We have briefly studied three phases of development, maturity, and operations in the church. For the purpose of this study, “Taking the Land,” I would categorize them:

1) Taking the land
2) Occupying the land
3) Making the land fruitful

As the Coalition nations have found in Iraq, taking the land and occupying it are two different things. I do not fault the Bush Administration for this, as they had requested over 100 million dollars just to study this before the war, and it was cut from the appropriations bill by Congress. Therefore, they went in with a plan for taking the land, but had no plan for steps 2 and 3 above, and the price is now being paid for this short-sightedness.

The church has likewise been prone to the same kind of short-sightedness. We have had great campaigns to mobilize Christians and take certain objectives, but fail to have a plan for occupying the territory taken, and it ends up in worse shape than before. Just as when a demon goes out of a person, it always seeks to return, and if it can it brings back seven more even worse than itself, the same is true anytime the demonic are displaced from anything.

Of course, this is what the Bush Administration is now claiming would happen in Afghanistan and Iraq if we abandon them now—that they would end up being a worse problem for us than they were before, and this is almost certainly correct. It is hard to imagine what terrorists would do with the financial resources of a nation like Iraq. The reverse is also true, with Afghanistan and Iraq becoming stable democracies in that part of the world, the potential for doing good for the whole area and bringing relative peace and security to the world is great. 

This is not intended to be a political perspective on present world affairs, but we have such an obvious example of these principles in the world today that we should learn from them. Some of the biggest challenges after taking the land will be holding the land. After securing the land for the long-term, then the challenge is to turn it into a fruitful land. The command that the Lord gave to mankind after the creation was to “be fruitful and multiply” (see Genesis 1:22), and that should always be our ultimate goal.

Any successful military, business, or church leader will have defined goals. What will the end product of our efforts look like? Let’s apply this to a crusade in Africa. It is a marvelous thing to see thousands of people giving their lives to the Lord, but are they being established in the Lord and bearing fruit for the kingdom? What do these last two issues look like when they are accomplished? Paul the Apostle had a focused vision for his work, which he stated in Colossians 1:28-29:
 

Paul’s goal was not just to get them saved, but to present every one of them “complete in Christ.” You can see his efforts to do this in the churches he raised up in his letters to them, which now compose a large portion of the New Testament. His goal was not to just see them saved, but to mature in Christ and to bear fruit. We must have the same long-term goals for our work or much of our efforts and resources will continue to be wasted, as they are now.

I was told by the Lord over a decade ago that I needed a 1,000-year plan. I was given Ecclesiastes 3:14, “I know that everything God does will remain forever; there is nothing to add to it and there is nothing to take from it, for God has so worked that men should fear Him.” I was told that if we abide in Him, then our work should also remain. That is what He has called us to do, bear fruit that remains. How is this going to happen practically?

To begin with, we should not give ourselves and our resources to short-term projects. I was also told not to just focus on this being the end of this age, but on the fact that it is the beginning of a new age, the one in which Christ will reign over the earth. How can I help prepare the way for this? How can I build that which will be useful and remain through the millennium? For this I was given Isaiah 40:3-5:
 

The way we prepare the way for the Lord is to build a highway. To build a highway, the mountains and hills have to be brought down, and the valleys and low places brought up, so that they are all relatively level. To do this, cutting through mountains, forests, deserts, and swamps is a grueling task, with progress often being measured in feet per day. Once the land is made level, the bed for the road must be painstakingly prepared by rolling over it many times with heavy equipment to settle the ground. Then it has to sit to see how the weather affects it. This must be done again, making it uniform, or the pavement will crumble quickly. It is a long process and very hard work. That is what we are called to do to prepare the way for the Lord.

After all of this labor, we have a highway where we can travel 60-70 miles an hour. We probably never think about all of the planning and work that went into it so we could just cruise along. All that we are enjoying today physically, mentally, and spiritually is the result of generations before us devoting themselves to building what we now enjoy with relatively little effort. Are all of these things going to be destroyed at the end of the age? No, as we see in such Scriptures as Revelation 11:15:
 

 
There are other biblical prophecies that imply a transition to the kingdom. It is also obvious that many of the works of man will be destroyed at the end of the age, but not those that were built on kingdom principles and kingdom purposes. We can still expect that which makes the transition to require some adjustment, but we are building a basic infrastructure that will be used in the kingdom.

To go back and relate to current events, it is now considered by many that one of the biggest and most obvious mistakes that the coalition forces made after defeating the army of Iraq was to disband that army, as well as the police forces of Iraq. Certainly these were used for evil under Saddam, but when they were disbanded a vacuum was created and the door was opened for what many Iraqis, even those who suffered greatly under Saddam. Consider an even worse evil—lawlessness—which opened the door for gangs and insurgents to take over in some areas. Because the armies of Saddam were disbanded before the Coalition forces were ready to seize their weapons and arsenals, many of them fell into the hands of the wrong people too, and are now being used against the coalition forces.

Have you ever stepped on a spider and had a thousand baby spiders run out of it? That’s kind of what happened when the military in Iraq was disbanded. Now all of those baby spiders are growing up. Certainly, “hindsight is always 20-20.” However, let us also consider that “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” If the army and police forces of Iraq had been kept intact, it is likely that the insurgents, who now have almost free run in some parts of Iraq, could have never found a foothold. Without doubt some of the leadership would have needed to be changed in these forces, but if it had been done gradually without disbanding the infrastructure of those forces, it is likely the coalition would not be facing nearly the same problems that they are now. 

So how does this apply to us? My point is that we must be careful before abolishing anything, as we have taken some ground. It can be devastating to just indiscriminately start tearing down a social order without carefully replacing it with kingdom principles. This often takes time if it is done right. I am sharing this here because, as this is a study of “taking the land,” and we are about to see this happening in very practical ways, we need to seek the Lord for a long-term vision and strategy for occupying what is taken, and helping it to become fruitful.