3.180 Every Generation Gets to Choose

In Matthew 5, Jesus calls us the salt of the earth and the light of the world, reminding us that our lives are meant to preserve, illuminate, and point others to Him. This season on Savory Salt, we'll walk through the Old Testament, one verse and one thought each day. Perhaps these moments will add greater savor and brighter light to our lives as we seek to truly live as Savory Salt.

Hello, my friends. It's a new day with new opportunities. Choose ye this day whom you will serve.

Do you and your family do certain things simply because it's what your family's always done? Do you have maybe those generational traditions? Let's talk about those a little bit today as we dive into a new week and new readings in 1 Kings chapters 12 and 13.

Wrapping up the story of the Old Testament, we get into 1 Kings 12. We have his son in his stead, and his son gets basically an ultimatum from the people. This is what the verse says in our verse for today, 1 Kings 12:4.

This is what they say: "Thy father made our yoke grievous: now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee." So the people are trying to say, "Look, we want you to be king as long as you let up a bit." Your dad was pretty tough on us. And then chapter 12 goes into Rehoboam. I don't know how to say his name correctly there.

Sorry about that. But Rehoboam goes through, and he's going to talk to the older, wiser guys. He's going to talk to the young guys as counselors, and he's going to make a decision here.

But he has a generational decision to make. This is how your dad used to do things. Are you going to do it differently?

And then we see where it goes from there. My friends, I would pose the same question to you in a myriad of different ways. Just because your folks did things a certain way and you continue to do them, have you ever stopped and brought those actions into your own thought processes, weighted whether they fall in alignment with gospel principles, whether they fall into alignment with things that you want to actually bring into your life and then continue doing them, or do you simply do them because?

Now this perhaps makes sense why I brought this up with the benign example of Thanksgiving being on a Sunday versus a Thursday. That's certainly not going to affect the outcome eternally of my family. But are there phrases that perhaps your parents or grandparents said to you or ways that they said it?

Is there generational abuse, emotional or physical, that you have an opportunity to choose whether you bring it into this generation or not? You see, here we see an interesting example of a king who has to make the choice of whether generationally he's going to do things that he knows hurt the people. I hope that you and I take an opportunity to evaluate our own relationships, evaluate our own communication styles, evaluate our own ways that we show up as followers of Jesus Christ, and decide if it's time to end those generational habits, generational behaviors, or generational comments and continue on a different path, one closer to our Savior.

Every generation gets to choose. That's all for today, my friends. You and I have come here for such a time as this.

Step forward in faith and let's be Savory Salt. We will be here tomorrow and we hope you are too.