“Slow Productivity” – FBC Morning Light (3/18/2024)

Well good Monday morning to you, and here we are beginning yet another week, and we're in the last half of the month of March and marching toward Resurrection Sunday, the last day of the month, and looking forward to that.

But for today, we're reading in the Old Testament and jumping back and forth.

So one of the features of reading the Bible chronologically is that you're going to end up doing that some, and we do that particularly today as we go back and forth between the book of Joshua and 1

Chronicles. And what's happening in Joshua is that Joshua and Eleazar are continuing to divide up the land to the different tribal groups, and so after the

Joshua passage describes the territory given to a particular tribe, then you go to 1

Chronicles and you see the genealogy of that tribe. But what I want to focus on is the end of chapter 19, so it will wrap up our reading for the day, and in particular the last verse.

The last verse says, These were the inheritances which Eleazar the priest, Joshua the son of Nun, and the heads of the fathers of the tribes of the children of Israel, divided as an inheritance by lot in Shiloh before the

Lord, at the door of the tabernacle of meeting. So they made an end of dividing the country.

And with that comes the fulfillment of the promise that the

Lord made to Abraham hundreds of years earlier, and the last iteration of that promise was made to Jacob more than 430 years ago.

So it would have been really, you know, well, much more than that. More than 430 years earlier. And so finally, the land is in the possession of and divided among the tribes of Israel.

And when I read this, I thought about a book that I just got and have been reading. The book is entitled

Slow Productivity, and that book is, you know, championing the idea of getting rid of some fluff stuff in your life so that you can really focus on important things, but yet allowing those things to...those

important things to come to fruition, not in a hurry, not hastily, but slowly, so that the work is more productive and more effective, more fruitful, more beneficial, more effective.

And I thought about that in relation to this. You know, here, this promise made hundreds of years earlier, and the

Lord took his time in this slow productivity of dividing the land, giving the land to the nation of Israel, the children of Israel, and the various tribes.

Now what's interesting is that—and we're going to see this more when we get into the Book of Judges—is that just because the different tribes were allotted the territory, it doesn't mean that they immediately had possession of every square inch of that territory.

And we'll see why in a future reading. But what I want to really just focus on today is the fact that God promised an inheritance to Abraham, an earthly inheritance that would be the land.

He said, this land will be your possession. All that you see here in Canaan, it will be your possession.

And here it is finally coming to pass. So the Lord fulfills his promise of the inheritance, but it came a long time in coming.

And I think about that in relationship to the New Testament believer as well. We in the

New Testament, as New Covenant believers, followers of Jesus, have been promised an eternal inheritance.

It's ours, the down payment for that inheritance is given to us in the person of the

Holy Spirit who dwells within, and yet we don't realize the fullness of that inheritance yet.

It's going to take a while before we do, and we can get discouraged in the meantime.

Let's not. Let's remind ourselves of this Old Testament truth that the

Lord gave the promised inheritance to his people in his time, in his way, and it was a slow productivity work that he did to finally bring this to pass.

Our inheritance will be ours as well. Let's be patient in the receiving of it.

Father, thank you for this encouragement from the Old Testament today, and we pray that we would be patient awaiting the eternal inheritance.

We ask this in Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right, well listen, have a good rest of your