Inheritance

An elderly woman went exploring near her village in Romania. From a stream bed, she pulled a 7.7 lb. (3.5 kg.) rock which looked to her like an average stone. Without much further thought, she took it home and used it as a door stop where it sat for decades. Then she died.

When Elena, her relative inherited the house, she wondered if the rock might be a semi-precious stone. She sold the rock to the Romanian state who had it evaluated by specialists at a Polish museum. The experts assessed this unusual stone as the "world's largest Rumanite amber nugget." It's now recognized as a Romanian national treasure worth over a million dollars! But the elder Romanian woman died having no idea her doorstop made her rich! (Note: Ironically, burglars had broken into the elder woman's house and stolen a few small pieces of gold jewelry but had completely missed the precious amber doorstop!)

Isn't this how we tend to view the fantastic spiritual riches God gives us in salvation?

An article in The Wall Street Journal warns: “Your 401(k) is up. Don’t let it go to your head.”

Checking your 401(k) is the feel-good move of the year. After the stock-market rally, it now feels safe to peek at your 401(k) balance again. That is a relief for the millions of people whose retirement accounts are still recovering from the bruising they took in 2022, when the S&P 500’s total return was -18.11%.

Don’t let your self-worth balloon along with your net worth, financial advisers warn. They say the overconfidence that comes with making big gains can cause people to take bigger risks with their investments. And that makes us feel like we’re savvier investors than we really are.

Neuroscience backs up the idea of overconfidence being a problem. Research on the brain has found that increases in dopamine, a brain chemical that likely gets released when you see large returns in your account, can lead to more financial risk-taking.

Possible Preaching Angle:

That’s good financial advice, but the Bible also warns that, more importantly, it’s good spiritual advice.

A tourist in Las Vegas hit the jackpot on a slot machine, but he was never informed due to a malfunction in the machine, according to gaming officials. Now after an exhaustive search, the Nevada Gaming Control Board says they have identified the winner of the nearly $230,000 prize.

A man, later identified by officials as Robert Taylor, played a slot machine at Treasure Island Hotel and Casino. Due to a communications error, according to gaming officials, the slot machine malfunctioned and didn't notify Taylor or casino personnel that he was a winner. By the time the error was noticed, casino personnel were unable to identify the man, who was from out of state. The gaming board took on an exhaustive search to make sure the man would be awarded his prize.

To identify the winner, gaming officials combed through hours of surveillance videos from several casinos, interviewed witnesses, sifted through electronic purchase records, and even analyzed ride share data provided by the Nevada Transportation Authority and a rideshare company. The jackpot winner was determined to be Taylor, a tourist from Arizona.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We too are the inheritors of a great wealth, the Kingdom of God, but we go through life living unaware. How would it change the way we live today if we truly understand the vast riches of tomorrow?

Before her death in January 2020, Cathy Boone had been living on the streets for years, struggling with drug abuse and mental illness. But for her father, Jack Spithill, said the tragedy was multiplied tenfold by the revelation that she died without collecting any of the inheritance she was due after her mother’s death, an amount that totaled over $900,000.

Her father said, “It just didn’t make any sense to me. That money was just sitting there, and she needed help in the worst way. I think my failure to recognize her mental health issues. I kind of gave up on her because of the drugs and I shouldn’t have done that.”

Spithill said that after he lost touch with Boone, he was unsure if she even knew she was entitled to an inheritance, or if so, how to go about collecting. Court records say that after her mother died, estate representatives tried to contact Boone via phone and email, spoke to other family members, sent her messages via Facebook, and even ran ads in the newspaper … to no effect. They even hired a private investigator, but came up empty.

That Boone was entitled to any sort of money was news to those who knew her best. “She was a special person as far as I’m concerned,” said Donny Holder, a friend who shared cigarettes and coffee with Boone at the local McDonald’s. “She was a sweetheart … I fell in love with her.”

Local public guardian Chris Rosin says Boone might’ve gotten help if the court could’ve established her inability to care for herself, but added it’s a steep benchmark to clear without criminal charges or urgent medical needs. Johnathan Kvale, another friend with similar struggles said, “We’re not just statistics. These are good folks. It’s just circumstances.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Inheritance - Regardless of anyone's earthly circumstances, if they put their faith in Christ and receive the gift of salvation, they have an eternal inheritance. 2) Body of Christ; Caring – As members of the church, we should all be willing to pay special attention to the helpless whom God brings into our lives.

Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth about $220 million. The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin.

