Section 02 - Finding Your Promised Land

Genesis 13: 17 says this:

Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it to you.

Deuteronomy 34:4 says:

And the LORD [Yahweh] said to him, This [is] the land which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, I will give it to your seed: I have caused you to see [it] with your eyes, but you will not go over there. 

Joshua 1:3 and 4 says:

Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon, that I have given to you, as I said to Moses.  
From the wilderness and this Lebanon right up to the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and up to the great sea toward the going down of the sun, will be your coast. 

God has always had a Promised Land for His people. In the Old Testament it was a literal, physical land. This was God's promise of blessing. Right from the beginning when it started with Abraham, God promised a land. That was the sum total; the ultimate blessing that God could offer to His people; their very own land.

Land is very important even in the world today. Most of the wars that are fought are over land. So for Israel it was a literal, physical land.

In the New Testament God still has a Promised Land for His people. In the New Testament it is spiritual in its essence, but the results are still the same - prosperity and wealth.

Prosperity and wealth have always been an integral part of God's Promised Land for His people. Right back from the Old Covenant and into the New, God today still has a Promised Land for each one of us as His people.

Identify Your Land

Now before you can enter into your Promised Land, the first thing that you need to do is to identify the land. God called Abraham from the Ur of the Chaldees way back in the Old Testament and He promised him a country; a land. But it wasn't his homeland. It was a foreign land.

It wasn't the land of his people or his fathers. It was a different land. You may ask,

"Well what is my promised land?"

Let me give you a hint. It is not going to be your homeland. And I am not speaking about the country you were born in, or natural land. I am speaking spiritually now.

God has a Promised Land for you. And the first and biggest mistake that most of God's people make is to think,

"My land is the place I am familiar with and what I am comfortable with."

If you are expecting God to prosper you and make you wealthy, realize that He is not likely to make you wealthy where you have been most of your life. He is going to take you away to something new.

The first thing that you will have to identify, is where and what is your Promised Land. This is because the chances are that it is something you have never thought of before.

It is a place you have never been before; something brand new that you have never done before. You are not comfortable with it and it is out of your comfort zone. It is out of your abilities and your natural strengths, and it is probably the furthest thing from your mind.

You may say,

"Well God where are we going?"

"Trust me; just go because I have a Promised Land for you."

There is the first step in identifying your land. Are you prepared to give up the things with which you are comfortable? Are you prepared to give up your natural strengths and abilities?

You say, "God has given me real business ability."

Give it up.

"God has given me a real artistic ability."

Give it up.

Something Brand New

God will not take what is your natural strength. He will give you something brand new, that you were not capable of doing before. It is your own unique, special Promised Land, which He has for you and for you alone.

Abraham traveled off to this land, ready to go and do what God told him to do - or at least half-ready anyway. The Lord told him to leave his father behind, but he took dad with. He told him to leave his family behind, but he took his nephew with. And what happened? It caused problems.

The old man was easy to get rid of. He was ready to die anyway, so he died and was gone. So that was not a problem. But Lot was even younger than Abraham was and he was trouble. Abraham probably said,

"But you know he's my right hand man. We grew up together and we do things together. If I start a business I think he should be a partner in the business. We've always done things together."

Forget it. God said,

"You do this alone."

This is your mandate. It is your Promised Land and it is yours alone. Don't look at what everybody else is doing. God has a calling that is unique to you. He has a land that He has chosen and promised especially for you.

What happened? Abraham came to this wonderful land, and there were the cities of the Plain; all the wealth and the growth and wonderful things. And in his mind he must have thought,

"Here we go; this is the place."

But that is not the land he ended up with was it? With all the strife that he had with Lot, in the end to get rid of him he had to let him make the first choice.

Lot chose the best, and he left Abraham with the farmland which was not much use to anybody. There was miles and miles of just land. Nobody was even living there. It was not habitable land.

But God had chosen that land. And after he separated from Lot, God said to Abraham,

"Go and look now - North, South, East and West - for everywhere that you can see is the land that I will give you. This is your Promised Land."

