How To Build A Legacy

Build on Christ. Build with Christ. Build His Church.

We are approaching a season in which the El Nino rains are expected to come. And when the rains come, we are told to prepare. We inspect our roofs. We clear our drainage. We reinforce our structures. We make sure that what we have built can withstand the storm.

Because a storm has a way of revealing things.

When the rains come, you discover which buildings had strong foundations and which ones only looked strong from the outside.
And Jesus tells us that our lives are exactly the same.

In Matthew 7, Jesus tells the story of two builders. One built his house on the rock. The other built his house on sand. The rain fell. The floods came. The winds blew and beat against both houses.

Notice something important:

The storm came to both.

Being a Christian does not mean you will never experience a storm.
The difference was not whether the storm came.
The difference was what the house had been built upon.
And today, as we gather to celebrate the life of my father, I want us to ask ourselves one question:

How do you build a legacy?

My father was born in 1967. In 1992, he encountered Jesus Christ, and he was born again.
And his life was never the same again.
He was not a perfect man.
But he was a godly man.
And there is a difference.
A perfect man does not exist.
But a person can choose to surrender an imperfect life to a perfect God.
My father built a legacy.
So today I want to ask: How did he build it?

And I believe Scripture gives us three answers.
Build on Christ.
Build with Christ.
Build His Church.

BUILD ON CHRIST

The first thing we must understand is that before we can talk about the quality of a building, we have to talk about its foundation.
The Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11:
“For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
There is only one foundation.

Not morality.
Not good works.
Not education.
Not wealth.
Not a good family.
Not a successful career.
Not being a nice person.
Not coming to church.
Not being born into a Christian family.

The foundation is Jesus Christ.
Jesus Himself says in John 3:3:
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
You must be born again.
And Romans 10:9 tells us:
“If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

This is where legacy begins.
Not with what you accomplish.
With who you belong to.
Because you can build the most impressive life imaginable and still build it on the wrong foundation.
And eventually, the storm comes.

So the first question I want to ask everyone here today is not, What have you achieved?
It is not, What will people say about you when you die?
It is not even, What will your children remember about you?
The first question is:
Are you in Christ?

Because when my father’s life is viewed through the lens of eternity, the greatest thing about him is not his career.
It is not the things he owned.
It is not even the people who loved him.
It is that he belonged to Jesus.
And because he belonged to Jesus, everything else he built could have an eternal foundation.

BUILD WITH CHRIST
Here is where things become more challenging.
It is possible to build on Christ and still build poorly.
And this is where Paul speaks to us in 1 Corinthians 3.
He says:
“By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder… But each one should build with care.”

And then he speaks about different building materials:
“If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire.”

This is where I want to speak particularly to Christians.
Because perhaps you have accepted Christ.
Perhaps you are born again.
Perhaps Jesus is your foundation.
But what are you building with?
Because the storm does not merely reveal the foundation.
It reveals the quality of the building.
And I think some of us have to ask ourselves very uncomfortable questions.

What happens when God does not do what we asked Him to do?
What happens when the prayer is not answered in the way we expected?
What happens when the job doesn’t come?
When the marriage doesn’t happen?
When the child doesn’t come?
When the promotion doesn’t come?
When the diagnosis changes?
When the person we prayed for dies?
What happens to our perception of God then?

I know something about that question because we lived it.
There was a prayer chain for my father.
For two weeks, people prayed.
People believed.
People interceded.
People trusted God.
And then, for a moment, it appeared that the prayer had been answered.
Dad was discharged from hospital.
Some thought, Thank God. He is coming home.
And then, only a week later, he died.

How do you reconcile that?
How do you reconcile two weeks of prayer with a funeral?
How do you reconcile believing God for healing with standing here mourning someone you believed God would heal?
I don’t necessarily have a neat explanation for that.
And perhaps I don’t need one.
Because Christianity does not promise that we will always understand God’s ways.
It asks us whether, when we cannot understand His hand, we will still trust His heart.

That is the difference between trusting an outcome and trusting God’s character.
Some of us have built our faith on a particular outcome.
God is good because He gave me the job.
God is good because He gave me the husband.
God is good because He gave me the child.
God is good because He healed my father.
But what happens when He doesn’t?
Does God stop being good?

Or were we trusting the outcome more than we were trusting God?
A grass mentality says:
“God is good if the story ends the way I want it to.”
But gold says:
“God is good because God is good.”
Gold goes through fire.
It is not destroyed by the fire.
It is refined by the fire.
And so I have had to ask myself:
Can I look at every possible version of this story and still conclude that God is good?

If Dad had recovered and lived another twenty years, would God have been good?
Yes.
If Dad had recovered but lived with disability, would God have been good?
Yes.
If God had healed him completely, would God have been good?
Yes.
If God chose to take him home, is God still good?
Yes. And another yes.

