The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. -- Leviticus 25:23
The natural life of a person passes away. We work and accumulate, maintain, save,
store, perhaps even hoard. Sometimes we
forget that we must, at some point, leave everything behind. We have to take a balanced approach. I could die and leave it all behind
tomorrow. Or, I might live another 30
years. Meanwhile, I am a manager of God’s
property – what I own, even my own physical existence.
Life makes more sense, is easier, and less stressful when we
follow God’s will, trusting and resting in His goodness and grace. As far as our lives and possessions go, the
first rule is simply to be faithful to do what we can do. There is no place in a Christian’s life for
sloth, neglect, and ingratitude. Yet the
battle is not ours. We do our part and
give the Lord room to do His part. We
trust that when we have sought His will in prayer, He will meet us in our
circumstances. He wants partners not
puppets, sons not slaves. But partners
trust one another, and a son believes in his Father, just as Jesus did, right to the cross, through the tomb and out the other side.
It is our Father’s world.
We move through it and move on.
Someone comes behind us and inhabits what we have left, the echoes of
our lives, the alterations we have made, the ruts of our failures, the
pinnacles of our successes. It becomes their
responsibility to deal with what they have been given, while we give an account
for what we left.
Is our legacy the briars and barrenness of
self-righteousness, envy, strife, and hatred?
Or are we leaving behind well-cultivated fields sown with “… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control …” (Galatians 5:22-23), the fruit of the Spirit to
sustain our successors in difficult times.
I am afraid the last few generations have squandered a great
and glorious inheritance. We have a few
fields that have not been paved over, a few that have not been exhausted and
depleted and abandoned to the sprouts, weeds, and brambles. Will the next few generations struggle in a
new dark age where truth becomes a scarce resource, or will we begin to break up our own
fallow ground and reclaim some plot, however small and humble, for the Lord?
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