Standing on the Shoulders of Our Forebears
We were recently gone for my family’s annual “Wakefield Family Fall Retreat,” which got me to thinking about something that happened a couple years ago on Sunday morning that particular weekend.
At the conclusion of our time we have a little worship service together that ends with participating in the Lord’s Supper. This time my Dad started by talking about the generations of Wakefields who have followed Christ. He held up pictures I’d never seen and read from a Bible owned by my great grandmother. I felt a great sense of pride and belonging as we sat around the table and listened to him talk about how generations of Christians before me remained faithful, sometimes at great personal cost.
With my arm around my daughter, and my son sitting on my wife’s lap, we heard him talk about his own dad’s faithfulness… How for years he served in church leadership; how he helped plant a church in Southern Illinois; how he was generous in helping those who needed help, even if money was scarce; and how he stood for what was right, once telling the church leaders that if they wouldn’t let him bus in both black and white kids to Sunday School, they could find another bus driver. (“You go, grandpa!”)
And then he read, from that old Bible, these beautiful words from Hebrews 12:1, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (English Standard Version).
Our faithfulness to Christ, recognized as the true founder of our faith, is bolstered when we remember the “great cloud of witnesses” who have gone before. And we are encouraged to keep from sin and remain faithful, like them, based on the foundation of Jesus Christ.
May we stand on the shoulders of our forebears… acknowledging today that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice is reason to remain faithful, no matter the cost to us. Friends, Jesus’ death on the cross was too costly a price to pay for us to be anything less than faithful!
For the sake of the Kingdom,
Scott