The Will of God   Dale Hartman

My wife, Sheila, and I both come from families of multi-generational faith. However, we’ve always believed in the old preacher’s comment that ‘God doesn’t have any grandchildren’. Each new generation of faith has to make the commitment to walk by faith or to walk in darkness. It’s in that context that, since 1971, ‘Fingerprints of Faith’ is one way Sheila and I have endeavoured to pass the baton of faith on to our physical and spiritual families.

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A judgment will be made of the faithfulness of each generation. One generation will be described like the Israelites of Joshua’s day: ‘Israel served the Lord all the days of Joshua, and all the days of the elders who outlived Joshua’ (Joshua 24:31). Other generations will receive a very different verdict: ‘And there arose another generation after them who did not know the Lord’ (Judges 2:10).

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The challenge of nurturing inter-generational faith should be a priority for all Christian parents and grandparents. It’ll also determine the existence or extinction of each local congregation.

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So, in our family, Sheila and I created a written plan to help us pass on our baton of faith. We both majored in education in university, so were very familiar with the concept of ‘developmental tasks’. Essentially, this means there is a sequence of tasks or responsibilities which must be mastered before a child can progress to the next level of learning. An example is children learning to crawl and walk before they can run. Hence, we sought to focus on one area of faith development during each stage of our children’s lives.

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We are convinced Scripture is written to ‘equip us for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:17). So we prayerfully looked for biblical examples of building faith at each stage of childhood development. These examples became anchor passages to help us pass along fingerprints of faith to our children.

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In September and October 2024, I visited Australia again and shared a series of lessons entitled Fingerprints of Faith. I was blessed to visit three of the four congregations (Belmore Road, Macquarie, and Holland Park) that my brother, Kent, and I had visited with James Baird in May 1974 – so this visit also marked the 50th anniversary of my first trip ‘Down Under’. In addition, the Point Church in Brisbane graciously hosted lessons on a Saturday at Redlands College. I was also blessed to spend a Sunday with brothers and sisters in Canberra.