He Holds the Generations

These days, I feel pressed to pray for my children more and more. The first one in his twenties, the second now a high school graduate, and our daughter riding the teen waves, I feel a heavy weight and burden to cry out to God for them. I ask for them to hear His voice and follow Him, to be overwhelmingly protected by His hand, and for the enemy to be defeated in the fight for their lives.

The truth of the matter is, now that my children are on the cusp of real adulthood, I’m afraid something bad will happen to them. I’m afraid they’ll “choose wrong.” I’m afraid they’ll fall down and get hurt. I’m afraid they’ll lose hope, give up, and sit down on themselves and their dreams. It’s terrifying.

But in honestly giving these fearful thoughts over to the Lord, I remember that I was a teenager once. This is my first time as a mom of adult children and it’s scary, but I remember what it was like when I was in my teens and twenties and newly moving out into the world. This shift in my thinking gave me so much hope because I didn’t always hear and follow God. I wasn’t even close to “always choosing right.” Even the thought is laughable! I fell down and got hurt many times, and I survived… and in many cases, thrived.

For the Lord is good; His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.

Psalm 100:5

Here’s the Truth…

If God has chosen you, then you can be sure that He has also chosen your children. The Bible says our kids are sanctified because we belong to Jesus (1 Cor 7:14). He has a plan for their ultimate good!

God doesn’t just choose a person, He chooses a generational line. In the Old Testament, He is not just the God of Abraham, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Even more than that, on the day He created Adam… because God is outside of our human timeline… I believe He saw the biblical Jacob twenty-two generations into the future. Twelve more generations past Jacob, I believe He saw the boy David who would one day be king, and from the house of David… somewhere between twenty-seven and forty-two generations later… He saw Jesus.

God declares the end of a thing from the beginning, and His plans and purposes will stand (Isaiah 46:10), so He sees every future person who will come after you in your generational line before He chooses you.  He looks down the line of not just who YOU will become, but who your children and those children coming many generations into the future will become, all at the same time. 

He says, “I’m saving Jennifer right now, but with this one action, I am also shifting the outcome of her family line one hundred generations into the future!” 

Let this be recorded for a generation to come, so that a people yet to be created may praise the Lord…

Psalm 102:18

I have prayed for my children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren… and every person in my future lineage until the return of Christ… that they will all follow the Lord, and that God would remove from them anything that would tear them away from Him. I have cried over them all, I have blessed them and prayed a hedge of protection over them.  

I believe the ripples of my faith will continue to move out into the future until Jesus returns, not because of anything special about me, but because He is faithful from generation to generation (Psalm 100:5).  He is able to take my prayer of faith and make it effective throughout all time.  

Does that mean every future person in my family will follow the Lord? Maybe not, but I pray for them to. Not every person who came before me in my family followed the Lord. A good many of them rejected Him and went their own way. But somewhere in this offshoot of my family tree, someone chose Jesus… and because they did, I did.

I come from a broken family, but my grandfather, Charles Wesley, took us to the little Church of God in his tiny country town as often as we were able to go. We went to Children’s Church and Vacation Bible School. We had the Bible Lady come to our country school and tell us flannel-graph stories about Jesus once a month. I chose to follow Jesus as a child and was baptized, and He stayed with me through thick and thin. Now nearly five decades later, I know that He will also stay with my children, for He is a God who is faithful to a thousand generations (Psalm 105:8).

I don’t want to be the one in my generational line who stops following Jesus.  I don’t want to be the one who allows the enemy to take hold and steer my heritage away from the Lord. I am a wife, a mother, and a child of God… therefore, I will put on my armor and stand firm in the battle for my future generations, in Jesus’ name.

One generation shall commend your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.

Psalm 145:4

Your testimonies are my heritage forever, for they are the joy of my heart.

Psalm 119:111

Anyone who has children, especially older children, knows that we can’t force them to follow Christ. My children know the Lord, and have a relationship with Him, but their journey with Jesus is theirs, not mine. I knew the Lord as a child, but I didn’t always follow Him, same as my husband. But God drew us in and captured our hearts.  Don’t we want Him to do the same for our children?

It’s the bumps and bruises in life that draw us to God’s love and protection.  It is all God has done for me that keeps me coming back to His side.  I do not want my fear, or my human “cares and concerns” to rob my children of their testimony of God’s love and faithfulness.  I do not want to hold them back from learning first hand what His grace and power can really do. 

I was stubborn and stuck. I had to suffer long and experience devastation before I finally let God have me, and let God love me.  I didn’t know what life could be like, and now I’m so thankful for all I have experienced… for it has shown me the overwhelming grace and goodness of God.  I do not want to keep my children from learning just who God really is simply because I’m afraid they’ll get hurt. Only God knows His plans for my children’s lives, and He always plans for our good. So I release my children to the Lord because He loves them more than I do, and I will not be afraid.

He knows exactly what they need.