Skip to main content
Daily Devotions

Reclaiming Your Heritage

By January 9, 2015No Comments

Read Genesis 26 – 28

And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them. Genesis 26:18 KJV

Isaac is Abraham’s famous son of promise. We would expect page upon page to be written about him in the book of Genesis, but his story is basically limited to this one chapter where he is portrayed as a digger of wells. That has always impressed me as a rather humble record for such a significant figure of Biblical history. But this record is important for God’s people. When Isaac re-dug those wells stopped up by the Philistines, the enemies of God, he was claiming his heritage of faith. He was saying those wells which represented his father’s faith also represented his faith. He was claiming them for himself. How important that is for all of us! You and I cannot live by someone else’s faith; eventually we must make it our own. That’s what Isaac was doing, having his own vital experiences with God. He was experiencing the reality of God personally in his life!

Lord, I am grateful for family members who knew you, loved you, and sought to pass on their faith in you to me. I have learned it is not enough to just accept what they did and said. It has been far more rewarding to take what they did and claim it for myself so that you are not just their God but my God as well.

A question to ponder: Obviously, professing Christians today would not dig wells to reclaim their heritage of faith, what would they do?