3.248 Heritage of the Lord

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.

My friends, I've got a new style of episode today, and it may be just a one-time event, or you never know, it may be fun enough that we do it more and more often. I have invited Hope to join me inside of the episode today. Hello, everybody!

Yes, that's right. And you know, if you were watching us right now, you would see that we're squished around a microphone, and that's okay because we haven't thought about doing a podcast with the two of us, just one at a time. But here we are.

I invited Hope deliberately today because of our verse for today. Now, here's the thing that I thought would be kind of fun around our verse for today. Hope has no idea what the verse is, nor my thoughts around it.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to share the verse, but then I'm going to turn and ask her a question that she has no idea what's coming. I promise you, we have not had this conversation. I just said, 'Hey, you want to come down and do a Savory Salt episode with me together?' And she's like, 'Sure, let's go.' And so here we are.

So let's get to our verse for today and then into our question here. Psalm 127 brings our verse for today. It has been weighing on me.

Psalm 127 in its whole has been weighing on me with just things happening around the world right now, the way that the world seems to be going right now. And our verse for today is Psalm 127, verse 3: 'Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is his reward.' Now, my friends, the one thing I want to share with this is this idea of an heritage of the Lord. As I looked in and kind of studied that concept of heritage a little bit, the same term is used when the Lord describes the promised land.

And if you think about what that means, it's a blessed stewardship given to us, but owned ultimately by the Lord. Our children are the Lord's and we are stewards of them. Now, here comes the question to Hope that she has not heard yet, but she is going to give her true answer to it as she hears the question.

Hope, I'm interested in all the things that Mom and I have done to try to make our family a place welcome for you. What are the things we do regularly that stand out to you most that show you the Lord loves you? Well, we do family scripture study every night, or we try to do it every night.

And if people aren't here in the night, we still do it, and we try to have it. And we always try to have like a thought around it, and they recently, I think like a year or so ago, had us start preparing the scripture study, and so we had to start diving into it on our own. Another one is they are very supportive of all of us in our different activities.

We have a lot of stuff going on with our individual lives, and Mom and Dad have always just been there to support us and try to go to all of our concerts and games and everything, and it's really special that they make the time for us personally. Thank you, Hope. I appreciate you just jumping on without having any sort of context there.

My friends, this isn't to try and make any sort of attempt to show, 'Look at what we do as a family here.' The idea is the precious nature that our children are to us and what we're doing on a daily basis to try to show them the love of our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Now, this message is not just for parents today. This message, we all in our lives have interactions with children.

We all have an attempt to bring children in and allow them to feel the love of the Lord. We can serve as stewards and have an opportunity to do that: to instruct, to raise, to love, to help, to guide children who truly are... I absolutely love my girls.

They are amazing to me. And I sometimes, honestly, sometimes when we pray at night, with my wife and I, just the two of us, I pray to the Lord with gratitude for how amazing it is to be their father. My friends, I hope that you and I have an opportunity to remember every child we come across is an heritage of the Lord, a beloved child of God, and they deserve to be treated as such.

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.