Leaving a Legacy

After Cain kills Abel, Eve names a new son Seth — “God has appointed for me another offspring.” Then Seth has a son, Enosh, and a single quiet sentence turns the whole story: “people began to call upon the name of the LORD.” Nothing dramatic. No temple, no miracle, no fanfare. Just ordinary people, in a broken world, beginning to pray.

On Sunday, James Drake traced two family lines running side by side through Genesis. Cain’s line builds cities and makes a name for itself, and seven generations down it produces Lamech, boasting about the men he has killed. Seth’s line does something smaller and louder: it calls on God. One line grabs; the other kneels. The legacy you leave is the line you hand on.

It would be easy to read this as a tidy reward chart — godly family prospers, wicked family fails. Genesis will not let you. Both lines live in the same fallen world; both bury their dead. The difference is not that Seth’s children had easier lives. It is the direction they faced. They turned toward God, and they taught the next generation to do the same.

You are already handing something down — to your children, to the people who watch how you actually live. Not mainly your accomplishments; your direction. Whether the ones who come after you learn that God is worth calling on will have far less to do with what you achieve than with whether they see you turn to him. Start there today.

Genesis 5 is a chapter of tombstones. Eight times the same words fall like a bell: he lived, he had sons, and he died. Lived and died. Lived and died. Then the rhythm breaks. One man never gets the word “died” at all: “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” The whole chapter leans on that one sentence.

James Drake held up a worn pair of shoes and asked what we are actually measuring. A long life can rack up a lot of miles — accomplishments, experiences, accolades. But Enoch is not remembered for distance covered. He is remembered for direction and for company. It is not how far you walked, James said, but which way you were headed and who you were walking with.

Walking is an unhurried word. You do not sprint a walk; you keep pace with someone, in step, in conversation, headed the same way. That is what Enoch had with God — not a dramatic résumé but a steady, daily companionship across ordinary years. Scripture tells us almost nothing else about the man. It did not need to. The walk was the life.

Measure your week honestly and it is easy to feel you are logging miles in every direction at once. But the question Genesis 5 asks is quieter: were any of those miles walked with God? A faithful life is not the busiest one. It is the one that stayed in step with him. Slow down enough today to actually walk.

The detail is easy to skim: “Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years.” Three hundred years. Not a mountaintop moment, not a single blazing experience — three centuries of ordinary days, raising children, doing the next thing, and doing it all alongside God. The walking was not one event in Enoch’s life. It was the shape of the whole of it.

James Drake told of a little girl who wandered into his office mid-week and asked whether he ever actually hears God. Her questions exposed something he felt in his own crowded week: so much of life gets spent doing things for God instead of being with God. Enoch’s three hundred years were not a ministry project. They were a friendship kept up, day after unremarkable day.

Hear what this is not. It is not a call to do less and feel guilty about the rest, or to trade a full life for an empty one. Enoch fathered children and lived a whole life inside those years. The point is not subtraction; it is company. You can be busy with God or busy away from him. The walk happens inside the ordinary, not instead of it.

You will not find a spare three hundred years, or even a spare hour most days. But Enoch shows that God is not waiting for the grand gesture. He is content to walk with you through the carpool and the inbox and the dishes. Being with him is not one more task on the list. It is the one thing the list was never meant to crowd out.

Genesis says Enoch walked with God; Hebrews tells us how. “By faith Enoch was taken up… before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please him.” Then the heart of it: anyone who comes to God “must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.” Faith is what made the walking possible.

James Drake was careful about what that word faith means. It is not merely agreeing that God exists — even the demons do that, he reminded us, and they are not saved. Real faith, he said, is the difference between believing a stool will hold you and actually sitting down on it. Enoch did not just think true things about God. He put his weight on him.

And watch what Enoch trusted God to be: “a rewarder of those who seek him.” That is not a promise of health, wealth, and an easier life — pray harder, check the mailbox, cash the blessing. James named that lie plainly. The reward Scripture holds out is God himself: the Friend who said he would never leave you. When you seek him, what you get is him.

It is possible to know a great deal about God and never once lean your weight on him. The bills, the waiting, the decision you keep white-knuckling — those are the stool. Faith is sitting down. Enoch pleased God not by knowing more but by trusting him with the actual weight of his life. Where will you set yours down today?

One more glimpse of Enoch comes from the New Testament. Jude tells us Enoch “prophesied” — the man who walked so quietly with God also spoke openly for him, naming the truth to a generation that did not want to hear it. He believed God, he trusted God, and then he could not keep quiet about God. The walk eventually found its voice.

James Drake pulled these three threads together: Enoch believed God, trusted God, and proclaimed God — and insisted none of it is a to-do list to earn God’s love. It is the fruit of walking with him. We do not speak and serve and trust in order to be loved, James said. We do it because we already are. The order makes all the difference.

He told about driving home from North Carolina, confidently steering the family an hour and a half the wrong way before anyone caught it. Some of us, he said, have logged real miles in the wrong direction. Friday is a good day to notice. The gospel is not “try harder and catch up.” It is a God who turns you around and walks the rest of the way with you.

Eight times Genesis 5 says a man died. But Enoch walked with God — and then Jesus came down as God, walked with us, died our death, and rose. Because he lives, you will live; because he walked, you can walk. He is not asking you for more. He is asking for your next step, however small. Take it today, and keep walking with him.