Starting a New Legacy - Cecily Feldman

Show Notes

God seeks people who will intentionally pass down faith to the next generation. Even first-generation believers can start a new spiritual legacy through Jesus' resurrection power, but it requires leaving some things behind and fighting spiritual battles. Scriptures: Genesis 1:24-25, Genesis 18:19, Deuteronomy 6:7-8, Ezekiel 22:30, Psalm 14:2, John 10:10

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Hi, thanks for tuning in to this Week's message at C3OC. We hope that it blesses you, equips you, and fills you with faith. Let's dive in. When we talk about spiritual legacy, essentially what we mean is the footprint we leave behind. And so all of us are going to leave a footprint of some kind. Whether we like it or whether we don't, we are going to leave a footprint. And so when we talk about spiritual legacy, we're talking about the intentional passing down of faith and godly values. So everybody's leaving a legacy. If we look at Genesis chapter one, verses 24 and 25, it's a spiritual principle that is set on the earth. It applies to every living creature. So figs are going to bear fig trees. Everything is going to reproduce. The Bible says after its own kind. That's what God put on the earth. So a thistle will produce a thistle, a fruit tree will produce a fruit tree. And you and I will do exactly the same thing. Your children will look like you. They will have your genetics, they will have your DNA, but they will also inherit your spiritual DNA. So the Bible says, a wise men leaves and a wise man leaves, this is in the book of Proverbs, leaves an inheritance for his children's children. And that is speaking on two levels. God is encouraging us to steward our resources well so that we leave an inheritance that goes down financially and with assets that goes down to our children and our children's children, but also that we pay attention to who we are in the spirit realm, that we pay attention to ourselves, so that what we pass down to our children is a spiritual inheritance that lasts for multiple generations. And we're going to take a look at some people in the Bible today that were very successful at that. But today I want to be sensitive to people who may be first generation or you haven't really even started on a spiritual legacy. We're in different places. Some people have started. Some people are first generation believers, some people are second generation believers. And I want to point out some of the dynamics that can take place in all this. I'm here today to testify of the living, transforming, delivering power of Jesus Christ. I did not grow up in a Christian home. I grew up. My personal ancestry goes back multiple generations. As far as I can see, nobody gave their life to Jesus. My husband was raised in a kosher keeping Jewish home and back to the 14th, 12th, 13th, 14th century. They were Jews, Ashkenazi Jews that lived in Eastern Europe, fled from Eastern Europe to Namibia at the time of the pogroms and to escape the Holocaust. But there was no Jew until Gary that gave his life to Jesus. So on both sides of my family, there is absolutely no spiritual legacy whatsoever. But here I am today, and here are my children today. So how does this happen? And what are the dynamics that take place? It's important to understand. When I grew up, there was no Bible in my house that I can recall. Nobody ever said grace, nobody prayed, nobody mentioned the word of God unless as a cuss word and as derision. That's all I knew. I was, of all men, most women, most miserable. I was one of those where the Bible says, the people who sat or walked in darkness, that was my life. I was miserable, Gary, the same. So how does this change? Well, the Bible says in Psalm 14, I believe it is verse two, it says, the Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who seek, who understand and who seek God. So God's heart, he's always looking. He's attentive, he's not distant. He's not sitting twiddling his thumbs. He's not saying, oh, well, I've made the earth, now let them get on with it. No, he's looking at humanity consistently. So he's looking at me. That's on my side. I'm sitting in darkness. I'm miserable. So is Gary. We didn't know each other at that time in our misery, by the way. God, on the other hand, is looking down to see who's going to seek him. And then it says, in Ezekiel 22, verse 30, I sought for a man among them who would build the wall and stand in the gap. And prayer needs to go up. You can never overestimate, underestimate the power of your prayers for an unbeliever. Because God needs us to pray. He rewards those who diligently seek him. So in my life, it was my grandmother, when she. She had always kind of been a formal churchgoer, as it were, but had no real relationship with Jesus. When she turned 80, this granny got born again. Amazingly, she got born again. At that time, I was about 16. And over that period of three years, 16, 17, 18, 19, Granny Gwendolyn prayed for her family. Within a year, when I turned 19, we all got together for a Christmas vacation. My aunt, myself and my cousin had become born again. In Gary's situation, he also had someone praying for him. At high school, his German teacher prayed for him and said to him, you going to become saved one day? You going to become a Christian? Fast forward so Otto Kasser prayed for him. God sees and answers the prayers. God's a rewarder. Remember, there's nobody that you pray for that God is not answering that prayer. You may not see it, but he is answering it. Fast forward. Gary leaves school, voted the person most likely to