertained and you go home again, you write a thank you note. Oh incidentally, it pays to put a little thought and originality into your gratitude. Don’t just say, “Well thanks a lot”, you know and that’s it.

Oh, incidentally here’s one for a chuckle. I heard about this little boy who wrote a thank you note to his aunt after having received a Christmas present; he said, “Dear Auntie, I want to thank you for the Christmas present you sent me. It was almost as good as the one I really wanted. Lovingly yours”.

Well, put a little thought into this matter of gratitude, giving thanks. Thank your Heavenly Father for His kindness day after day. He keeps your heart beating, He keeps your temperature of 98.6 approximately. He keeps the atmosphere properly balanced in the combination of nitrogen and oxygen, every other combination of nitrogen and oxygen about which I know of course I’m not a chemist I could be mistaken, but I think that almost every other combination of oxygen and nitrogen is poison except when you breathe. Isn’t that of God to give you the right one?

Yes, he keeps you going. He keeps the world going. He keeps your own life ordered. He protects you in a million ways. Thank your Father and learn the secret of thankfulness with people. Look for things that you can say thank you for. Would you do that beloved?

Today, look for things concerning which you can say thank you, sincerely and enthusiastically and, let’s face, it with a little bit of innovation so it isn’t routine, okay? Well, that was kind of a detour, but maybe it’s helpful to somebody.

“Giving thanks to the Father who has made us worthy to be partakers of the inheritance”. Now, how do you become worthy to be an inheritor? Well, you become worthy to be an inheritor by being a member of the decedent’s family, and so Peter says in developing that same thought, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who hath according to His abundant mercy, has begotten us again”, there’s the concept of being born from above, born-again, “has begotten us again”, born-again, “unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”.

The reason we have hope for the future. But you get closer and closer to that time- oh the fact that Jesus is alive from the dead and He said, “Because I live ye shall live also”. In a million years from now, you and I can be walking down the streets of Glory, we’ll know each other, we will have that the eternal existence which is the essence of God’s blessed life, and we’ve been born into that heavenly family.

He said, “To an inheritance”, we’ve been, been born from above to an inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in Heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, looking for that good, wonderful, last day.

Now, what’s involved here are the two or three concepts and we’ll just wrap them up as time is running out on us here. First, you don’t have an inheritance unless there is someone who makes the will for you. The writer to the Hebrews says, “There’s no inheritance unless there is the death of the testator”, the one who made the will. Jesus died in order that we might inherit this wonderful inheritance, and the second thing is, you don’t become a member of God’s family unless by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ you are born again into that family. Today, you may be as religious as you wish, but if you’ve never known Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and have never really entered in them to the family of God, you don’t have that inheritance. So this whole idea being worthy to partake of the inheritance depends, doesn’t it, on having been born again by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, if I’m speaking to someone who has never opened your heart to Christ, do it today by faith say, “Lord Jesus come into my heart. Make me a child of God”. He will, I promise you.

Dear Father today, may we live the way members of that heavenly family ought to live, in the light of our inheritance, in Jesus’ name, Amen. Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!