Some years ago, Melanie and I watched a favorite movie with our friends Josh and Becky Guajardo. Before he played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s the Passion of the Christ, Jim Caviezel played the role of a policeman who found out the future through a short-wave radio. In the movie called Frequency, his decisions in the moment affected lives in the future. To this day we share inside jokes from that movie.
Do we even want to know the future? If you could, would you? Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself” (Matthew 6:34). If we knew the future, would it change the way we live? How do our decisions today affect the future?
Stephen’s sermon helps us. God revealed to Abraham that his descendants would serve as slaves for four hundred years before they returned to worship in the promised land. Someone said, “God does not have favorites, but he does have intimates.” The Lord sometimes reveals to his servants what he will do in the future. Then God established a covenant with Abraham and his descendants. God fulfilled his part of the covenant. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived in covenant faithfulness with God.
Like Abraham, we understand that God has future plans for us and the world. He wants to give us hope and a future. But what is our part today? “How then shall we live?” Faith leads to faithfulness. Trust and obey. Perhaps our greatest impact on the future is living in obedience today. Like Abraham, we live today trusting God for the future. We know God will be faithful. Be it resolved: so shall we. Let the generations that follow us find us faithful to our faithful God today. This decision profoundly changes the future.
