Leave a Legacy

Your daily dose of depressing: How much do you know about your great grandparents? How about your great-great grandparents? Or your great-great-great grandparents? Unless someone from your family tree has made its way into the history books somehow, chances are that you know next to nothing about the previous generations of your family, especially by the time you reach your great-great-great grandparents. Do you even know their names? I sure don’t…

So what? Well, unless you become famous, the same is going to be true for you in a couple generations down the road. No one is going to remember who you are, what you did, or why your life mattered. On earth, all that will be left proving your existence is a slab of rock with your name on it in a cemetery somewhere. Now, humor me for a moment, and imagine what else will be written on you gravestone. What is it that you want to be remembered for? But more importantly, what do those words represent?

They represent your legacy: Something that you will hand down that will impact generations to come, even though they’ll never know your name.

With that said, just because you leave behind a legacy doesn’t mean it will be a good legacy. You must make up your mind as to what kind of legacy you will form because it is something that you are building everyday of your life, whether you are aware of it or not.

So what kind of legacy should we build? The legacy of Christ. We must preserve the legacy he established while on earth. Just ask yourself, “Are people more like Christ because of me or in spite of me?” That is a question we should ask ourselves every day.

Leaving Christ’s legacy ultimately comes down to making disciples (followers/students) of others by teaching them to follow Christ (Matt. 28:19). If we invest in others in this way, we will impact the future. This is something you should be doing all the time and in all places. But before you can make disciples, you first must be a disciple. This means dying to yourself on a daily basis, spending time in God’s Word, having love for others, and abiding in Christ at all times. When it comes to making disciples, we should emulate Christ. How did he do it? He talked with people, he walked with them (had relationships), he challenged and corrected them (sharpened them), and most importantly, he loved them.

So, what does this mean for us? Pretend that you’re a bucket. Once your bucket has been filled and begins to overflow, find other buckets to pour into. Find someone in your town, church, school etc, ideally of the same gender (missionary dating/flirt to convert NOT ok :P) that you can disciple and empower with the wisdom and knowledge flowing out of your bucket. Discipleship is a relationship, a very powerful one at that. Ultimately, the buckets you pour into will begin to overflow and find other buckets to pour into, thus leading to a exponential increase of buckets being filled. That is how you build a legacy. Or, at least one worth passing along.

So really,since you’re a bucket, don’t waste your water.