The problem is that years ago Mr. Thomas lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations—to no avail. Thomas said, “I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

Bitcoin has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time. But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent—currently worth around $140 billion—appear to be in lost or stranded wallets. Brad Yasar has put his hard drives, containing millions of dollars in Bitcoin, in vacuum-sealed bags out of sight. He said, “I don’t want to be reminded every day … of what I lost.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This sad story is in sharp contrast with the security of our inheritance that is guaranteed in heaven. “An inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for you” (1 Pet. 1:4).

Clark Cothern, in a sermon titled “Joyfully Rescued,” talks about the inheritance promised by God to his children:

Mom kept saying, “After I’m gone, keep your eyes out for the gold.” My sister and I chalked this admonition up to a little memory loss. But, just in case, we kept our eyes open. As we sorted through Mom’s things shortly after she went to heaven. We looked under drawers, behind cabinets; anywhere we thought she might have hidden some gold, but we didn’t really expect to find any.

Then I went to Mom’s bank to get the life insurance policy from her safety deposit box. In a tiny privacy room, all by myself, I opened the long narrow metal box. Under the life insurance policy was a brown paper lunch bag. There was a rubber band wrapped around it which crumbled into tiny pieces because it was so old. I opened the crinkly paper sack. There were two, 3-inch long rolls of gold coins. I laughed out loud.

As you can imagine the contents of that lunch bag were extremely valuable. My sister and I used that money to help us prepare Mom’s house for market. That gold was still just as shiny as the day Mom had purchased it over 40 years earlier. And it was a lot more valuable than the day it had been purchased. It had been kept safe for my sister and me, as part of our inheritance. We hadn’t done anything to earn it and yet it now belonged to us.

Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1:4 that our spiritual inheritance, worth far more than gold, will one day be ours. Our inheritance will never decay or fade. It is growing more valuable the older we get. Jesus Christ did all the work for it and then banked it in heaven where he is keeping it safe.

Mr. Jay Speights of America discovered that he is royal. He took a DNA test and the results popped up as being of royal descent. The funny thing is that Speights grew up in New Jersey. He lives in an apartment. He does not even own a car. But now he’s a prince.

NPR reports that he visited his long-lost country and was welcomed home as royalty. Another paper reported, “When he first arrived, he saw what looked like a festival, hundreds of people dancing and playing instruments and singing. It took him several minutes to realize it was a welcome party—for him.” Here’s an excerpt from his interview on NPR:

Steve Inskeep (host): Royal DNA? Mr. Speights is a prince in the small West African country of Benin. His family had been trying to learn the African side of their lineage for decades, and at last, he had an answer. So naturally, he got on a plane.

Speights: Next thing you know, I'm in Benin, being crowned as a prince. It was that easy.

Inskeep: The royal family prepared a festival for his homecoming. They hung up banners. They held a parade. And because the prince had no experience with prince-ing, the royal family sent him to a so-called prince school.

Speights: What may have added to the intensity of emotion was that it was my father's birthday. And to land there on my father's birthday was just unbelievable. And I tell you, my father's presence was with me. I could see him and feel him.

Possible Preaching Angles: When we come to Christ we discover we are a child of God, adopted as royalty into God’s family.

If you've ever had to wait in a long line at your local Starbucks, you probably already know—millennials spend a lot of money on coffee. But it turns out many are spending more cash on caffeine than investing in their future. According to a reports from Acorns Money Matters, 41 percent of nearly 2,000 millennials—individuals born in the early 1980s through the early 2000s—surveyed admitted to spending more on their morning brew than contributing toward their retirement plan.

One millennial from Phoenix, Arizona put it this way:

I'm not putting money away because I'm not making money, so maybe that shift toward more people in school longer and going back to school is connected. We live in the moment maybe more than others, so that concept of thinking about the future or retirement isn't necessarily as big of a deal as it was in the past.

But it's not just coffee where millennials are making poor financial decisions. The survey says that just five percent of young millennials (ages 18-23) are investing at all. But on the flip side, 39 percent feel anxious about their financial future. According to the report, the average American spends approximately $1,100 a year, or $3 each day, on coffee.

Possible Preaching Angles: The point of the story is not a negative portrayal of millennials, but the fact that we all need a heavenly focus in our daily life. 1) Rewards; Self-denial; Christians should give serious thought to storing up treasures in heaven by giving up fleeting pleasures. 2) Inheritance; Security; Earthly savings are no guarantee of financial security due to these uncertain times, but anything entrusted to God is absolutely safe.

