The Day of the Farm Sale

Half past eight and the auctioneer's van is already in the yard.

He is at the gate because the gate is far enough away. He has said good morning to about eleven people this morning and every single one of them has said something kind and every single one of them has said it in that voice, and he has said "you are all right" eleven times, which is what you say.

They are loading the small tractor. The blue one. His father bought that in nineteen eighty seven and he has a photograph somewhere of himself sitting on it at about four years old, and two men he does not know are winching it onto a trailer with the care you would use for a piece of furniture, which is the correct amount of care and it is unbearable to watch.

Thirty one years.

He has prayed over this ground. That is not a figure of speech. He has walked the boundary in January more than once, actually walked it, with his hands out, feeling like a fool and doing it anyway, and said out loud the things a man says. Bless this land. Bless this work. And he has meant it, and he has gone back to the house and got on with it, and he has done that for thirty one years.

So he is standing at his own gate on the day of the sale, and the thing he cannot get past is not the money and it is not even the shame, which is real. It is this: where was any of it. Where was the favor. He has been reading psalms about the righteous flourishing since he was twenty two and there is a man in a hi vis vest walking backwards guiding a trailer out of his yard.

If you have ever prayed over something for years and then watched it be loaded onto somebody else's transport, you know that gate. And you know the sentence underneath: I asked for a blessing on this and I got a sale, so either He was not listening or I was not the kind of man He listens to.

The word, before we go anywhere near the yard

Let me lean on the gate with you a minute and say the plain thing, and then I will say the true one.

The plain thing is that you have been using one word for two different objects for thirty one years and today they came apart.

Blessed does not mean the ground yields. It means the favor of God rests on a person. His face is turned toward them. That is what the word means in Scripture from the first page to the last, and it has never once meant that a farm holds. Two words got the same spelling, and out here they looked identical for three decades because the farm did hold, and this morning they separated in a yard.

Now the true thing, and it starts with the strangest conversation in the Old Testament.

Moses is on a mountain and God offers him, in plain terms, the thing itself: the land. He says, go up, take the people, I will send an angel before you and drive out the inhabitants, and it is a land flowing with milk and honey. Every promise about the ground, guaranteed. But, He says, I will not go up in the midst of thee.

The offer is the farm without the presence.

And he said unto him, If thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.Exodus 33:15

Moses turns down a guaranteed harvest. He says: if You are not coming, I do not want the land. And God's answer, two verses earlier and again after, is: My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.

You have been given the thing Moses chose when he was offered the other one, and it was not the consolation in that story. Exodus 33 puts the presence and the land side by side and lets a man pick, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the way that presence is with a man now, standing at his own gate, rather than only on a mountain then.

What the boundary walks were actually doing

Now let me say something about thirty one years of walking that boundary in January, because you have started to treat those as evidence of nothing and they were not nothing.

You have decided, since about February, that those walks were a transaction that did not clear. Prayers in, harvest out, and the account has closed short.

They were not a transaction. They were a man walking his own ground telling God it was His. Every one of them was true when you said it and it is still true this morning, and the fact that the ground is going does not retrospectively make a single one of those walks a mistake.

And there is something else about them you have not counted. Thirty one years of walking a boundary in January is not what a man does who is buying an outcome. It is what a man does who wants the company. You could have prayed that in the kitchen. You went out in the weather, on your own, repeatedly, for three decades, and I do not think that was about yield.

You have wanted His presence longer than you have known you wanted it, and thirty one Januaries in a field is the evidence. Scripture has Moses asking for the presence rather than the produce, and it is His Spirit who has been the one meeting a man at a boundary fence in bad weather all those years, which is not a thing that ends when the yard does.

And here is the other half, and I will not skip it. The sale is a real loss. It is not a hidden blessing and it is not a lesson and God did not arrange the last four years of prices to teach you something about dependence. That is the comfortable ditch and it turns a man's family history into a teaching aid. The loss is a loss.

You are carrying a real loss and you are not carrying it alone, and those two are both true at this gate. The written word never once pretends the wilderness is the land, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter, which is a word for somebody who comes into a hard thing rather than one who explains it away.

Rest, and where He put it

One more line from that conversation, because it is the one that will follow you into the house tonight.

My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.

Rest. That is what He attaches to the presence, and He says it to a man in a wilderness who does not have the land yet and will die before he sees it.

Which is a strange place to put rest. You would put rest at the end. You would put rest in the good field with the crop in. God puts it beside His presence, in the middle of nowhere, before anything has resolved.

You have rest available at your own gate today, and it is attached to His presence rather than to a settled account. Exodus 33:14 gives the rest and the presence in one clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one making that clause operative now, which is why what you are being offered this morning is not a feeling you have to work up.

I am not going to tell you what happens after the sale. I do not know. I do not know what you do next year and neither does anybody who leaned on that gate this morning and said something kind. What is written is what a man was offered on a mountain when he could have had the ground instead, and what he chose, and what he was given.