What Will You Pass On to Others?, Part 1

In our early years, we rarely give consideration to our legacy. After all, life has too many demands to be concerned with how our daily decisions impact the next generation. Today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll will challenge us to resist this passive position. What you're about to hear was originally presented to students preparing for full-time ministry at Dallas Theological Seminary. In this address, Chuck challenged these seminarians to defy convention and begin charting their future with the end in mind.

Chuck titled his message with a question. What will you pass on to others? I want to begin by asking you a question. Everything I have to say today will relate to the answer to this question. But first, think about it, will you? What are you leaving for the next generation? What will you pass on to those who will outlive you?

The questions may seem a little irrelevant because you're young, you are students, and you have most of your life spread out before you. And probably among the last things you think about would be those who will outlive you. But there will be many. And as you minister in the years to come, you will meet them, you'll serve them, and you'll leave them with the lasting impressions that even your death will not erase.

I want to talk about those impressions. Stephen King is a horror novel writer, as all of you know. He's rich, he's famous, and he's also very human. Neither his notoriety nor his wealth could protect him from a very serious car accident that happened a number of years ago. It was a hit and run, the other car fled. I don't recall if his car was totaled or almost, but he wound up thrown from the vehicle in a ditch, bleeding. He was in a remote area in the countryside. He was seriously injured.

Had he not been found and airlifted to a local hospital, he could easily have died. That traumatic event left him differently than he was before it happened. It was his wake-up call, as he put it. This time it wasn't some horrifying story that he created in his mind, it was an actual event that for all he knew would cripple him for the rest of his days. He wrote about it, and I have come across the piece that he wrote, and I want to read it to you. These are Stephen King's words after he had recovered in the hospital and was able to go home.

He wrote this, a couple of years ago, I found myself, I really found out what it meant that you can't take it with you. I found out while I was lying in a ditch at the side of the country road, covered with mud and blood, and with a tibia of my right leg poking out of the side of my jeans, like the branch of a tree taken down in a thunderstorm. I had a MasterCard in my wallet, but when you're lying in a ditch with broken glass in your hair and blood all over you, no one accepts MasterCard. We all know that life is ephemeral, but on this particular day, and in the months that followed, I got a painful but extremely valuable look at life's simple backstage truths. We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed when we go out, but we're just as broke. Warren Buffett going out broke. Bill Gates going out broke. Tom Hanks going out broke. Steve King broke, not a crying dime at his death. All the money you earn, all the stocks you buy, all the mutual funds you trade, all of that is mostly smoke and mirrors.

It's still going to be a quarter past getting late, whether you tell time on a Timex or a Rolex. No matter how large your bank account, no matter how many credit cards you have, sooner or later things will begin to go wrong, with the only three things you have that you can really call your own, your body, your spirit, and your mind. So I want you to consider making your life one long gift to others. And why not?

All you have is on loan anyway. All that lasts is what you pass on. Everything I have to say has to do with those last eight words of Stephen King. All you have is what you pass on. And I realize it's easy to forget that when you're involved in your studies, in ministry, preparing for a lifetime of reaching, touching, serving the lives of others. It's easy while here to be focused only on what you're getting. And that makes sense. You've come for an education.

You seek to learn things you've not known before so that you might use them in a career that stretches out before you. But I want you to remember today that all that lasts is what you pass on. It will not be your financial portfolio. It will not be your possessions.

It will not even be those precious family photos. What you will pass on, most importantly, will be a life well lived, ideally lived for others. The legacy of a series of life changing relationships that you cultivate in the years ahead.

I would even add in the years you were at the school. In case you wonder what that might look like, you need not wonder any longer. Thanks to the Apostle Paul's careful work in Romans, we find a veritable checklist of the qualities that are worth passing on from one life to another. In the latter half of Romans chapter 12, all the attention that we give to Romans usually falls on the first part of the chapter.

I'd like to emphasize the latter part. We haven't the time to cover all the verses that follow verse 8. I usually give attention to verses 1 to 8.

I'm looking at 9 through 16, actually, and I want to read the verses for you carefully and slowly. I want you to listen for characteristics in a life worth living. Paul writes in verse 9 from the New Living Translation, don't just pretend to love others, really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good. Love each other with genuine affection. Take delight in honoring each other. He goes on, never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically. Literally, the Greek says, with a zealous spirit.

