Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, September 18, 2022
by Dr. Kimberly Leetch, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: God keeps promises, even if it takes a while.
God’s relationship with humanity was still fairly young. With the paint still drying on the covenant God made with Noah, God sought to solidify the covenant with one of Noah’s descendants. God chose Abram and Sarai, and God expected the blessings they received to become blessings for the world.
When Abram, Sarai, and Lot arrived at Canaan, the land God promised to them, they didn’t settle there immediately. They passed through the land and pitched their tent in the hill country east of Bethel. They were there—they passed through the land—but it wasn’t yet time for them to claim their God-given right to the land. God had bigger plans that would take years to develop. It would be a couple centuries before Jacob finally settled there.
The text doesn’t clearly indicate why Abram continued his nomadic lifestyle despite God’s promise of the land, except to say that there were Canaanites living in the land at the time. Certainly, that could have been a deterrent to settling there. Abram would need time to cultivate a large family that could be an intimidating enough presence to take the land from its current inhabitants.
To our sensibilities, a promise that cannot be fulfilled in our own lifetime is a promise broken. But in God’s time, a promise fulfilled for our descendants is just as
good as one fulfilled for us. This is especially so because the promise is not to bless the individual or even the family. The promise is to bless the family so that the family can be a blessing to the world. When we consider the outward movement of God’s blessing, the promise is fulfilled even as the blessings slowly unfold.
We are often told that life is short. Seize the day. No time like the present. This works best, however, when we don’t look at it as a call to impatience, but as an openness to opportunity. When we have a dream (especially when our dreams are driven by a sense of call), we do need to be ready to jump when the window of opportunity opens. But we can also find happiness and blessing during the waiting period. Sometimes a dream is the right dream, but now is not the right time. We can use that time to be a blessing, even as we prepare ourselves for when the timing is right for our dream to be fulfilled. We need not waste the waiting. Abram led a full life while he waited for God to prepare his family to be a blessing to the world. He lived his life to bless others long before God settled them in Canaan.
