The unexpected inheritance you're leaving right now
When my boys were small, I would sit on the bed with them and talk with a hand puppet named Mousy.
To this day, I’m not actually sure what Mousy is—maybe a mouse, maybe a Chihuahua? I still have him in storage somewhere.
But back in the day, my boys would lie in bed and listen as the puppet explained things and talked about their day and what had happened. Sometimes I read books to the boys, and sometimes Mousy read the books and would have little reactions to different parts.
As we all know, puppets have a supernatural power to get through a child’s defenses.
Flash forward several years. My boys are now grown and married, and earlier this week I met my first grandchild, for the first time. His name is Theo and he’s perfect.
A few days before this meeting, I dreamed I was talking to Theo with Mousy, the same way I used to talk with his dad. Baby Theo was watching the puppet and learning whatever it was I was trying to teach him.
This dream stirred up my thoughts about the way inheritance works and what Dawna and I are leaving for our future generations.
Here’s an idea I want to share with you.
More Than Money
A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,
And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous. (Prov. 13:22 NASB)
As most of us do, I first approached the subject of inheritance from the perspective of finances. It’s a money topic, right?
But over the years, I’ve realized that inheritance isn’t just a financial gift we leave one day—it is something we’re leaving right now.
Recently a woman came up to me at church and said, “Hey, Steve. How are you?”
I didn’t know her, and she explained, “I saw you and Dawna with two of your friends at the restaurant last week, and I was watching how you guys interacted.”
Oh my word! I thought. I hope what was coming out of my life when I didn’t think about it was in fact a virtue of Jesus. A mind-of-Christ example.
In every situation, you and I are giving away something of ourselves whether we mean to or not. We’re constantly transmitting the “treasure” or truths of our hearts.
The issue is, not everything we treasure is actually worth treasuring. That’s a unique idea within the Prosperous Soul message—sometimes we treasure things that aren’t intellectually good, yet we’ve found them to be helpful so we continue to rely on them.
For instance, perhaps we learned in our younger days that intimidation can be helpful when it comes to managing people. Or we learned we can escape or postpone our problems by overworking and giving ourselves to busyness. Maybe we learned we can get what we want by manipulating others through our intensity.
Intimidation and manipulation are hard, unattractive words. Yet they can sneak in to become “treasures” we hold because they seem to help us; therefore we value them.
Because of the way God designed humanity, we can’t avoid leaving an inheritance. But we want to pass on to our children only what is absolutely true and trustworthy—good things they can build on for the rest of their lives.
Leaving a Legacy for Future Generations
The good news is that what we value and treasure isn’t outside of our control. We get to choose what goes in the vault.
So if something comes out that doesn’t look like Jesus, we don’t have to leave that thing in there to fester. We can do something about it.
Theo is an important milestone in the inheritance of Dawna and Stephen De Silva. I don’t want my grandson and whoever comes after him to try to build a life with building blocks that are not made from the gold of our Lord Jesus.
Don’t settle for bad ideas and those non-Jesus beliefs and treasures. Go to God for help and begin to renew your mind according to His Word. He can remove the building blocks that aren’t actually helping you and replace them with the truth of the gospel of peace.
It is time for us to be people who grow boldly and powerfully in Christ for the sake of our children’s children.