Living Letters – A Christian Legacy – Introduction Lesson – July 19, 2026

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Living Letters: A Christian Legacy

Introduction

Introduction This series will help you build a Christian legacy through nine chapters: • Salvation and Baptism • Transformation (Before/After) • Sharing My Story • Church Life • Giving Back • Discipleship • The Bible • Prayer • Prepared for Eternity

Series Goal To help you take hold of the Christian legacy God is building through your life: • Map — who has God used in your life? • Understand — what has God done in your life? • Live — what do people read about your life? • Expand — who will you shape next?

The Weight of What’s Written

In 1994, the CEOs of seven major American tobacco companies sat before Congress, raised their right hands, and testified under oath that they did not believe nicotine was addictive. One of them told the committee plainly that he didn’t believe nicotine or his company’s products were addictive.

But sitting in company file cabinets were memos written decades earlier, never meant for the public to see. One, written by a Brown and Williamson executive back in 1963, said this: “Nicotine is addictive. We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.” For over thirty years, two versions of the same story existed side by side — what the companies said in public, and what they wrote down privately.

When those internal memos surfaced through newspaper reporting, the sworn testimony did not hold up. Within two years, all seven executives were under federal investigation for perjury, and not one of them was still running their company. What undid them was not anything new. It was what they had written down decades before anyone ever asked them to raise their right hand.

This is true for all of us. When we write something down, it often carries more weight than our spoken words, especially in understanding what we know, how we think, or what we truly believe. We live in a time when this is truer than ever. Text messages, emails, old letters, even a note scribbled in the margin of a Bible — they all outlast the moment they were written, and they often tell the truth more plainly than we would say it out loud.

Consider how personal letters, journals, and diaries shape the way we understand historical figures. Mother Teresa wrote in personal letters about feeling unloved by God, abandoned, alone, with no sense of His presence. She wrote that her smile was a mask, hiding her spiritual pain from the public. About a public speech she had given, she wrote: “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, tender, personal love. If you were there, you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.'”

These letters let historians write an accurate account of her life and faith. From them, we learn she experienced a long season of loneliness, something her public words never told us. We only know it from what she wrote down.

With this in mind, consider what Paul said to the Christians in Corinth. He called them a living letter, now open for anyone to read. This series is titled “Living Letters: A Christian Legacy.” The idea comes from Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 3:2–3:

2 Corinthians 3:2–3 — Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men: Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart. (KJV)

 

Two Ways to Communicate

There are two ways we communicate who we are. The first is with our words. In conversation, we tell people things about ourselves that shape what they think of us.

The second is by how we live. Our character gets lived out in front of people, whether we intend it to or not. A parent can tell a child a hundred times to be honest, but the lesson that actually sticks is watching that parent hand back extra change a cashier gave them by mistake. The lived example teaches faster and deeper than the spoken instruction ever could.

James 2:18 — Shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.

In other words, don’t just tell me what you believe. Show me. Our actions confirm or contradict our words every time.

Notice what Paul said about the Corinthians. He called them epistles, a word that simply means letters or writings. We know Paul’s doctrine because we can read what he wrote — how he explained and defended his faith. But he also lived that faith out, and his life matched what he had written. That is what made him trustworthy.

 

Letters of Commendation

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul is talking about a real practice of his day: letters of commendation. When someone traveled to a new city, they were a stranger there. There was no internet, no phone call, no way to check someone’s background. Nobody automatically trusted them. To be received well — to find a place to stay, help with expenses, or simply a hearing — travelers would carry a letter of commendation. This was a letter written by someone the new city already trusted, vouching for the traveler’s character.

These letters usually followed a pattern. They said something about the traveler’s character, their relationship to the one sending them, the purpose of their visit, and often a request for the receiving church to provide food, shelter, or help with expenses along the way. In a world with no other way to verify a stranger, the letter carried real weight. It was the only credential a traveler had.

We see this practice show up more than once in the New Testament.

Romans 16:1–2 — I commend unto you Phoebe our sister… that ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she hath need of you.

Paul is vouching for Phoebe so the church in Rome will welcome and help her.

Acts 18:27 — The brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him.

This was written of Apollos, when he wanted to travel to Achaia — a letter sent ahead of time, opening the door for someone the church had never met.

That is the background behind 2 Corinthians 3:2–3. Rival teachers had shown up in Corinth carrying letters like these, using them to claim an authority they had not actually earned. Paul, notably, did not have one of these letters for the Corinthians. So he asks, essentially: do I need a letter like that? His answer is no, because you are my letter. Their changed lives, their faith, their transformation, was better proof that Paul was sent by God than any paper anyone could carry into the room.

Who Is Reading Your Letter?