go to prison. Leaves school, is still in contact, mind you, with a German teacher, is at medical school and he becomes radically saved, becomes born again. So what do we see here? We see that the opportunity to change your legacy starts with Jesus Christ. It can't start just by positive thinking. It starts with Jesus Christ because when we become born again, we become a new creation. So the old that kept me in darkness, the limited mindsets, that all falls away and I become a new person. And the resurrection power of Jesus lives on the inside of me. So I'm not just living myself anymore. I, I'm living by the resurrection power of Jesus. So I want to just take a very brief look at one character in the Bible, probably the most important besides Jesus, and that is Abraham. So Abraham had a multi generational legacy that spanned about 2100 years. Starting with a promise that God gave him that said in you all the nations of the earth will be blessed. And, and then went all the way through. Mary and Joseph were part of Abraham's legacy. Came Jesus was part of Abraham's legacy. And then further beyond that, James, the half brother of Jesus and Jude, the half brother of Jesus all traced their ancestry back to Abraham. Okay, that's quite an amazing feat to think that I can start here today, I can give my life to Jesus and I can have a 2100 year legacy after that, that God will be faithful to the decisions and to the choices that we make. So how did this all work for Abraham? Abraham didn't start a born again Christian. Abraham started in Ur of the Chaldees, in Mesopotamia. And Ur of the Chaldees was a moon worshipping society. So he was a pagan, full on pagan. His family were full on pagans. That's all they knew. To this man, God began to initiate a new covenant and a new legacy. And he said to Abraham, get out of your country, get out, get away from your people and your father's household. And I just want to talk about those three things for a minute and what that means. How many of you here are immigrants to America? You didn't. We weren't born here. Whole bunch of us. Okay, so for those of us that are immigrants, we know all about this get out of your country part. Okay. So getting out of your country. And coming to America is no small thing. It's no small thing. So what does this mean? What God is basically saying is that the new work I want to do in you, Abraham, the new legacy I want to do for you, the promises that I have to to have for you are going to require some change. You are going to need to leave some things, and you're going to need to engage some other things. And so for Abraham, he had to leave Ur of the Chaldees to a land he had never seen, to a vision. He didn't even know what he was going to, but he had to leave the limited mindsets of a moon worshiper. He had to leave the idols, he had to leave the attachments. He had to a foreign kind of worship, to worship the God of Aid, to worship Yahweh. He was going to have to make some significant changes. And the only way to do that was to get, get out of that environment. So I can see that even in my own family, as sad as it was for me to leave, there was no way I was going to be able to be a Christian rooted in a family that was antagonistic towards God. I was going to have to leave. As sad and as difficult as that may be, the same is true for Gary. So in that time, it's hard to leave what you know, it's hard to leave your country and your habits and your traditions. It's hard to do that. But in that the Bible says of Abraham, he became a friend of God. God became his friend. Isn't that beautiful? He had no friends. He had to go all on his own. But God became his friend. And I love that. And that's true for you and I. When you have to separate from difficult situations, God will fill that gap for you. He'll become your friend. So Abraham had to leave his people. What does this mean? His community that he was rooted in? Now, I have to say here, not all community is good for you, when what he had to leave was unproductive attachments. So what is an unproductive attachment? It's an attachment, it's a relationship, it's friendships. It's just community that does not align with the purposes of God for your life. So what God wants to do in your life does not include those attachments. And so for God to be good to you, for God to invest in his promises in your life, he needs to help you cut that off. And that too is not an easy thing. We have Gary's family. They're constantly telling us that we've all got Trump derangements in Rome and we need to move to Australia. And they will pay our way and they will help us. And they are convinced that we are completely off the wall because we live in America, just because we live in America. Well, they're not God fearing people. So what do they actually know about what's good for us? They, they don't really know. And then the third thing, God spoke to Abraham. He said, leave your father's household now. For many of us, this is necessary. It was necessary for me. But what Jesus actually commented on this too. He said, if any man comes after me, he needs to hate his father and his mot. Well, Jesus doesn't propagate hate. So what is he actually saying? What he's saying is in terms of priority, we need to prioritize God first. We need to make God the priority in our lives. It's not that your family doesn't count, but we need to walk with God independently. And when we discipling our children, that is an important aspect. Is we raising them to walk with God. We're not raising them to walk with us, we're modeling for them, but we are raising them to walk with God. And