I love that. Rejoice in our confident hope. Be patient in trouble and keep on praying. When God's people are in need, be ready to help. Always be eager to practice hospitality.

The list just goes on and on, doesn't it? Bless those who persecute you. Don't curse them.

Pray that God will bless them. Be happy with those who are happy and weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with each other. Don't be too proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.

And don't think you know it all. Candidly, I don't know of a better list to shape one's life with than that list. I once preached on that section.

I called it Christianity 101. It's the living out of the life of Christ emphasizing these various character traits that are worth passing on and yet are so easily forgotten in the midst of our busy, preoccupied world. Not surprisingly, love takes center stage right away, as it should, for it is the pervasive trait that colors all others. So Paul, though he doesn't go into such detail as in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul highlights love and not only lands there but stays there for a little longer than with any of the other characteristics.

Let me say a couple of things about love. The best definition I've come across is that love is seeking the highest good of the other person. It's not making the other person comfortable. It's not telling him or her what he or she wants to hear. It isn't treating another like he or she treated you. It isn't looking the other way when another does wrong. Love sometimes must be tough, even stern and always relentless. Other times, admittedly, it is soft and it is affirming, reassuring and full of forgiveness and compassion.

Why is it so important? As I said earlier, it colors all of these other traits. John Stott puts it this way, each staccato imperative adds a fresh ingredient to the apostles recipe for love here in Romans 12.

When it is lived out, it wears these various garments. The first is, as you will see in this passage, it is un-hypocritical. Literally, the verse reads agape unhupacritas, love un-hypocritical. So the first side of the coin is sincerity, a love that's sincere. It isn't play-acting.

It isn't phony-bologna. It isn't act one way and think another. It isn't something with hidden motives as we act out. Love is not theater. John Murray writes, if love is the sum of virtues and hypocrisy the epitome of vice, what a contradiction to bring these two together. Let's face it, our culture is saturated with hypocrisy.

It goes all the way to the state, to the nation's capital. We see it on display on our televisions at night. Polish the image while hiding the reality. We use words that impress, but the fact is we do not often mean them. So love is to be sincere.

Second, it is to be discerning. That's the other side of the same coin of love. Love is not blind sentiment. It has backbone. It doesn't check its brains at the door when it walks into the room of good and evil. Love clings to truth.

It bonds like glue. Remember, it's what you pass on that will last. Make sure that it includes a life of love. People who most impacted my life while in the most impressive years of my earlier days were those who truly loved me. They loved me enough to tell me the truth. They loved me enough to look past those things that should not have been.

They loved me often in spite of myself. There are several other components and they are all set forth in this passage. He moves quickly to devoted affection. You'll see that here in verses 9 through 16. Verse 10 refers to devoted affection. Paul draws upon terms that are usually reserved for the family. Familial affection.

Phil Adelphia. The same kind of devotion that you find when family members are in harmony with one another. Let that be true in the family of God, he's saying. Deep, familial affection, warmth and depth.

And second, he mentions in verse 10 to honor one another. One of my favorite concepts. It works its way out in listening when they speak. Caring about how they feel. Paying attention to their opinions.

And showing gratitude for their lives and saying so. So important that we be demonstrative in these qualities. Third is one of my favorites, enthusiasm. Passion. This is not a shallow, superficial excitement like you'd see at a ball game. This is long lasting optimism. True zeal about the work of the ministry. I urge you in that. I have a friend who said he learned at the school he attended that he did his best preaching when he preached on tiptoe.

You live your life on tiptoe when you live it with zeal and enthusiasm. Some time ago I came across a work titled The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander. Benjamin Zander at that time was the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. Also a teacher, a professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. He wrote this in a part of his book.

Listen to what he says about enthusiasm. I love this example. I had listened to one of my students who was a pianist. I watched her perform Bach Suite in D minor. And I realized that the student was able to play the piece and could handle it theoretically.

