And I said, “O Lord God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, let your ear be attentive and your eyes open, to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel, which we have sinned against you. Even I and my father’s house have sinned.” (Nehemiah 1:5-6, ESV)

Nehemiah’s prayer, offered over several days, was not only the recognition that his current generation was living apart from the will and direction of God, but also a confession that his ancestors had done the same. Nehemiah’s reality of captivity in a foreign nation was not the direct result of his actions or the actions of his fellow Israelites, but the consequence of the actions of those who lived long before he was born.

In our culture we are constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the effects of our corporate actions on our progeny. “Reduce carbon emissions, stop growing the national debt and our personal debt, reduce the amount to sugar intake and lower your body mass index, use less healthcare, don’t cut old growth forests…” From my perspective I see these pervasive and persistent cries for repentance for “the sake of the children” largely ignored. We pretend to care, but we are really much more interested in our own common comforts. Though most don’t desire our children to suffer and do really want them to have a “better” life than we experience, we are unwilling to make the necessary sacrifices to make a real difference.

This is most evident, I think, in our spiritual lives. We may make some minor adjustments to our lifestyle to “slow global warming” but the major changes demanded by the presence and power of the Holy Spirit are too foreign to our pampered existence to be acted upon. Since we are largely unwilling to “leave all and follow Jesus” we are neither model spiritual maturity to our children nor challenge them to lives of desperate obedience to Christ. The outcome of parental apathy and disobedience regarding the commands of Christ is a heritage that will, in the end, invite the same kind of reality as Nehemiah experienced: desolation of our spiritual home and contemporaries who are largely disinterested in doing anything to repair the lost relationship with God.

The wonderful part of God’s character is that he is not overcome by our generational drift and he is willing and able to restore to himself all those who call upon his name. We would do well to ponder the fact that the God of Christianity has been declared dead again and again over the last one hundred fifty years and yet still seems to be able to engage people in every culture and place in a real and life-changing manner. For my part, my grandparents were not driven by obedience to Jesus, yet God interdicted the life of my parents and gave them a passion to follow him, no matter what the cost. This is my heritage, one that I am determined to do all I can to pass along to my children. To each generation is given the choice to receive or reject the Lordship of Jesus, it is my prayer that those presently alive in Jesus would be about the business of doing all they can to make sure that Nehemiah’s prayer does not need to be repeated.

Make it so Lord.