there are aspects of our children's call and anointing we may not have privy to. So when we start to interfere with God's call on their lives, we actually beginning to move into control and, and to witchcraft. So just something to remember. All right, so why. Now this is important? Because Gary and I had to deal this, deal with this with his mom, good Jewish lady that she was, loved her son, the doctor, more than anything else in the world. And so there were times that we had to set boundaries and say no. There was one time, I remember after both girls were born, the Jewish community puts a very high premium on education. And his mom came to us with a proposal. So she knew that we would be raising our children in the church. We would not be raising them as, as Jews, we'd be raising them as Christian. And she came and she said, we will pay for you, for your children. Both of them will pay their entire education to go to Herzliya. Now Herzli was. Herzliya, right? Herzliya was a very, very prominent Jewish school. Phenomenal, high standard of education. Only problem was they would have to learn the Jewish way of life and they would not have any knowledge of the Messiah and they would be taught to be good Jews. Yes, whatever that means. So as tempting as it was in South Africa, where good education was Increasingly becoming something quite hard to find. We had to decline. We had to decline the offer. And we, for the sake of what we believed God was calling us to, we had to decline. Now, speaking of children and raising children, in Genesis 18, verse 19, we have to ask the question, why did God choose Abraham? So there were thousands or millions of people on the earth at that time. Why did God pick out Abraham to initiate a new covenant? So in Genesis 18:19 it says he will command his children to keep the way of the Lord. In the Hebrew and in the Jewish writings, that is phrased a little differently. And it said, it's assumed that what was meant here was God chose Abraham because he, he knew, he knew not he was going to command. He wasn't leaving this to chance. He knew this man will do a really good job of making sure his children learn the law and learn more importantly than the law, the ways of God. So God is a good investor. He wants to establish a 20, 100 year multi generation legacy. He's looking for a man who has this one quality. He's not necessarily the smartest, he's not the most spiritual alert. He's whatever other qualities he has or doesn't have are not the most important thing. The most important thing to God was his attitude towards the training and teaching of his children. And that is true of you and I today. Of all the things we can accomplish in our lives, how we train and we teach our children is the most important. And so I want you to just look at one verse, Deuteronomy, chapter six. It's actually verse seven and eight. And this is from Deuteronomy is Moses recapping the law after the law had been given. So it's kind of the second iteration of the law. And in Deuteronomy chapter 6, if you could just put that up on the screen for us, Brittany, it says, teach your children. Okay, here we are. You shall teach them diligently. He's talking here about the law to your children. And you shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. So what God is saying here is in the daily activities of life, the law or the word of God or the ways of God are to be taught, imparted, trained. It's not something that is formalized. Although the Jews do a pretty good job of formalizing education for their children. Gary at least had the advantage over me in that he did go to Heder classes, he did go to Jewish school as A young boy and learn Hebrew, learn the law, learn the words of God, and even to this day has a very thorough knowledge of the Old Testament and say, no, this didn't happen. Yes, that happened. This didn't happen. It isn't like that. It's like this. And so that provided them with a solid foundation. But how do we translate this now into our present day world? Many people make a huge deal of, you must have a family devotional, you must pray with your children before they go to sleep. You must homeschool them, you must send them to a Christian school. Well, all those things are good. All those things are good. But I'm not sure it's enough. In our case with our children, my prayer was that they would encounter Jesus for themselves. So yes, we did talk about Jesus as best we could. We did share the Word, we did pray, we did all those things. But mostly our prayer was because we knew that unless they encountered Jesus for themselves and came to a personal knowledge that God is alive, all the teaching, training, the devotionals, the homeschooling, the Christian school, none of that is actually going to carry any weight. So we did a lot of praying on the quiet hours and hours, I want to tell you, the two of us would kneel down by our bedside and we would pray for these kids. We would pray for their problems. We would speak God's word over their lives. I was acutely aware growing up, as I began to raise my children, that nobody had prayed for me except my grandmother in my 19th year. I was very aware. I was aware with the problems that I faced. There was no hedge protecting me in the spirit. And I wanted to leave that for them. I wanted them to feel my praise. I wanted them to know that I had prayed for them. Life gives you so many challenges to put God on display. When they come home from a swim practice, when they come home from. When they come home from dance practice on the way to dance practice, when they come home from school and they