The best legacy to leave is not written or spoken or counted (a balance sheet) or built (an organization or a ministry or business or building). Instead, it is lived. The best legacy to leave is a godly life. A real and growing reflection of Christ in your life that others can see and draw from… and will remember. I’ve known more than a few people who did great things but did not live great lives. Godly lives. People who wrote, or built, or taught or led or even preached… but who did not win the battles of personal holiness, either in gathered areas of their lives or in disastrous moments of sudden temptation. I don’t want to be one of those people.

I’ve known others, by contrast, who left no remarkable body of work or set of accomplishments but who did live godly, obedient, spiritual lives and are fondly remembered for that. When I have sat in quiet living rooms with their surviving children as a pastor, planning funeral songs and memorial remarks, it is the character and the sacrifice of these people that is most remembered by their children… not how long they were on the job, how big the company grew or what was left in the bank accounts.I would desire to finish like those people have.

In fact, living a life dedicated to personal achievement and satisfaction really represents very little moral achievement. It is, in the end, really nothing more than something just sensibly selfish. And if you stain that legacy with the failure of an ungodly life, that mark lives on, at least in the eyes of people with integrity. I wouldn’t want that at all. Jesus told His Father toward the end of His earthly life that He had glorified Him and thus accomplished the work that He had been given to do (John 17:4). That work was the living of a perfectly obedient and godly life that He could take to the cross, to serve as a perfect sacrifice for the eternal rescue of others. His was a life filled with sorrows, wreathed in poverty and ended in suffering… branded in the eyes of almost all who knew Him as a life and a legacy of failure. But John 17:5 tells us that Christ’s earthly legacy was celebrated in the one place where it would be valued: heaven’s throne room. May ours be commended there too.