How To Leave Spiritual Wealth for your Children. (Series 1)

Many Christians, like most people, aren’t wealthy — financially or spiritually. Many may live paycheck to paycheck materially, and too many live paycheck to paycheck spiritually. They struggle to enjoy divine margin in their relationship with God — surviving on a series of emotionally charged events or experiences. Kids in these homes have a unique set of issues to process when it comes to developing an intimate relationship with Christ.

Fortunately, many Christians fall on the other side of the continuum. They enjoy enormous spiritual margin in their relationship with Jesus, because they seek him daily and aim to live for his glory. The depth and maturity of their walk with Christ creates stability and richness and overflow in their families. But their abundance in Christ can present a particular set of struggles when it comes to their children developing their own passionate relationship with Jesus.

Passing on material goods to our children creates a fairly good analogy for the difficulties Christian parents often face in passing along to their offspring the spiritual wealth they’ve gained. For our discussion, let’s agree that we’re defining “wealth” as having more of something than the minimum, more than we can reasonably consume on our own. Jesus said that to whom much is given, much is expected. With that in mind, I offer the following parallels.

Difficulty of Passing on Our Wealth

There’s a big difference between becoming wealthy and having wealth from the beginning. The first knows what it’s like to have nothing — to be hungry, to wonder how you will make it month to month. The second knows none of these things — at least not experientially.

Yet it’s that hunger — the feelings of barely getting by — that tend to push a person to do the hard, disciplined work required to build up the internal muscles needed to eventually move from rags to riches. It does take “muscles”:

• Humility — that puts their pride in check and frees them up to do the thankless, self-effacing jobs that eventually give them access to the ladder of success.
• Vision — that enables them to see a better future as well as formulate a plan to get there.
• Tenacity — that pushes them over, around, or through the myriad roadblocks on their quest for a better life that scream, “No, it’s too hard!” or, “It’s not worth it!” or, “Give up now!”
• Sacrifice — that willingness to deny themselves now in order to ultimately attain what they would never get otherwise.

These internal muscles not only help a person gain material wealth, but also serve them well when it comes to protecting that wealth and multiplying it.

When typical Americans have worked hard and accumulated some healthy financial margin, it’s normal for them to want to use some of it to make their daily lives more comfortable, convenient, and safer. They don’t do this because they’re threatened by discomfort, difficulty, or risk. They’ve known plenty of all three. But now that they have some financial depth, it makes sense to use some of it to alleviate these hardships that are now optional. Because of the personal price they paid to get there, these amenities of their wealth aren’t as likely to corrupt them but simply represent ways they’re enjoying its blessings.

But if you’re a child growing up in this home, the blessings of your parents’ wealth can have a completely opposite impact on you. You have no reference point for hunger, no need for vision, no call for sacrifice. A life of abundant options is so much of a foregone conclusion that it’s hard for a child to even imagine what it would be like to not have them. If a parent isn’t careful, this context of blessing can breed an assumption of entitlement in their children. The underbelly of unearned privilege is often laziness, arrogance, selfishness, and a lack of appreciation for the sacrifice others made to make one’s life so good.

That’s why wealth has a difficult time being passed on for more than two generations from when it was originally made. The mantra has variations but basically goes like this: the first generation makes the wealth, the second one mismanages it, and the third one loses it.

We shall continue this series next week, looking at Parenting in Material Abundance.

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