The New Inheritance

The other day I met someone who’d recently retired from work. I was thinking how lovely to be starting a whole new phase of life with the opportunity to do things you’d like to do but never had time; and time to spend with people, maybe precious grandchildren. We got talking about health and doing the best to keep healthy. This person then told me that they hadn’t much longer to live now. When I asked how they knew, they said that no one in their family had ever lived beyond the age of seventy-two, so they knew that they wouldn’t do so either.

I felt quite shocked and sad that this person didn’t know that they could be set free from this generational inheritance and enjoy the glorious inheritance that we have in Jesus, as our verses for today say (1 Peter 1:18-19), and Hebrews 9:15 also confirms as follows:

‘That is why he is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant’.

In my own family line for at least the previous three generations the husband of the eldest female died prematurely, leaving my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother as widows with young children to bring up. It was one of the first things that the Lord dealt with in ministry for me, and I know, and rejoice, that God has set me (and my husband) free from that curse.

I’m sure when Peter wrote his letter he was talking to the Jews, that they could be free from their inheritance of striving to obey God’s law, and to the Gentiles about their potential freedom from a pagan and godless society. That isn’t just spiritual truth. It has a practical outworking, which is glorious.

Let’s ask God to show us today if we’re still living in an empty inheritance that comes from our ancestors, and enable us to enter into all that God intended for us when Jesus shed His blood for our ransom.

Prayer: Dear Father, thank You that Jesus died and shed His precious blood to set us free from the empty way of life that was handed down to us. Please show me today if I’m not fully living in the glorious inheritance that You intended for me, and help me to enter more fully into it. Amen.