whatever they did in class, when all this stuff goes down, we have time and opportunity to put God on display. Don't use your own wisdom. You don't have much. Get with them. Where two or three agree is touching anything. Pray with them. Let them know the presence of God. Let God speak. Put him on display. He's more than faithful. He'll show up every time. Not all. I can't change that they were rude to their teacher. They may have to go to detention or whatever. I can't change that part. But you know, God can minister in Those situations, he will teach, and he will train them on your behalf on a level that you cannot even begin to do. He will speak. Even this week, Sean had a UG Ben for his doctorate. And we prayed. We just said, no, this is a big deal. We want to see God come through on his behalf. The whole family got together on the phone. We began to pray for him. And how did it go, Sean? Because God is faithful. Amen. All right, so to start a new legacy, we will, just, like Abraham, have to leave some things behind. And then there's also going to be a fight. So you can't enter into a new legacy without a fight. And there's a book by a man named Francis Frangipani. I don't know if any of you know that name. Francis Frangipani, a couple of years, wrote a book called this Day We Fight. It's a Christian book. He's a pastor and a Christian author. And that book absolutely transformed my life. Because the point that he makes in the book is that sluggishness, passivity, and laziness will rob you and your children of their destiny. You will have to stand up and fight. You will have to stand up and oppose some of the things that come against you. So the Bible says we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but principalities and powers. And so in every family, legacy or generationally, speaking, especially when you come to Jesus in your first generation like we are, you have to stand against the spirits because they are demonic spirits that kept your, your granny, your grandpa, your three, four generations before you that never, ever gave their lives to Jesus. You will have to fight those battles, and you will have to make a choice about what you're going to do. So I wanted to share a story, a biblical example of the Amalekites. So the Amalekites were an Old Testament tribe. They were a warlike tribe, very violent and warlike. And they first show up in Exodus when the people are going through the wilderness. And in Exodus, they attacked the weak and the stragglers at the back of the line of the people wandering through the wilderness without wondering they were trying to go somewhere, and. And the Amalekites would come and kill them. He would kill the babies, the elderly, the frail. And God spoke to Moses and said, tell Joshua to go take them out. And Joshua went to war against these Amalekites. And we all know the story. When Moses held up his rod, they were winning the battle. When his hands got tired, they began to lose the battle. That is a symbol of prayer. We win because we pray we don't win any other way. So Moses, Hur and Aaron would hold up his arms and eventually Joshua won the fight. Well, that was round one. Amalekites, though, showed up again. Let me go through this very briefly with you. Showed up in Gideon's day, showed up in Saul's day, showed up in David's day, and then finally in Esther's day. So what is this? This is spiritual opposition that is always present, consistent in every generational line. So in Joshua's day, he knocked them out. Gideon's day, he knocked them out. Come to Saul's day. And Samuel says to Saul, you need. God wants you to go and take out these Amalekites. Saul goes and when, for those of you are Old Testament readers, you know what happened here. Saul did win the battle. But God's instruction was very specific. He said, kill them all. Exterminate them all. Kill all their cattle, all their sheep, every single thing that belongs to them. Saul, however, had a better idea. He didn't do that. He kept the king of the Amalekites alive. So he came and he presented this to Samuel. Samuel said, why did you not take them out? Saul said, oh, well, you know, our people wanted the this and the that. And he had a whole lot of excuses. And God was so angry with Saul, he said, I'm going to take the kingdom from you. Now why would God be like that? Well, because this spirit of Amalek was a God hating spirit. It was an anti God spirit. It was like the Antichrist really. It was going to go after anybody that believed in God. And God was so angry with Saul that he said he's going to take his kingdom away from him because he wanted to punish the Amalekites and wipe them off the face of the earth so that they would not harass David. They would not be around to harass Esther. Fast forward another 400 years. David has his skirmish at Ziklag. Esther is in a situation where she's the queen. And now we have another Haman. Haman was an Amalekite and Haman was busy planning the final extermination of all the Jewish people in Esther's day. Now, none of that would have happened if Saul had won the battle and done what he needed to do in his time. And, and I want to say to you, today there are battles you must fight and win. If you do not fight and win them today and in your lifetime, they are coming back for your children. You must win the battle. I want to give you an example. In our family line, there are many different battles families have. Substance abuse, addiction. In our family line, financial reversal is a thing. So my father went bankrupt as a young man. Thanks, Joe. Gary's father had a financial reversal when he became