The Land Was Already Yours

"You do not put pecan trees in ground you are renting."

Carl Boone has said that sentence, or some version of it, every March for twelve years, standing at the north end of the forty with a cup going cold in his hand, describing exactly where the windbreak ought to run. He can walk you the line. He can tell you the varieties and the spacing and which end to start on, and he has never put a single tree in the ground.

He calls it the place I am on. Never my place. Twelve years, and it is still the place I am on.

On the back of the barn door there is a list in pencil in his own handwriting. Gutter over the south lean-to. Bottom hinge, big door. Culvert at the county line, silted. Spring house, roof. It goes down the door in three columns and it is four years deep and there is not one line crossed off, because it is not that kind of list. Carl adds to it. He does not work off it. It is closer to a record of everything a man is behind on than it is to a plan for a Saturday.

Where he got this is not a mystery and it is not his fault.

His father farmed forty two years on other people's ground. Two landlords, four different places, every lease a year at a time, and the man was as good a farmer as that county had. He also never once drove a nail into a building he did not own. Would not paint. Would not plant a tree. Would not so much as hang a gate straight, because the day comes when they tell you they are selling and you load your tools and you go, and a man who has put his heart into somebody else's buildings has to leave it there when he goes. Carl learned every bit of that at his father's elbow before he was ten years old, and he learned it the way you learn to hold a hammer, which is to say he never once decided it.

Then in February he had to go to the courthouse about the culvert on the county line, because the county wanted somebody to sign off before they would put a crew on it.

The clerk turned to her screen and asked him for the legal description, and he gave her the one from memory the way farmers do, and she read for a second and then said the thing.

"Boone. Forty acres on the creek. That has been in your name since you were nineteen."

Carl stood there at that counter.

"I have been farming it since I was twenty seven."

"Well," she said, and she was not being smart with him, she was doing arithmetic out loud the way people do. "Then you have owned it eight years longer than you have worked it."

He drove home the county road, which took twenty minutes, and he does not remember one foot of it.

He walked into the barn and stood in front of that door with his coat still on and read his own pencil handwriting from the top down. Gutter over the south lean-to. Bottom hinge, big door. Culvert at the county line, silted.

Every line true. Every line still his to do. Not one word on that door changed while he was at the courthouse.

But it had stopped being an inspection.

The deed was signed before the first instruction was given

You have been reading the book like a man reading a lease.

That is not a criticism and I doubt you decided it either. Somewhere back there you were handed the pages with the tone already set on them, and the tone was assessment. So now every time you open it a small clerk stands up inside your chest with a clipboard, and you get four verses in and the arithmetic starts, and you close it, and the closing has nothing to do with unbelief. It is what anybody does with a document they are behind on. That tone was real and it happened to you, and it is not what His word is, and His Spirit has never once read a line of it to anybody in that voice.

Here is the thing I want to put in your hands, and it is a matter of order rather than a matter of effort.

Nobody in Scripture was ever taught the instruction in order to get out of Egypt. They were taught it in a camp on the other side, months after the water closed behind them, with the dust of the country they left still in their clothes. The rescue was finished. The mountain came after. That order is not incidental; it is the whole argument, and every page of the fifth book of Moses is Moses saying it again to a generation who had not been there.

You were brought out before you were ever taught one line of it, and Deuteronomy 6:23 says He brought us out from there so that He might bring us in and give us the land which He swore to our fathers, and the same Spirit who moved that sentence out of Moses is the one who has kept it in front of people for three thousand years.

Read that verse again for the timing. He brought us out, that He might bring us in. Out is finished. In is His stated purpose. Nothing in the middle of that sentence is a probationary period.

And the land was sworn to their fathers, which means the deed on it was older than every single person standing there listening. They walked into houses full of good things they did not fill, wells they did not dig, vineyards and olive trees they did not plant. That is Deuteronomy 6 and it is God describing an inheritance He handed over before the recipients had done one day's work on it.

Now put the anchor beside all of that.

And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?Deuteronomy 10:12-13

Look where that sentence ends. For thy good.

Not for His records. Not so the arrangement can continue. The whole paragraph is a Father leaning over a boy and telling him how the place runs, because the place is going to be his and he is going to live on it a long time. The word Scripture uses for this instruction is a word for teaching, the sort a parent gives at an elbow, and it is a different animal entirely from a set of terms.

You have a Father and not a landlord, and Deuteronomy 8:5 says it in the plainest words available, that as a man disciplines his son so the Lord your God disciplines you. His Spirit turns that line from a threat into relief while you read it.

I am not going to tell you which lines on that door are yours to work this year. That argument has kept better people than me busy for a long time and it is not what this message is for, and you cannot fail this page. What I am telling you is whose ground you are standing on while you read them, because that one fact changes what every line on the list is doing.

Same words. Same book. Same list in the same handwriting.

It is already settled that you belong here, and that was settled at the cross rather than in your performance, and what is written in Galatians 4 is that you are no longer a servant but a son, and the Spirit sent into your heart is the one who says Father in there when you have not got words of your own.

A tenant reads the list and hears everything he is behind on. A son reads the same list and hears what needs doing at his own place. There is no daylight between the two lists. There is a world of daylight between the two men.