I also saw a young pianist playing Chopin's Prelude in my master's class. And although we had worked right up to the edge of realizing the overarching concept of the piece, his performance remained, well, earthbound, shall we say. He understood it intellectually. He could have explained it to someone theoretically. But he was unable to convey the emotional energy that the true language of the music held within it. So as I noticed it, I saw that his body was firmly centered in the upright position on this piano stool.

And so I blurted out. Can you imagine in the middle of this man's piece? The trouble is you are a tuba player, I yelled in the class. I encouraged him to allow his whole body to flow sideways from one cheek to the other on the bench. And he would catch the wave of the music. And the shape of his own body would convey the enthusiasm of the music. Several in the audience gasped when I made my comment.

But later they felt the emotional dart hit home as a new distinction was born. The one buttock player, he made the mention. He said we had in the class that day the CEO of a company from Ohio who was there with us. And he wrote me later and said I was so moved by what you said, I went home and I formed my whole company around the idea of a one buttock company, which is a whole new concept. I'm suggesting a one buttock ministry that you might think about.

You've got to be careful who you suggest that to, however. He goes on to talk about a cellist. He said I met Jacqueline Dupree in the 1950s when I was 20 and she was only 15, get this. She was just a school girl who blossomed into the greatest cellist of her generation. What enthusiasm! Her performance of the two cellos by Schubert as she played a duet with another stayed with me for the rest of my life. When she was just six years old, the story goes, someone saw her running down the corridor with her little cello held above her head. The custodian looked at her and thought he saw a face of relief as she was grinning from ear to ear. And so he referred to that saying how wonderful it must have been when you played. She said, no, I haven't played yet, but I look forward to, I'm just about to play my piece.

There was an excitement before she even went in to play her piece. I would love to light a fire of excitement under many a young preacher I endured while listening to as they go along with their very accurate exposition of a passage but lacking an enthusiasm. Don't leave that out.

Don't forget that. It's amazing what happens in the pulpit and how it affects the pew. Howie Hendricks used to say, a mist in the pulpit puts a fog in the pew.

A sleepy preacher puts people out right away and therefore I urge you to think seriously about a life of passion. When you share that, literally people do not forget. Then he mentions patience and the importance of enduring hard times and being steadfast in prayer, something that is so easily, easily forgotten in our lives. You have a body of people who hold you up in prayer.

You're a rich individual. Billy Graham used to talk about the one who would get the greater reward himself or the lady who prayed for him throughout his ministry back home. And he was quick to say the greater reward will go to her. Encourage great commitment to prayer in your ministry. It will outlive you and it will not be forgotten by others. Chuck Swindoll has reached the fourth point in his message, but there's much more teaching ahead. He's speaking to an audience of seminary students and addressing an issue that relates to all of us. This is Insight for Living. We're looking at Romans Chapter 12 and Chuck titled his message with a relevant question.

What will you pass on to others? It's the fifth in a six-part series called The Pros and Cons of Ministry. Remember that every sermon you hear on Insight for Living is paired with Chuck's online study notes. We call these free resources Searching the Scriptures Studies. To take a deeper look at Romans Chapter 12 and the other passages Chuck mentioned today, go to insightworld.org slash studies.

Look for the series called The Pros and Cons of Ministry. Much of the wise counsel we heard today originates with one of the greatest leaders of the early church, the Apostle Paul. You might be surprised to learn that Chuck wrote a biography on Paul. His life is an inspiration to leaders and followers alike, and the book is available for purchase right now. The title is Paul, a Man of Grace and Grit.

To purchase Chuck Swindoll's biography on Paul, go to insight.org slash store or give us a call. If you're listening in the United States, call 800-772-8888. These daily visits with Chuck are made possible through the generous gifts of grateful listeners like you. If it's been a while since you've been in touch with us or perhaps you've never reached out to give a donation, why not do that today? It doesn't take a lot of effort, but your gesture of generosity, whether big or small, will have an eternal impact on those who hear the truth of God's word delivered on Insight for Living. To make a donation today, go online to insight.org or call us.

If you're listening in the United States, call 800-772-8888. So what will you pass on to others? I'm Bill Meyer inviting you to join us when Chuck Swindoll talks about your legacy next time on Insight for Living. The preceding message, What Will You Pass On To Others?, was copyrighted in 2022 and 2023, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2023 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.