Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
I wish when I was a teenager I had understood that God's great promises (in Gen. 12:2, 3) to Abraham were to me also. Nobody told me! My whole life would have been different. All that God promised Abraham was precisely what worried me. (Teens seem to be the most worried people on earth.) I wanted to be "a great nation," that is, I wanted to be "somebody." I didn't want to be a "zero" in humanity. I wanted to live for a purpose, to amount to something. Was I sinful? Of course I was! But the desire to be "somebody" is also God-given; and He wants every teen to hear His promise, "I will make you somebody important!"
I also needed to hear Him tell me, "I will bless you." That would have lifted a load of fear from my heart. And yes, I wanted to hear Him tell me that He would make my name "great" in some meaningful way--if only to some one girl or woman who would become my wife. I didn't want to be a glob of jelly, a "blah" young man. I wanted to be "some one" in those eyes of hers!
And yes, sinful though I was, I did indeed dream of God doing for me what He promised to do for Abraham, "And you shall be a blessing." From early years I dreamed of becoming a missionary somewhere. I didn't know how, but I wanted to be a useful person in God's great plan for the world. I would have been so happy if I had known that all along God was promising me these wonderful things He promised Abraham.
All seven of those fantastic promises in Genesis would have rejoiced my young heart if only I had known that God was telling me all that! I would have stood taller and walked more sprightly had I known. I would have studied better, developed my abilities more efficiently.
And best of all, if I could have known that God was promising me that someday I would fellowship with Christ in "all the families of the earth [being] blessed," that by His grace I would be an agent He would use in some small but meaningful way to convey that "blessing" everywhere I would go--the New Covenant would have made all the difference in my thinking and my life.
Now, how about passing on those New Covenant promises to some child or teenager?
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: January 2, 2003.
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