Daily Devotional for Sunday August 25, 2002

What will Your Legacy Be?

(Matthew 26;13; Hebrews 11:4; 2 Peter 1:15)

A few months ago as I read the newspaper, a big story in the local Tampa, Florida area, where Liveprayer is located, was the Supreme Court refusing to hear a case brought by the City of Tampa against a local Internet pornography company. The company which operates websites where people pay to watch young college girls who live together in a house, was sued by the city of Tampa for zoning violations, stating that they were operating an adult business. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case, upholding a lower court ruling that because it was an adult business on the Internet, it was not subject to local zoning laws. Of course, the operators of this adult site were very happy with their legal victory.

As I read this story, I thought about how this would be the legacy of those who operate this business. Most people have no idea the magnitude of the problem that Internet pornography is. In the three years that Liveprayer has been on line, we have been inundated daily with prayer requests from those who are in bondage to Internet pornography, as well as the families of those who are enslaved to this 21st century addiction. I can tell you without hesitation that lives are destroyed, marriages are destroyed, and families broken apart because of Internet pornography. While it has been from day one and remains today the most profitable business on the Internet, the legacy of those who operate these businesses will be the destroyed lives of men and women, marriages that have been ruined, and children growing up in broken homes. The by-product of their ?business? is human destruction. Their legacy is the lives they have helped destroy along their journey!!!

For everyone who is reading this today, whether you are 10 or 100, your legacy is something that you should take VERY seriously. Your legacy is what you will be remembered for. Your legacy is that part of you that will live on after your life here is over. Your legacy is how your life has impacted the lives of those you encounter along this journey of life. You see, the fact is, even if you live to be 100, you will die one day. Death is an inevitable part of the human experience that we all must face. So if death is an event that we will face, and none of us know when that event will take place, the emphasis then becomes what we do between now and that time. I really doubt if on their death beds, men like Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, and anyone else who spent their lives making fortunes off of the destruction of human life want that to be their legacy. But they will be unable to escape the fact that their real legacy was how their life impacted those they touched along the way.

You see, God gives us each day as a gift. What we do with that gift becomes a decision that we each make every day. God gave us the free will to choose how we will spend that gift of life each day. As a Christian, we understand that our purpose in life is to serve and glorify Him. Our service to Him is our service to other people. For the Christian, that insures that our legacy is the hope and love of Christ that we impart to others along our journey here on earth. When our life is over, we can feel good knowing that God has used our life as an instrument to bring His message of hope and love through Christ to those people that we encountered during our life. There is NO greater legacy that we can have. Long after we are gone, our life will live on in the lives of those we touch for Christ along the way.

I love you and care about you so much. I pray that today you will take a few minutes to sit down alone with God and ask God if you were to die today, what would your legacy be? How would you be remembered? Are those that you have encountered along life?s journey better or worse for having you in their life? It is never too late to create a legacy that you will be proud of. You can start today. But it requires that you be surrendered and open to how God wants to use your life. Never forget that when we accept Christ as our Savior, the Bible says that it is not our life any longer, it belongs to Him. That means we are His instrument to bring hope, encouragement, and everlasting life to those that He brings into our life each day.

Allowing God to use YOUR life to give hope to someone that you encounter is the absolute greatest legacy that you can leave when your life is over. Let me repeat, YOU will live on in the lives of those that you encounter throughout your life. The choice that you must make each day is what YOUR legacy will be in those lives.