Daily Lift: Teach Your Children!
Titus 3:8
8 This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those who have believed in God should be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable to men.
I just finished reading T. D. Jakes’s “Reposition Yourself.” At the end of the book, he describes the quilt of our lives……not even beautiful and neat, but with odd shapes, loose threads, and uneven seams. He states that in those imperfect places is our history. The messy childhood, the hard relationships, the lost jobs, the missed opportunities, but through it all, those events and people made us who we are today, and we have to embrace ALL of our lives, good or bad. He also adds that it is important that if you get to your goals and are successful, you need to incorporate things from your past, not as a mausoleum, but to remind you of where you came from, to keep you humble.
As we build our futures, it is imperative that we keep in mind that we are building legacies for our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It is also equally important to teach future generations how to maintain all we have done by going ahead of them. If we don’t teach them to work their way up the ladder, we are handing them something of little value to them, which discourages them from maintaining it. It is our duty to impart the same values of hard work and appreciation for goals achieved and milestones reached, so they too may continue to build the legacy for those who come after them.
This is what I know: I watched a father hand over a lifetime of work, a car dealership, to his sons who had just graduated high school without teaching them how each part of the business worked from the ground up. As a result, within five years, the dealership was out of business, bankrupt. The sons took the profits of their father’s hard work and squandered them, giving no thought to how it would affect their children or grandchildren. Future generations can only be told stories about their grandfather’s accomplishments. They were unable to learn the business or enjoy the fruits of their labor.
It is natural for us to want our children to have it easier than we did, not to have to struggle and work so hard, but the truth is our work ethic, dedication, and commitment to the vision are what make us successful. Why would we want to rob our children of the ability to build their own legacy to be proud of? Why do we set them up to fail?
Hard work never killed anyone; in fact, as my grandfather used to say, “Hard work builds character.” God’s instructions are clear: we are to maintain our good works, and that includes teaching our children how to maintain them after we have left this earth to be reunited with Jesus in heaven.
