Generational Christianity

 On my mother’s side, a prioritized relationship with God goes back a long way in my family. This is a common story among our brethren as beliefs and practices are passed from generation to generation. This is a wonderful thing! As the apostle John remarked: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth!” (3 Jn. 4).


However, it is easy to see how religious practices passed down repeatedly from parents to their children can be watered down to mere family tradition. Conversations about what the Bible teaches often become conversations about ‘how I was raised’. 


It is a wise proverb that reads “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Pr. 22:6). However, while rules, advice and traditions can be drilled into children by repetition and inherited by the next generation and the next… one cannot simply inherit an authentic relationship with Jesus! 


We may often use Ezekiel 18 to make the true point that guilt for sin cannot be inherited from father to son, but the opposite point can also be made from the same passage - the good deeds of the father do not belong to the son either! 


For those of us Christians who were ‘raised on the pew’ we should be very thankful for the teachings and environments we were brought up with, but we also must be careful that we do not allow our Christianity to be purely the result of family relations. 


Thanks be to God for the faith of our fathers, but more importantly we must commit to pursuing real, authentic, meaningful and personal relationships with our spiritual Father! (Jer. 9:24).

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