Claiming Our Inheritance

Title: Our Inheritance

Theme: To show that as a child of God we have been given freedom and promises that we need to hold onto.

Text: Romans 8:17,

Note: This message was inspired from Unshakable Hope by Max Lucado. Where quotations are the book is quoted. Great message from the book I wanted to share.

Opening Scripture

Romans 8:16 The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs--heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together.

Timothy Henry Gray.

I read the story the other day about sixty-year-old body of Timothy Henry Gray was found under a Wyoming overpass two days after Christmas in 2012. There was no sign of foul play. No indication of a crime or mischief. A homeless cowboy who had died of hypothermia.

He would have normally fallen into the cracks of every other homeless, died with no one knowing him except for one detail: he stood to inherit millions. Gray’s great-grandfather was a wealthy copper miner, railroad builder, and the founder of a small Nevada town you might have heard of: Las Vegas. His fortune was passed down to his daughter, Huguette. She died in 2011 at the age of 104.

Huguette left a $300 million fortune. At the time of Gray’s death, the execution of the will was tied up in court. As things turned out, the man found dead under the railroad overpass wasn’t poor after all. He may have been worth $19 million.”

The questions begin to pile up. How could a man who was going to inherit millions live as a pauper? Surely Timothy knew the history. Did it ever occur to him to reach out?

If it were me, I would camp at the doorstep of my great aunt. I would turn over every document. Wouldn’t you? We would make it our life’s goal to access our inheritance, wouldn’t we?

But do we?

Look at the verse that we opened up with. We are “heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ Jesus” Romans 8:17

Paul takes it further in Ephesians 1

(Ephesians 1:3 NKJV).” “You aren’t merely a slave, servant, or saint of God. No, you are a child of God. You have legal right to the family business and fortune of heaven. The will has been executed. The courts have been satisfied. Your spiritual account has been funded. He “has blessed [you] with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ”

Do you need more joy? Just ask for it

Do you need more love? Just call on His name

Do you need victory over areas in you life? Just reach out to Him.

Do you need healing? “by His stripes we are healed”

Do you need peace? Call on the Prince of Peace

Jesus said in Matthew 7:7-8 "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (8) For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

“You will never exhaust his resources. At no time does he wave away your prayer with “Come back tomorrow. I’m tired, weary, depleted.””

God is affluent! Wealthy in love, abundant in hope, overflowing in wisdom.

No eye has seen, no ear has heard,

and no mind has imagined

what God has prepared

for those who love him. (1 Cor. 2:9 NLT)

Look with me now to another passage in scripture. Israel had a hard time understanding this. Numbers 13:1-2

“One of the most famous stories in the Bible has to do with inheritance. The Hebrews had just been delivered from Egyptian captivity.”

It was God who brought them out of Egypt. It was God who decimated Egypt before Pharoah’s eyes. Even the magicians of Pharoah declared, Exodus 8:19 Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God."

Later on we read in Numbers 13:1–2. “God led them and Moses to the edge of the promised land and made this offer: “The LORD said to Moses, ‘Send some men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders’”

“God did not tell the Israelites to conquer, take, invade, subject, or secure the land. He told them he was giving it to them.

They had a challenge would they trust God. Listen to their response.

In Numbers 13:25-29 And they returned from spying out the land after forty days. (26) Now they departed and came back to Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the children of Israel in the Wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh; they brought back word to them and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land. (27) Then they told him, and said: "We went to the land where you sent us. It truly flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. (28) Nevertheless the people who dwell in the land are strong; the cities are fortified and very large; moreover we saw the descendants of Anak there. (29) The Amalekites dwell in the land of the South; the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the67ykl Amorites dwell in the mountains; and the Canaanites dwell by the sea and along the banks of the Jordan."