Every version of this story ends with God being good.
That is what it means to build with Christ.
It means that my faith does not have to wait for the ending before I decide who God is.
I don’t have to stand in the middle of the storm and renegotiate God’s character.
I already know who He is.
Because He has told me who He is.
His goodness does not begin when I receive good news.
And His goodness does not end when I receive bad news.

Paul says in Romans 8 that nothing—not death nor life—can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.
So whether we live or whether we die, Christ is glorified.
As Paul said:
“For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”

That is gold.
That is what it means to build with Christ.

It is saying:
“Lord, I will tell You what I desire. I will pray boldly. I will ask You for healing. I will believe You for a miracle. But I will leave room for You to be God.”

I can tell God what I want without telling God what He must do.
And there is a peace that comes when you finally surrender the outcome.
Philippians calls it the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.
That is the peace I am standing in today.
Not because this does not hurt.
It hurts.
We miss Dad.
We are grieving.
There are questions that may never be answered on this side of eternity.
But grief does not have to become unbelief.
I can grieve and still trust.
I can cry and still believe.
I can fail to understand and still worship.
I can miss my father and still say:
God is good.

And perhaps that is part of what the fire reveals.
Not whether we can avoid suffering.
But what kind of faith we have built inside the suffering.
So examine your building.
What happens to your perception of God when life doesn’t go your way?

Does bad news change who God is to you?
The fire will test the building eventually.
So build accordingly.

BUILD HIS CHURCH
And then we come to the final part of legacy.
If we build on Christ, and we learn to build with Christ, then what are we building for?
We build His Church.
Jesus tells His disciples to go and make disciples of all nations.
The Christian life was never meant to terminate with us.
We receive Christ so that we can reveal Christ.
We are blessed so that we can become a blessing.
We are discipled so that we can disciple.
We are saved so that we can become witnesses.
And this was my father’s final wish for my brother and me.
Serve God.

That was what he wanted for us.
Not simply to be successful.
Not simply to have good careers.
Not simply to accumulate things.
He wanted us to serve God.

And I think I understand that wish differently now.
Because building God’s Church is not necessarily about standing behind a pulpit.
It is about making your life available to God.
It is about serving where He has planted you.
It is about using your gifts.
It is about loving people.
It is about telling people about Jesus.
It is about making disciples.
It is about plugging yourself into a Bible-believing church and asking:
“How can I serve?”
And perhaps one of the greatest ways we build the Church is by allowing people to see what Christ looks like in an ordinary human life.

People watch how we live.
They watch how we love.
They watch how we forgive.
They watch how we suffer.
They watch how we mourn.
They watch what happens when the prayers we prayed don’t produce the answer we wanted.
And, when they look at us in those moments, I pray that they see something that makes them say:
“I want to know the God who gives that kind of hope.”

That is legacy.
Legacy is not simply people remembering your name.
Legacy is people encountering your God because of the way you lived.
And perhaps this is the strangest thing about a funeral.
The person we came here to honour cannot speak to us anymore.
Dad cannot stand here and preach this message.
So I am standing here.
And perhaps that is legacy.
He taught us.
He served.
He loved.
He prayed.
He told people about Christ.
And now, even in his absence, the message continues.

• DAD’S FINAL WISH

So today, I want to honour my father by granting him his final wish.
Dad wanted us to serve God.
And in that period when he was in ICU, mum asked him at some point what he would want to do if God healed him, and he said that his only desire was to win more souls for Christ.

And so if my Dad could have one final request granted today, I believe it would not be that we would simply say beautiful things about you.

It would be that someone in this room would come to Christ.
That someone who has been far from God would come home.
That someone who has been building on sand would finally find the Rock.
That someone who has been trusting outcomes would learn to trust God’s character.
That someone who has been asking, “What happens after this life?” would discover the answer is in Jesus.
Because Dad’s legacy was never ultimately about Dad.
It was about Christ.
So if you are here today and you do not know Jesus, I want you to hear something very clearly:
You do not have to become a better person before you come to Christ.
You do not have to clean yourself up first.
You do not have to have all the answers.
Come as you are.
Believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord.
Confess Him with your mouth.
Turn toward Him.
Be born again.

Because none of us knows how much time we have.
We like to think we have tomorrow.
We make plans for next week.
Next month.
Next year.
But Dad’s life reminds us that eternity is not an abstract theological idea.
It is real.
And Scripture tells us:
“Now is the day of salvation.”
So perhaps today is your day.
You may have another opportunity.
But you may not.

We stay ready so that we do not have to get ready.
Dad was ready.
He was in Christ.
And now he has rested.
Praise be to God.

If you desire to come to Christ today, and begin building your own legacy, a real legacy, our pastors will be waiting at the front at the end of the service, so do not be in a hurry, come and begin a new life in Christ.

This is a funeral service that represents Dad’s sunset however it can be the beginning of your sunrise in Christ when you become born again.

If you are watching online, and desire to come to Christ, you can send a message to 0718652652 and someone will get in touch with you to explain how you can begin an amazing new life in Christ. Thank you. My sermon is ended, to God be the glory forever and ever.

Amen.