Your God Is Better Than You Imagined

Chapter 2
Your God Is Better Than You Imagined

“For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off.”
Acts 2:39

Here’s one reason we struggle to believe in the historic significance of our families: fear. We fear the future. It’s scary and complicated. We fear we’re too small for a challenge so big and bold.

Guess what? It’s true. The future is too big for any of us to figure out. And we are too weak and unsteady ourselves. We’re limited in every way from being able to force our will on other people, no matter how well-meaning our intentions, especially on generations we won’t even be around to see.

But this dream doesn’t die just because the challenges are bigger than we are.

The truth is, your family is significant—not in the eyes of this grandiose world, obviously. But the promises of God declare who you and your family really are. His grace resting upon your family is such a blessing as this world cannot give, or take, or even imagine. How big God is matters more than how frightening the future is.

Take his promise to Abraham, for example. Abraham and Sarah were childless. But God’s promise included not only a future family but also a new “land” to possess and call their own (Gen. 15:1–7). And as the biblical story unfolds, God’s promise grows. He promises to lead all his children not into a new land but into a “new heaven and a new earth”—a sparkling new universe forever (Rev. 21:1–5). God’s promises just keep getting better and better.

It would be like if your dad promises to take you for your birthday anywhere you want to eat, anywhere in town. But then, on the big day, he ends up taking you and your family for a whole week to your favorite place in the world. That would be an amazing dad!

That’s what our heavenly Father is like. He keeps being better to us—way better than we deserve, for sure. He never runs out of energy, love, and steady attentiveness toward us. He bears with us patiently, supports us faithfully, forgives us graciously, and provides for us generously. He’s not tired of us today, and he won’t get tired of our children tomorrow. Thanks to the perfect life and atoning death of Jesus, we and our children, to the tenth generation, can always open up the empty hands of faith to receive his fullness of “grace upon grace” (John 1:16). That’s the story God wants to tell through your family. It’s a story that keeps getting better as it goes along because he is the one writing it, he is the one doing it, better than we ever could.

On the one hand then, we can all agree that our world today and its outlook for tomorrow are discouraging, even bleak. This world is thirsty land and dry ground. Good news, though: God has promised to “pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.” How? He does it by promising even better news: “I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants” (Isa. 44:3). This is his twin strategy for infusing his refreshment into our desolation.

• One, he sends his blessing down vertically, in the moment, as people hear the gospel for the first time and put their trust in Jesus.
• Two, he sends his blessing forward horizontally, through time, as children in Christian families soak up the gospel at home and at church throughout their formative years, then are launched into life, bearing his Spirit into the future.

God’s second strategy of blessing—the horizontal one—is what this book is about. As we shared in the previous chapter, “The promise is for you and for your children” (Acts 2:39). We love that. Wondering about the future unknowns of life in this world, we Christian parents are not left bracing ourselves fearfully against what all might happen—social upheaval, economic meltdown, political extremism, family tragedy, worldwide pandemic, whatever. Yes, bad things are sure to come. But God’s promised grace is always coming our way. He overrules the evil of this world every single day, bringing his good into our bad places (Gen. 50:20). In fact, the goodness of God is bending bad things around in the opposite direction.1

God himself, therefore, is all the hope we need for ourselves and our children, on into the far distant future. We don’t need to wring our hands and “hope for the best.” God has given us his assurances in writing, on the pages of our Bibles, come what may. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29). The Lord our God will always be there, bringing new life into a dying world through our Christian families, for Jesus’s sake. Again, this promise is “for you” and “for your children” and “for all who are far off.” Pretty good promise, right?

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Order your copy of To the Tenth Generation: God’s Heart for Your Family, Far into the Future by Ray & Joni Ortlund