Imagine an eight-year-old boy playing with a toy truck and then it breaks. He is disconsolate and cries out to his parents to fix it. Yet as he's crying, his father says to him, "A distant relative you've never met has just died and left you one hundred million dollars." What will the child's reaction be? He will just cry louder until his truck is fixed. He does not have enough cognitive capacity to realize his true condition and be consoled.

In the same way, Christians lack the spiritual capacity to realize all we have in Jesus. This is the reason Paul prays that God would give Christians the spiritual ability to grasp the height, depth, breadth, and length of Christ's salvation (Eph. 3:16-19; Eph. 1:17-18). In general, our lack of joy is as Shakespeare wrote: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves" (Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2). We are like the eight-year-old boy who rests his happiness in his "stars"—his circumstances—rather than recognizing what we have in Christ.

Imagine you're a billionaire, and you have three ten-dollar bills in your wallet. You get out of a cab, and you hand the driver one of the bills for an eight-dollar fare. Later in the day you look in and find out there's only one ten-dollar bill there, and you say, "Either I dropped a ten-dollar bill somewhere, or I gave the taxi driver two bills."

What are you going to do? Are you going to get all upset? Are you going to the police and demand they search the city for the cabdriver? No, you are going to shrug. You're a billionaire. You lost ten dollars. So what? You are too rich to be concerned about that kind of loss.

This week, somebody criticized you. Something you bought or invested in turned out to be less valuable than you thought. Something you wanted to happen didn't go the way you wanted it to—these are real losses. But what are you going to do, if you're a Christian? Will this setback disrupt your contentment with life? Will you shake your fist at God? Toss and turn at night? If so, I submit that it's because you don't know how truly rich you are. If you're that upset about your status with other people, if you're constantly lashing out at people for hurting your feelings, you might call it a lack of self-control or a lack of self-esteem, and it is. But more fundamentally, you have totally lost touch with your identity. As a Christian, you're a spiritual billionaire and you're wringing your hands over ten dollars.

In his 2010 memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair shares the following story:

A friend of mine whose parents were immigrants, Jews from Europe who came to America in search of safety, told me this story. His parents lived and worked in New York. They were not well off. His father died when he was young. His mother lived on, and in time my friend succeeded and became wealthy. He often used to offer his mother the chance to travel outside America. She never did. When eventually she died, they went back to recover the safety box where she kept her jewelry. They found there another box. There was no key. So they had to drill it open. They wondered what precious jewel must be in it. They lifted the lid. There was wrapping and more wrapping and finally an envelope. Intrigued, they opened it. In the envelope were her U.S. citizenship papers. Nothing more. That was the jewel, more precious to her than any other possession. That was what she treasured most.

George Patten was an 8-year-old kid who told his friends he had shaken the hand of the new president. "Did not," they probably jeered. "Did so!" he probably shot back. And so it went, back and forth, back and forth, as it so often does with kids.

The new president little George Patten was talking about was Abraham Lincoln, and the year was 1861. George insisted that he'd shaken Lincoln's hand the year before in Springfield, Illinois, when George was with his father, a journalist. But the little boy's classmates just wouldn't believe him. Finally, George's teacher wrote a letter to President Lincoln to discover the truth. Surprisingly, Lincoln wrote back. His note was short and sweet:

Executive Mansion, March 19, 1861.

Whom it may concern,

I did see and talk with master George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois.

Respectfully, A Lincoln.

Sometimes it is hard to believe the places to which ordinary people can go—where they can find themselves, who they can meet. Take us, for example. We who are Christians are taught to see ourselves in a whole new way in the Bible. "Once you were not a people," Peter wrote, "but now you are the people of God." Jesus even taught us to call God "Our Father in heaven." And in Ephesians 3:10, Paul says something altogether shocking—that we who know Christ are so favored by God that the angels stare in wonder!

The article in The Washington Post, began with these words: "The king folds her own laundry, chauffeurs herself around Washington in a 1992 Honda, and answers her own phone. Her boss's phone, too." The article was about Peggielene Bartels, secretary to the Ghanian embassy in Washington for 30 years. She's originally from Otuam, Ghana, a small city of about 7,000, and her story is a fascinating one.

When the 90-year-old king of Otuam, Ghana, died, the elders did what they always have done: a ritual to determine the next king. They prayed and poured schnapps on the ground while they read the names of the king's 25 relatives. When steam rose from the schnapps on the ground, the name that they were reading at that moment would be the new king—and that's exactly what happened when they read Peggielene's name.

