Three Bad Years and a Sale Board

The board was up for five months and he saw it eleven times, and he could tell you which eleven.

It was not one thing. It never is. It was a wet spring that put everything in three weeks late, and then it was the year the price did what it did, and then it was the third year, which on its own would have been survivable, and stacked on the other two was not.

He held on longer than the men around the table thought he should. He sold machinery first, which is what you do, and then he sold the far parcel, which is what you do when the machinery is gone. And then in the March, on a Tuesday, he signed for the home ground, and the man who bought it was decent about it and has been decent about it since, which somehow does not help at all.

He drives the long way round now. Twelve minutes extra. His wife has said, twice, in a careful voice, that they could go the short way, and he has said, no, it is fine, this way is fine.

He is fifty eight. And somewhere in the last four years he has handed down a ruling on himself, and the ruling is short, and it has the sound of something a man's father might have said. A man who loses ground does not get it back.

That is not a fear. Fears wobble. That is a settled judicial finding, and he lives under it.

You know that road. Yours might be a house, or a company that had your name on the paperwork, or a trade you cannot go back to. There was a stretch that took something you had held on to, and somewhere in the aftermath you passed sentence, and you have been serving it quietly ever since without ever once appealing.

Come and lean on the gate a minute. Light is good. There is a line about land that changes who the judge is.

There is no code, and there is a landlord

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this place promises a secret and I am not going to stand at a gate with a man in your position and hint at one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that buys ground back, and I am not going to tell you God is about to restore your acres, because I have not been told that and no honest man will tell you he has. Nothing here promises a reversal and nothing here dates one.

Here is what is actually written, and it is one of the strangest sentences in the whole law.

The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.Leviticus 25:23

Now sit in that with me, because it does something to the whole of what happened to you.

Every farmer in Israel worked ground he did not own. Not leased in our sense. He held it, he worked it, he handed it on, and the deeds, so to speak, were God's. Which meant that when a man went under and the ground went to somebody else, the transaction was real and painful and it was also, permanently, provisional. Nobody could buy the ground for ever, because nobody had it for ever to sell.

And that is why the jubilee existed at all. It is not a nice idea about second chances. It follows from the ownership. If the land is His, then a bad stretch cannot make a permanent transfer, and the return was not charity, it was the correction of a temporary arrangement.

You did not permanently transfer anything, and the ground you worked was never yours or the buyer's to hold for ever. That is not a comfort I am arranging at a gate. It is written in Leviticus 25, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about ownership and lays it on a man taking the long way round.

You have a God who holds the deeds and has never once been outbid, and the standing of your life was never in a land registry. Scripture says the land is mine and ye are strangers and sojourners with me, which puts you and the man who bought it in exactly the same category, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land in a chest rather than merely in a head.

Now let me say the hard true thing, because you would smell it on me if I did not.

The ruling. That is what we are actually dealing with. Not the ground.

You passed sentence on yourself somewhere in that fourth winter, and you did it in the voice of somebody older than you, and you have never once asked whether that voice had any authority to speak. A man who loses ground does not get it back. Who said that? Where is it written? Because it is not written in this book anywhere, and this book is the only place I know of where anything final gets written down.

You have been serving a sentence handed down by a court that does not exist.

You are not under a ruling, and the only Judge with jurisdiction over your life has never entered that finding. Scripture says there is one lawgiver who is able to save and to destroy, and asks plainly who art thou that judgest another, and that question turns round on a man judging himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets it to land there.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a four year ruling does not get overturned because a friend was decent to you at a gate. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what enduring never does. So speak, out loud, on your own ground or somebody else's. You have the standing to speak to a verdict and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by acreage, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a field gate.