The Rain You Cannot Make

Guarding What Has Been Entrusted

A devotional on Deuteronomy 11 to 13 for leaders in business, community, and home.

Egypt was a land you watered with your own foot. You dug the channels. You worked the pump. The harvest rose or fell on your effort.

Canaan was different. “The land you are crossing the Jordan to take over is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the LORD your God cares for; the eyes of the LORD your God are continually on it” (Deuteronomy 11:11-12).

Read that as a leader and it should unsettle you. Everything in you has been trained to reduce your dependence. Build the system that runs without you. Remove the single point of failure. Engineer the irrigation so the harvest no longer waits on the weather.

That instinct will serve your operations and starve your soul.

The mature steward is not the one who needs God less. It is the one who has learned he cannot make the rain.

Deuteronomy 11 to 13 is one long argument about what that kind of leader looks like. It moves through three expressions of a single love, the love the Shema commanded: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Love that obeys. Love that worships on God’s terms. Love that stays loyal when the counterfeit is compelling. Walk through all three and you hold a map of spiritual growth for anyone entrusted with something they did not create.

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Lesson One: Love Obeys, and It Looks for Rain Daily

The chapter opens by fusing love and obedience into one act: “Love the LORD your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always” (Deuteronomy 11:1). Not love, then obedience. Love as obedience.

And the love that obeys is fed daily. Moses tells them to fix these words on their hearts, bind them on their hands, write them on their doorframes, and speak them when they sit and walk and lie down and rise (Deuteronomy 11:18-21). Devotion is not an event you attend. It is a rhythm you embed. The word Moses uses in 11:22 for how to relate to God is dabaq, to cling, to be glued. Daily seeking is not browsing. It is adhering.

This is the rain. The land that drinks from heaven needs heaven every morning. So does the steward. “Look for Him daily” is not a suggestion for the especially devout. It is the survival posture of someone who finally understands he is living on ground he cannot water himself.

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