So the first thing He told Abraham to do was to go and walk through the land. He had to go and see what it was that God was going to give him.

Become Familiar With Your Land

Before you can take your Promised Land, you had better see what it looks like. You should make sure that you are familiar with it.

Make sure you know what you are aiming for. How else will you know when you get there? How will you know when you arrive that you did not take a wrong turn and end up in the wrong place?

In the previous section, I spoke about 'Dreams, Goals, Plans and Actions.' You will see a similar structure in this section. You must have a dream, a goal and a very clear plan. You must have a clear picture in your mind of exactly what you are aiming for.

So the question you need to answer now is,

"Where is your Promised Land?"

If you don't know where it is then you had better go find out. And do you know what it is; do you know exactly what it looks like?

Do you clearly know every part of that land? Have you walked up and down that land and taken a good look; taken some photographs and video footage and gone back and studied it in detail.

Do you know the land that you are aiming for? If not then you are still right near the beginning stage. You have not even begun to enter into what the Lord has for you.

Notice that God promised to give the land to Abraham. It wasn't Abraham's yet. It was a future promise. It was a dream and a goal even though it wasn't there yet. But it wasn't something he had to work for.

God said, "I am going to give you this land."

It wasn't a payment in reward for labor, but it was a gift from God. Abraham had to simply walk up and down and familiarize himself with it.

He had to know and believe that God was going to give him this land. All he had to do was to set the future goal in his mind. He had to move from dreams, to goals, to having a very clear goal. He had to say,

"This is my Promised Land. This is what I am aiming for and what I believe God is going to give to me."

The Next Stage

That was Abraham's only function at first. But a long time later, someone came along who would move it to the later stages and start to put it into a plan.

The goal was made much clearer and more focused with some specific plans to make it come together. The Promised Land could actually now become a reality.

That person was Moses. Moses saw the land from a distance. He mapped out the whole land, even though there were no maps at that time. I don't know how he did it. Perhaps he was already skilled in Egyptian knowledge of geography and already had a map of the land.

It seems peculiar, but Moses already had a complete map of the land. He had decided exactly what was going to be where and who would take over each part of the land.

Abraham looked ahead to what God was going to do, but Moses looked at what God was about to do. He moved from the future tense, backward into the present tense. He saw the land as a present reality, ready to be taken.

With Abraham, it wasn't ready yet; it was a future promise. It was a goal and a dream. For Moses now this goal needed to be put into action. But before it can be put into action, we have dreams, goals and plans. God gave Moses the planning part.

Getting the Blueprint

God gave a blueprint to Moses for the Promised Land. It took him at least 40 days and nights up in the mountain with God, and then he went up a few more times to add corrections to the plan. After some time in the presence of God alone, Moses developed a very clear blueprint of what would be involved in taking this Promised Land and making it a reality.

He laid out plans to divide the land amongst the 12 tribes of Israel. He put together a full game plan of how they were going to do it; where they would start and where they would go next. He decided exactly how they were going to take the land and how they would split it after they had taken it.

Long before they even placed a foot on that soil, Moses had laid out the whole plan, step by step, stage by stage. Everything was an exact blueprint.

You say, "God has given me the land, so let's go and take it. By faith I step into my land and I have it. I will be a millionaire tomorrow."

Well if that is what the Lord has called you to be, then perhaps it is your land. But it will not happen tomorrow. A few things have to be in place before that land will become a reality.

Moses mobilized all the resources needed to take the land. And the first thing he needed to do was to train up an army. They were going to go into a foreign land that already had occupants. They had to drive off the inhabitants of the land before it could become theirs.

You do not just walk into a land and say,

"This land is ours. God has given it to us, so get out!"

Can you imagine the response you would have received? They would have said,

"Who do you think you are and who is your God anyway? Are you trying to be funny?"

<-Chapter 5   Chapter 7->   Show Condensed Version

Post A Review For This Book