As believers, we have a Canaan promised to us. This Promised Land is not a location but an internal transformation.
In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory. Ephesians 1:11-12
If we are left with an inheritance from a parent or grandparent, we can read the will as many times as want to, but that does not appropriate the will in our lives. We still do not enjoy the benefits of the inheritance until we put it to work.
The Scripture tells us that we have the inheritance of Jesus’ riches. It’s as if Jesus wrote a will and made us the beneficiaries. God’s riches of His inheritance are available to us to partake by appropriating what has already been purchased for us. We must believe them to walk in them and see them come alive in our lives.
In our old Adamic nature, we had the inheritance of sin and death. This is how the scripture in Galatians 5:19-21 in the Message Bible describes it:
It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.
Praise God that we no longer have to live that way any longer. If we’ve made Jesus our personal Lord and Savior, we have a new nature operating in us. Jesus gives us the inheritance of His kingdom and His righteousness. We have the forgiveness of sins. We have freedom from guilt and shame of the past. The bondages of the old nature don’t have to hold us hostage anymore. We have hope for our future and for our eternity. We have the Holy Spirit as our resident 24/7 wise counselor and comforter that we can call upon. We abide in Christ who is humble and gentle. We can develop the fruit of the spirit according to Galatians 5:22-23 (love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control). This is our Promised Land. This is our inheritance to let go of the old nature and its bondages and come to the freedom of the new nature made available through our inheritance in Jesus.
Praise God that there is no scarcity in the kingdom of God. That means the Lord doesn’t need to take something away from us to give it to somebody else. You and your best friend or your colleague both can enjoy the benefits of being in the Kingdom. There are plenty of blessings and riches available for everyone. We can all sit at His banqueting table and enjoy the benefits of belonging to His Kingdom. This can eliminate a lot of competition, envy, jealousy, and backbiting in the body of Christ.
Let’s praise God for being beneficiaries of His inheritance. Those are the true riches that money can’t buy and moth and rust cannot destroy.
In the Old Testament, God promised Canaan to be inherited by Abraham and his descendants (the Israelites). In the New Testament, our inheritance is a spiritual inheritance. I will share in the next devotional how Canaan, the Promised Land did not deliver as the Israelites expected.