God Has No Grandchildren
by Rev Greg Obong-Oshotse 2 October 2020
Reading: John 1:1-13
Text: John 1:12 “To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”
German-American evangelist Reinhard Bonnke (1940-2019) became a child of God aged nine, after his mother spoke to him about a sin he’d committed. At 10, he sensed a call to ministry in Africa. He studied at the Bible College of Wales in Swansea, and pastored in Germany for seven years, before launching his missionary ministry in Lesotho in 1967, which grew into a worldwide ministry over the next four decades. He liked to say that ‘God has no grandchildren. He has only children.’ He was himself a pastor’s kid. “I cannot be saved because of my father,” he once told a Nigerian newspaper. “Everyone has got to get saved himself. And if my parents go to heaven, I could still go to hell.”
John’s Gospel is clear that the reason for the incarnation is to offer humanity a Saviour. Each person must make his or her own personal commitment of trust in Christ as Lord and Saviour in order to be a child of God. Children of God are not “born. . . of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” A parent’s faith is not inheritable. Cain and Abel had the same parents but walked different paths. So too the twins Esau and Jacob. Only the Holy Spirit can press home how desperately we need this truth today as cultural Christianity fades, and church buildings are sold off.
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Prayer
Dear Father please help us to teach our children Your word and to pray that each will come to a personal commitment of faith in Your Son in Christ’s name, Amen.