Paul told the Corinthians they were a letter, “known and read of all men.” That is simply his way of saying someone is always reading your life, whether you say a word or not. Think about who is actually reading yours. Your spouse. Your children and grandchildren. The neighbor who has never once opened a Bible but has watched you for twenty years. The coworker who knows exactly how you act under pressure, whether or not you have ever mentioned church to them.

Maybe you know an older believer who never talked much about their faith, but you remember them praying quietly before every meal, or handling a hard season with a peace you could not explain. You read that. It taught you something no sermon could have.

Think about a boss who notices an employee is honest even when no one is checking their work, or a child at school who remembers the one classmate who was kind to everyone, even the kids nobody else sat with. None of that required a single word. It was read, plainly, in how someone chose to act. Even the things we write today without thinking — a text to a friend, a comment online, a note left for a spouse — become part of that same record. They add up, the same way the tobacco memos and Mother Teresa’s letters did.

That is the letter Paul is describing. But this series is asking a bigger question than just who is reading you today. It is asking what you will leave behind, which is where the word legacy comes in.

What Is a Legacy?

So far we have talked about your life being a letter, known and read by the people around you. But this series is not really about letters. It is about legacy. The letter is simply the picture Paul uses to make one point: what you live speaks louder, and lasts longer, than what you say. From here on, when we talk about legacy in this series, we are talking about your life — your faith, your character, what you have done and who you have shaped — not a piece of paper.

So what is a legacy? A legacy is what your life leaves behind. Not what you meant to do, or planned to do, but what actually took root in the people who watched you live.

It helps to see how legacy is different from reputation. Reputation is what people think of you while you are still around to be seen. Legacy is what remains once you are not there to explain yourself, defend yourself, or add one more good deed to the pile. Reputation can be managed. Legacy can only be lived.

Many of us have seen this up close. A grandparent passes away, and the family finds a worn Bible on their nightstand, full of underlined verses and handwritten notes in the margins from fifty years of reading it. No one ever saw those notes while that person was alive. But they become some of the clearest proof of what that person actually believed, long after they are gone. That is a legacy speaking.

Hebrews 11:4 — …he being dead yet speaketh.

This is said of Abel, one of the first people mentioned in the Bible. Abel died thousands of years ago. He did not write a book. He did not leave behind a sermon. But his faith is still spoken of today, still teaching us something, thousands of years later. That is a legacy: a life that keeps speaking long after the person is gone.

A legacy is not only passed down after death, though.

2 Timothy 1:5 — When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.

Timothy’s faith did not start with him. It was handed to him by two women who lived it out in front of him first. That is a legacy too — one generation’s faith taking root in the next, while both women were still very much alive to see it happen.

That is what this series is really asking you to consider: what legacy have you received, and what legacy are you leaving?

The Chapters Ahead

Here is where the next nine weeks will take us. Each chapter builds on the one before it, and each one is a piece of the legacy you are building or have already been given.

Goals and Expectations

Every goal in this series falls into one of two directions. The first two goals below look backward, at what has already shaped you. The last two look forward, at what you are shaping now, in others.

Why This Matters Now

None of us knows how much time we have. Abel did not know his life would still be read thousands of years later. Lois and Eunice did not know they were raising a missionary. They simply lived their faith out, day after day, in front of the people God put in front of them.

Here is the sobering part: your legacy is already being written, whether you are being intentional about it or not. Every conversation, every hard day handled well or poorly, every moment of patience or impatience, is a sentence in the letter people are reading. This series will not start your legacy. It is already underway. What this series can do is help you take hold of it, so the rest of your story is written on purpose, chapter by chapter, instead of by accident.

Before We Go Further

Take a few minutes to talk through these as a class. There are no wrong answers, only honest ones.

Closing

The tobacco executives found out the hard way that what is written outlasts what is spoken under oath. Mother Teresa’s private letters revealed something her public speeches never could. And Paul already answered the question of whether people are reading us. They are, right now, whether we notice or not.

But this series is not really about being read. It is about what we leave behind. A legacy is not built in a single moment, and it is not built by accident. It is built one chapter at a time, which is exactly why we are spending the next nine weeks walking through the chapters of a Christian life: salvation, transformation, testimony, church, generosity, discipleship, Scripture, prayer, and eternity.

By the end, the goal is not just that you understand your legacy. It is that you are actively shaping it, on purpose, for the rest of your life, and for the lives of the people watching you live it.

This Week

Take a few minutes this week and think through the legacies that have influenced your own faith. Make a short list of the names that come to mind.

Some may be people you know personally — a parent, a grandparent, a friend, a pastor, someone who sat beside you at church for years. Others may be people you have only read about or heard of — a missionary, an author, a historical figure like the ones we talked about today. Some names might belong in both categories.

Write down at least three names, and beside each one, jot a sentence about what their life taught you.

Coming Up

In the next lesson we will begin Chapter 1: Salvation and Baptism — the chapter where every Christian legacy starts, and the first page of a story that is still being written in you today.