older. My father also. So there are some things in life that are not natural. They have spiritual roots to them. And so you can go to therapy over what happened and it will help you, it really will help you. But if you do not deal with that spiritual root, if you do not deal with that part of it, which can only be dealt with through the blood of Jesus and the word of God, if you do not deal with that part, it will come back. So Jesus, for example, not everything is as it seems. When he came to bring healing to people, he did not always lay hands on them and pray for the sick. He cast the devil out. Why? Because some sickness even is fortified by a demonic spirit that partners. So that demonic spirit has come into that person's life to fortify that sickness. Not always the case, but sometimes. And we have to discern the difference. So in our personal family history, we had a situation where our parents. It was clear our parents had suffered these financial reversals. Okay, so for us, forward, we enter our 60 year decade and Gary works for a hospital in Long Beach. And in 18 years he had earned a certain salary and, you know, it had gone up and down a little bit and. But he was contracted. Well, the hospital decided that they were going to. They were going to pay the doctors differently. And they came up with these new complicated formulas and how they were going to pay the doctors. And it all looked really good on paper. On paper, everybody was going to come out even and some were going to do even better than they had been doing before. And everybody was happy and wonderful consultants you are to come up with this formula. Well, the first paycheck came and Gary's salary was reduced by half, I kid you not, 50% of what he previously earned. So what do we do? What are we going to do? Here we are again suffering financial reversal, just like our parents. So we recognized, we of course went to pray. We recognized that what was going on here was not natural, that this was a spiritual attack on us. But more importantly, I can remember Gary and I having a conversation before. We prayed and we said, if the devil sees that, we will do nothing. This is going to happen again. This is a fight. We have to stand up, we have to speak the word of God. We have to do what's necessary to overcome this, to reverse this. And to make sure we build a hedge in the spirit that had never happens to our children's children. If you don't, this will be our legacy for our children, our children's children, and forever until somebody stands up. So we began to pray. That was the first step. Gary began to approach the people at the hospital and say, hey, this is, I'm not accepting this. This is not how you said it was going to play out. Cut a long story short. After many hours of meetings, many prayer times, nine months later, and it was back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Nine months later, they paid him out back pay for everything that he should have been paid. Created another way of paying him and his salary was restored. Now, if we had not done what we did, it would have just continued. You know, John 10:10 says this. Jesus said, the thief comes to rob, to steal, and to kill. But I have come that you might have life abundantly. So when it comes to our legacy, what are we believing God for? Are we going to sit around and let the devil just take what he wants to take? And this applies in so many areas. Addictions. I don't really believe in generational curses because Jesus became a curse for me. So how can I be cursed by my generations before me? But there are spirits, familiar spirits, that will seek to apply those same, those same heartbreak situations to every generation coming after me. So that applies to barrenness, problems with anger, problems with addiction. These are not natural things. So today I want to challenge you if you want to start a new beginning. The resurrection power of Jesus that has worked in me, worked in my family, will also work in your family. It will take effort on our part. It's not going to happen automatically. So we're going to stand here today and we're going to pray. If this is the first time that you praying this prayer, if you've never accepted Jesus into your life before, that's the first place to start. It's the first place that we start. We don't really have the option of having charting a different course until we've made Jesus the Lord of our lives. It's the resurrection power of Jesus in me that's going to work and is going to affect the changes that need to be affected. The Holy Spirit's going to teach me, the Holy Spirit's going to help me. But the faith first step for us is to accept Jesus into our hearts. So let's just stand today we're going to pray together and I'm going to give you an opportunity to take that first step. Jesus is here today, and he offers each of us the invitation. He offers us the invitation of change. Many of you today know exactly what the devil is saying. Stolen from you. I don't even have to tell you. He came and he has stolen your purpose. He has stolen your life. He has brought depression. There's so many things in your life today that are there not because of what you did necessarily, but because of maybe what you didn't know. And today Jesus says, I have come to give you life, and I have come to give you life more abundantly. This changes everything. Like Abraham, he gives you a new beginning. Hey, thanks for tuning in. There's a bunch of different ways that we connect throughout the week, including Sunday mornings, and we would love to see you there. You can check out all the [e-mail].