Morning

March 9

Numbers 14:28, 33 ²⁸So tell them, 'As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I will do to you the very things I heard you say:

³³Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the desert.

The nation had come right up to the boundaries of the Promised Land and been afraid to trust God. They wanted to kill Moses and Joshua and elect a new leader to take them back to Egypt. Their lament was, "If only we had died in Egypt or in this wilderness." So God gave them their request. They wished they had died in the wilderness, and their sentence is exactly what they asked for. God's sentence is often to give man what he demands. If we could just have faith that what He has planned for us is so much better than our own ideas, we would move forward into the Promised Land. Instead, many demand death in the desert.

That is sad, and yet it is what we asked for. But the saddest of all is that our children suffer from our faithless choices. While we are wandering in the wilderness, they are wandering with us. Instead of settling them down in the Promised Land, and giving them a better start in life, we leave the battles ahead to them. Faith and the fruit of it are the greatest inheritances you could possibly leave your children. A nice cave in the desert near a spring does not compare.

How is your life affecting your children? Are you beginning a legacy of faith or building a foundation on shifting sand? Our lives are so much more important than our own daily comfort. What are you sowing?

Meditation: What kind of spiritual legacy will I leave my children?