So now Peggielene is a king—yes, a king, not a queen (when she pointed out to the elders that she is a woman, they replied by saying the office of king is the post that was open). When she goes back to Ghana, she has a driver and a chef and an eight-bedroom palace (though it needs repairs). She has power to resolve disputes, appoint elders, and manages more than 1,000 acres of family-owned land. "I'm a big-time king, you know," she told the reporter. When she returned for her coronation, they carried her through the streets on a litter. She even wore a heavy gold crown.

Paul Schwartzman, the reporter, wrote, "In the humdrum of ordinary life, people periodically yearn for something unexpected, some kind of gilded escape, delivered, perhaps, by an unanticipated inheritance or a winning lottery ticket." Peggielene got the unexpected.

As you think about Peggielene's story, consider what the Bible says to ordinary believers like you and me: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ." We are blessed with great riches—"spiritual blessings"—that have elevated us to a different status altogether. In fact, it is Peter who says we are "a royal priesthood."

Being completely conformed to the likeness of God's Son is something that we look forward to in the future, although the transformation is happening now gradually. Being adopted among many brothers is something that we have now. The minute you become a Christian, you have intimacy of relationship. You have an unconditional relationship. You become wealthy, because everything that Jesus Christ has accomplished is transferred to you. You become beautiful and spiritually rich in him.

Some people are put off by Paul's language of adoption because it's gender insensitive. They argue, "Wouldn't it be better to say that we become sons and daughters of God?" It would, but that misses the whole point. Some time ago, a woman helped me understand this. She was raised in a non-Western family from a very traditional culture. There was only one son in the family, and it was understood in her culture that he would receive most of the family's provisions and honor. In essence, they said, "He's the son; you're just a girl." That's just the way it was.

One day she was studying a passage on adoption in Paul's writings. She suddenly realized that the apostle was making a revolutionary claim. Paul lived in a traditional culture just like she did. He was living in a place where daughters were second-class citizens. When Paul said—out of his own traditional culture—that we are all sons in Christ, he was saying that there are no second-class citizens in God's family. When you give your life to Christ and become a Christian, you receive all the benefits a son enjoys in a traditional culture. As a white male, I've never been excluded like that. As a result, I didn't see the sweetness of this welcome. I didn't recognize all the beauty of God's subversive and revolutionary promise that raises us to the highest honor by adopting us as his sons.

Our adoption means we are loved like Christ is loved. We are honored like he is honored—every one of us—no matter what. Your circumstances cannot hinder or threaten that promise. In fact, your bad circumstances will only help you understand and even claim the beauty of that promise. The more you live out who you are in Christ, the more you become like him in actuality. Paul is not promising you better life circumstances; he is promising you a far better life. He's promising you a life of greatness. He is promising you a life of joy. He's promising you a life of humility. He's promising you a life of nobility. He's promising you a life that goes on forever.

In October 2005, Moses Bittok celebrated an experience he had waited a lifetime to achieve: he became a U.S. citizen. That alone would have been enough to give the native Kenyan the happiest day of his life, but it was just a prelude.

On the way home from the Des Moines, Iowa, federal building, Bittok stopped at a gas station to see the winning numbers in the Iowa state "Hot Lotto Game." He was surprised to find out that he had won $1.89 million.

"It's almost like you adopted a new country and then they netted you $1.8 million," said Bittok. "It doesn't happen anywhere—I guess only in America."

In the same way, new life in Christ gives us citizenship into the kingdom of God and a heavenly reward.

If you are successful, it becomes possible for you to leave an inheritance for others. But if you desire to create a legacy, then you need to leave something in others. When you think unselfishly and invest in others, you gain the opportunity to create a legacy that will outlive you.

Researching your family tree can be a fun and rewarding hobby. For one Minnesota man, it was a life-changing experience.

Marty Johnson knew he was the product of two young college students who had a brief affair. Neither parent was prepared to deal with raising a child, so Johnson was given up for adoption and grew up in a loving home in Minnesota. Years later as an adult, he started digging through past records and got in contact with his birth-mother.

Then a letter arrived one day that said, “Welcome to the Ogike dynasty! You come from a noble and prestigious family.” The letter went on to explain that Johnson was the next in line to inherit the position of village chief from his biological father, John Ogike, the current chief of Aboh village in Nigeria.

Johnson flew to Nigeria to meet his new family. He went from having no knowledge about any blood relatives to a noisy celebration in the village. There he was united with brothers and sisters, numerous aunts and uncles, cousins, and of course, his father.

In a similar way, Jesus is God’s wonderful surprise letter declaring that we are his sons, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.