There’s a Casting Crowns song playing on the radio these days with a line that always bothers me a bit. The song is “Only Jesus,” and the message of the song is good. It talks about focusing on helping people see and remember Jesus rather than focusing on our own fame and fortune. However, the chorus begins with “And I, I don’t want to leave a legacy.” That line I’m not quite sure I agree with.

You see, while followers of Christ should not be focused on their own fame or aggrandizement, I think we are generally meant to leave a legacy. A legacy not motivated by our own vanity, but motivated by and naturally flowing out of our relationship with God.

I was reminded of this in my recent reading of Nehemiah. Chapter 3 lists the people who rebuilt the wall around Jerusalem, naming the person in charge of each section.  As I slogged through the chapter full of unfamiliar names, I once again found myself wondering why on earth God had the biblical writers include both this list in particular and the various lists we find scattered throughout the Bible. After all, I don’t think I’m unusual in kind of dreading getting to one of those chapters in my Bible reading plan.

I’m not going to claim to have a full explanation, but I think the point of the list in Nehemiah 3 is that this wall was the legacy of the people who worked on it. This list of people associated with the wall building, this explanation of their legacy, provides us with some valuable reminders.

First, it reminds us that God calls us to be involved in what he’s doing. God could have built that wall without the people, but he doesn’t usually work that way. He wants us to be a part of the plan. 

Second, while he sometimes takes us far from home to serve him, he wants us to get involved in his work where we are. The people working on the wall were mostly working on the section that was closest to what they cared about: their home or their work or both. 

Third, this list, along with all of the others, demonstrates that God cares enough about people to want them listed by name. He encourages us to see what the people did. 

We talk about looking to Jesus alone, and he is our only model, but I think God understands that we are human. We don’t always do well without flesh and blood examples, even though all of them but Jesus are imperfect. Thus, we have Paul encouraging the recipients of his letters to look at his example (and through it to Christ). We have the faith chapter of Hebrews 11, where the author takes us through the Old Testament story, pointing out examples of humans who lived out their faith in God.

Over the summer, two different older Christ-followers that I knew fairly well at different times of my life died. I was not able to attend either memorial service, but I saw all of the posts that came across Facebook, and I watched portions of one of the services that was posted online. In both cases, the defining characteristic of all that I read and saw was the legacy of faith that these people left to their family and friends.

Of course, Casting Crowns isn’t the only group that has weighed in on this subject of legacies, and I think I have to stand with a couple of others: Nicole Nordeman’s “Legacy” and Jon Mohr’s “Find Us Faithful.” I want to live a life of faith that leaves a legacy that allows others to see Jesus through me. Those are older songs (one quite a bit older), but worth checking out if you’re not familiar with them.

In the final chapter of Nehemiah, he lists a bunch of accomplishments: his legacy. The final words of the book read: “Remember me, O my God, for good” (Nehemiah 13:31b ESV)

May we choose to live such lives.

 

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I recently started using a CPAP because of severe sleep apnea. The first moments I tried on the mask were not positive. It felt like I couldn’t breathe out at all. Since I have asthma, that’s a familiar and scary feeling, so I had an anxiety attack right there in the poor respiratory therapist’s office. The good news is that we got through it, and I am using the CPAP successfully and sleeping much better than I was before.

Anxiety attacks are not a common phenomenon for me, but general anxiety is something I deal with, as many do. After all, there’s a lot in this life for me to worry about: sons, husband, daughters-in-law, grandson, friends going through various trials, getting my research program going again, going back to the classroom full-time after too many years out of it, leaving the department in someone else’s hands. I could go on at length.

I do want to be clear that I’m not only talking about baseless concerns. There are real current problems or significant transitions going on in every case I mentioned above. But God tells us not to worry, even in cases of real concern. The point of Matthew 6:25-33 isn’t that we don’t need food and clothing. God knows that our lives here on earth do require such things. However, Jesus tells us not to worry about them.

It’s easy to beat up on ourselves about worry. The reasons we’re told to avoid it are clear. It doesn’t accomplish anything. Time spent worrying about my family members changes nothing about their situation. There are things I can do to get my research on track and prepare for my courses this spring, but worrying is not one of them. In addition, worry indicates a lack of faith. If God is in charge, we don’t need to worry. We need to trust that he’s got it.

However, I have always found that kicking myself about my worrying doesn’t help a whole lot with it. It mostly makes me anxious about my worrying. The Bible gives us some help on this one. The first source comes at the end of that passage in Matthew, where Jesus tells us to seek God first. Matthew 6:33 often gets pulled out of context, and it is good advice in general, but the words come as the final part of the message on worry Jesus gives us here. If we are focused on seeking God rather than everything else, we will worry less.

There’s another passage that speaks to me on this subject with great reassurance: “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7 ESV). In this passage, Paul gives us a great formula for avoiding worry: 1) We ask God about everything with urgency and thankfulness and 2) God gives us peace.

One of my challenges is that I feel that I need to get rid of these feelings of anxiety. But that’s not really my job. My job is to seek God first and to let him know about everything. Paul makes that point, and Peter tells us to cast all of our anxieties (or cares) on Jesus (1 Peter 5:9). If we do that (often many, many times), Paul tells us that God’s peace will protect our hearts and minds. We’re not going to change our feelings by berating ourselves for them, but God can and will ease our anxiety if we entrust him with all of our cares. 

