God Has No Grandchildren
Read John 4:1-54.
I don't have personal experience yet, but I'm told by those who know (mostly my parents) that grandchildren are better than children. One wise sage put it this way: "Grandchildren are the reward God gives you for not killing your own children." I have people tell me that the thing they love most about grandchildren is that you can spoil them and then send them home—where their parents have to deal with the fallout! Most of the world seems agreed: grandchildren are fantastic.
So with something that good, you'd think God would invest in it as well, wouldn't you? And yet, as the old saw goes, God has no grandchildren. We see that clearly in the story of the Samaritan woman. She is a lost soul, a person Jesus goes in search of and engages with in a conversation that tackles a lot of different subjects. When the disciples arrive, the woman goes back to tell the Samaritan villagers (the same people who just earlier that day had shunned her) about Jesus. And then Jesus does the unthinkable: he stays with the Samaritans (no good Jew would do that) for a couple of days.
It's then that the "grandchildren" issue comes in, because at the end of Jesus' visit with them, they tell the woman this: "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world" (4:42). They had believed in Jesus because of her word; basically, they had believed in her faith in him. Now that they've directly encountered Jesus, they believe in him directly.
I don't have personal experience yet, but I'm told by those who know (mostly my parents) that grandchildren are better than children. One wise sage put it this way: "Grandchildren are the reward God gives you for not killing your own children." I have people tell me that the thing they love most about grandchildren is that you can spoil them and then send them home—where their parents have to deal with the fallout! Most of the world seems agreed: grandchildren are fantastic.
So with something that good, you'd think God would invest in it as well, wouldn't you? And yet, as the old saw goes, God has no grandchildren. We see that clearly in the story of the Samaritan woman. She is a lost soul, a person Jesus goes in search of and engages with in a conversation that tackles a lot of different subjects. When the disciples arrive, the woman goes back to tell the Samaritan villagers (the same people who just earlier that day had shunned her) about Jesus. And then Jesus does the unthinkable: he stays with the Samaritans (no good Jew would do that) for a couple of days.
It's then that the "grandchildren" issue comes in, because at the end of Jesus' visit with them, they tell the woman this: "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world" (4:42). They had believed in Jesus because of her word; basically, they had believed in her faith in him. Now that they've directly encountered Jesus, they believe in him directly.
That's what has to happen for each of us. Believing in Jesus because of someone else's faith will only get you so far. That's "grandchild" faith because it's a generation removed from direct contact with the Savior. What Jesus calls us to is direct faith, not faith in the faith of someone else. I can remember the moment in my own life when I realized that. I had lived on the faith of my parents, as most of us do in the early parts of our life. I believed because they believed. I went to church because they went (and I wasn't given a choice). But in a basement classroom during a week of Vacation Bible School, I heard the call of God to my heart, to become a child of God rather than a grandchild. God has no grandchildren, only children. We must believe he is the savior on our own, not based on what someone else has told us.
So...where are you in the faith family? Child or grandchild?
"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!" (1 John 3:1).
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