I’ll have to wait until Heaven to know for certain, but I’m pretty sure my testimony began many years before I was born. One of my aunts was convinced that someone in our ancestry prayed for their descendants, and I can’t help but agree with her. Who that person might have been, I don’t know. There are several possibilities that I know of. My great-great-grandfather, Rufus, is listed in some records as a minister of the Gospel. He and his wife donated the land for Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church in West Tennessee. My grandfather Hervey studied by correspondence through the Moody Bible Institute and served as a pastor for a while in southeast Oklahoma.
Whether it was my grandparents, great-great-grandparents, or a more distant ancestor, God has blessed many in our family with a relationship with Himself. Whoever it was may have seen only some of the answers to those prayers—perhaps only into the next generation. Consider, too, that those we credit for praying likely received the benefit of earlier prayers themselves, and Jesus Himself included us in His high priestly prayer shortly before His arrest (John 17:10ff).
Some of their believing descendants have also influenced other families to become Christ-followers, and those families have led even more people to faith. It is truly a multi-generational web of beneficiaries of those early prayers.
It occurs to me that there are prayers God will continue to answer long after we have joined Him in Heaven. I wonder if Jesus might sneak over every once in a while with a twinkle in His eye and whisper in our ear, “I just did it again!” Centuries from now, if He tarries, prayers we utter today will be as fresh in the mind of God as when we first prayed them. How cool is that?
If you haven’t already been praying for your multi-generational offspring, let me encourage you to start. Pray it forward! Who knows how far into the future it will spread?
As Chuck Leckie, one of my pastors, said years ago, God hasn’t finished writing their last chapter.
I started praying for each one in my son’s family. I believe children today have it tougher that Gen X ever did. While in some ways we raised ourselves, we didn’t have instant access to so many terrible thoughts in media. Yes, I pray now harder for my future generations than I did decades ago.
I agree, and our culture feeds into it. The Enemy has been given so much more garbage to feed into their, (and our) minds, right at our fingertips. They need our prayers more than ever! And so do we. On our own, we are no match for him. But…
“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” James 4:7