Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. (Isaiah 60:4)

We will inherit people if we allow the Lord to make us "barren" in terms of our own rights, possessions, and opportunities in the present life.

If we walk carefully with the Lord Jesus we soon will find He puts us through a program that strips us of all we depend on. Every relationship we have with people, with circumstances, with things, must be brought down to death and then raised again in the newness of resurrection life. The adamic race, and all that is of the adamic race, is corruptible and temporary.

Nothing is eternally alive in the Presence of God, nothing can survive in the Kingdom of God, until it has died and been raised in Christ into eternal life.

Eternal fruit can come only from what has died in Christ and been raised again in Christ. Until a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains by itself. Becoming willing to die to all that is treasured may prove to be the most difficult of the decisions the believer in Jesus is invited to make. But there is no other route to eternal life and eternal relationships.

Next to the Lord Himself, people are by far the greatest inheritance of all.

The earthly counterpart of this heavenly treasure is fleshly relationships—marriage to people, circumstances, and things.

Jesus informed us that those who do the will of God are His brothers and sisters. Our first loyalty is to God.

Again He exhorted, "Let the dead bury their dead."

We know it is God's will for us to be faithful in all our family relationships. We never will be able to enter the Kingdom of God if we are not a person of integrity and faithfulness to those who are dependent on us. However, it is true that unless we hate father and mother (in comparison with our love for Christ), and our own life as well, we cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

We can choose to spend our life engrossed in fleshly relationships, or we can set our heart on the Kingdom relationships that we have now and will have in abundance in the future, while at the same time fulfilling our role well in our present earthly relationships.

We can clutch to ourselves the people and things that please us, or we can submit to the death of the cross, allowing the Lord to remove from us what we have set our heart on and to give us the true, eternal relationships. Where our treasure is, there will our heart be also.

To be continued.