Wednesday, April 23, 2008
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My Grandpa John lost his hair, not all of it but enough to expose a sizable portion of the top of his head. Then there was my dad faithfully following in his father's footsteps - or maybe scalp-steps or whatever. He was bald in most of the same spots that his dad was. Hello third generation! My forehead seems to be growing, and behind me are two sons with great hair - for now. But the other day in church, our Pastor said something unsettling. He said, "One day you get up in the morning and you look in the mirror, and suddenly there is someone else there." You are looking at someone a lot like your father. I glanced down the pew at my son, and he had this anxious look on his face as he felt his forehead and he checked his hair.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have a Word With You today about "Fatal Family Resemblance."
Now it's true we all know about family resemblance, whether it's hair, or height, or face, or cholesterol, metabolism, or even health problems; but there are family resemblances that are less obvious and yet they're much more damaging. They damage our marriage, our kids, our close relationships, our future, our worth. We pick them up from our parents - their ways of talking and acting that we didn't like in them, and suddenly we hear ourselves sounding like Mom or Dad. We're treating others like our parents treated us. We didn't like it. We react, we communicate, we live as they did in ways that we never meant to repeat. Of course, if we are parents, now we are marking another generation who will have to go through the same pain we have unless something changes, which seems unlikely. If we could change some of these things, we would have by now. It's almost as if there's this man or woman we would like to be, that we need to be, and then there's this person we really are. There's a huge gap in between.
Well, there's some good news from our Heavenly Father - our word for today from the Word of God. It's in 1 Peter 1:18. Here's what it says: "Christ has redeemed us from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers with the precious blood of Christ." Did you hear that word - redeemed? That's a hope word. You and I don't have to be what our parents were and maybe all the generations before that. These family germs can stop in your generation, but not with your power. There's a six-letter word that bridges that gap between the person you want to be and the person you are. Here's the word: Savior. That's a rescuer from this spiritual cancer the Bible calls sin. It's not so much the breaking of some religious rules. It's a lot deeper than that. It's the issue of who's really God in your life. So we've made the choice Frank Sinatra sang about, "I'll do it my way." And that's led to thousands of little and big choices that have ignored God's way and made us slaves to the dark side of us. But there's a Savior, and our redeeming has something to do with the shedding of His innocent blood on that cross. 1 Peter 2:24, a little later in this same book explains it. It says, "He bore our sins in His own body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness." He took the power, He took the penalty, He took the pain of every sin on Himself. It means you can be forgiven, every sin erased from God's book; the beginning of your liberation. You can be changed, like the Bible says, "You can be a new creation in Christ."
I have experienced it. Thousands I've known have experienced it. What we could never change, Jesus has been able to miraculously transform. If you were to give yourself to Jesus today, you could finally say of all that sin baggage, "It stops here. It's hurt me long enough. It's hurt enough people." You would have the power of the only man who ever conquered death, changing you from the inside out. If you want to be sure you belong to Him, tell Him today, "Jesus, I'm Yours." And let me invite you to our website. I think you'll find a lot of help and encouragement there. It's yoursforlife.net.
I can't offer you a whole lot of help on the physical resemblances that we get from our family, but where we really need hope is on the kind of person we are on the inside, and there is a powerful Savior for that. You can stop those ugly family sins so that no one in your family will ever have to look like that again or be hurt by them again.