Even those about worrying.

 

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I am writing this on my 55th birthday, one that feels like a somewhat significant milestone. Some places consider me a senior citizen. I could now officially retire from my university position and own the title “Professor Emerita,” though that is unlikely to occur any time soon.

This milestone has me thinking a bit about what I have learned from the years I have spent on this earth. After all, the gray under my hair coloring is supposed to come with some wisdom.

What Matters

Of course, I have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge as you might expect for someone with my education and over twenty years of experience as a university professor. I value that knowledge and constantly work to add to it, but one thing I have learned is that it is not actually worthwhile as an end in itself.

There was a time when knowledge itself was one of the things I valued most. As my husband supported me through my graduate degrees, I think he was beginning to be afraid that I would spend my life as a professional student, and I once believed that would be the most enjoyable way to live if we could only afford it. I have since learned that knowledge is only truly valuable if it has a point. For me, the important point has become using the knowledge to help students learn the skills and concepts they need to succeed in their field. The knowledge matters only as I can use it to impact people’s lives for good. And my greatest professional joy is not the new knowledge I create through my research, but the alumni whose lives I have impacted.

Being Me

For many, many years, I lived with tremendous insecurity. I did not handle the teasing I faced as a child well. That and certain events in my childhood helped to build very low self-esteem. I spent much of my adolescence in pretty deep depression, and only concern for my family and a reluctance to suffer pain kept me from attempting suicide.

Over the years some counseling, some dear Christian friends, the love of my family, and a lot of time in the Bible have helped me learn what a lie I lived in. I have come to understand that God actually wants me to be myself. That he created me the way he wanted me to be. Yes, I am to die to self, to deny my fallen nature, to grow closer to Christ and learn to have his desires. However, the result of that process is not a cookie-cutter, bland non-entity, but rather the best version of the unique person created by the God who loves me more than my parents or my husband or my children ever could.

So I have learned to be myself. I have learned not to waste time worrying about what others around me think. My focus has to be on where I am in relation to my Father and doing what God has called me to do, not where others may think I fall short.

Letting God Do It

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned in the last few years is that the Christian walk is not something I do for God, but something God must do in me.

I think it is very easy for Christians to fall into the trap of focusing on good deeds. After all, it is certainly a common trap for humanity as a whole. Even those of us who emphasize that faith is a matter of grace, a free gift of God, too often worry about works and not having visible sin in our lives.

Now, I’m not advocating for sin, visible or otherwise, and good works should certainly be part of every believer’s life, but I think we approach things backwards. We worry about others seeing our sin, but we are called to confess our sins and pray for each other and let God forgive our sins and clean us up and heal us (1 John 1:9; James 5:16). We are to walk in the good works which God prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:10), not just do what we think we should for God. 

God has been bringing to my attention more and more verses that point out that the sanctification process is never something that I am to do on my own, never something that I am to feel guilt over. Instead, God will provide the fruit; God will shape the desires; God will do the work: my job is to spend time with him, to immerse myself in the word and in prayer, and to obey. That’s it. Remarkably freeing.

Are you approaching any milestones? What has God been teaching you?

 

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My husband and I recently met with our financial advisor to go over our retirement situation. Neither of us will have a pension, so we will be primarily dependent on what we have put away in his 401K, my similar account, and elsewhere. At the same time, both of our sons’ families are undergoing transition times that are impacting their incomes. As a result, I’ve been thinking about money.

Many believe the Bible says that money is the root of all evil, but it actually doesn’t. Rather, 1 Timothy 6:10 says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs” (ESV). As usual, God is concerned with our hearts and minds rather than our circumstances.

God is certainly concerned about how we get our money. A perusal of Proverbs turns up warnings about oppressing the poor and several statements about how much better it is to be poor than to be a liar or “crooked.” When Jesus drove the money-changers and pigeon sellers out of the temple in Matthew 21, it wasn’t only because they were conducting business in the temple. He says they have made it a “den of robbers.” God really doesn’t like it when people who claim to be his are cheating the poor.

We are told to do more than simply avoid oppressing the poor. In Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy, in addition to the warnings about treating the poor fairly, we see calls to be generous to the poor.

It’s easy to take all of this and take from it a legalistic view of money and how to act with it, but that’s not what we see in the New Testament. Instead, we are called to treat money well because our hearts are right. We know that God loves a cheerful giver, and so we try to force ourselves to give cheerfully, but that’s not the point of the passage:

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. (2 Corinthians 6:8-9 ESV)

Instead, we are able to give cheerfully because of the grace of God and our trust in him. I recently came across a verse I had somehow missed for many years. It happened to be in a collection of verses I picked to memorize. It’s another place where we hear about the love of money: “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’” (Hebrews 13:5 ESV)

God isn’t asking us to browbeat ourselves into handling money correctly. Instead, he seeks to assure us that we can handle it correctly and be content because he will be with us and care for us. That’s the point in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus talks about seeking God first and laying up treasures in heaven. God’s in charge and he actually cares about us. What happens here on earth may or may not look the way we think it should, but if we trust him, it’s all going to come out right in the end. And if we believe that, really believe it, we can save ourselves a world of anxiety and suffering.

 

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