AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Morning Devotional

Jake Harraway

Why Trials are Important

David Obermiller

The Parable of the Fig Tree

Alan Seiler

Active Grace

Devotional

Father in heaven, I want to thank you for the time in the scripture this morning.

I ask that you would bless us with your Holy Spirit as we study together, as we talk together.

Lord, I pray that you would forgive us of our sins, and even the desire in our heart to sin, our struggle with sin, that as we read this morning, that we could come as close to you as possible.

I pray this for myself, I pray this for all of us.

Matthew chapter 13 is the story, well among other stories, the story of the wheat and the tares.

This story and 2 others that I'm going to share with you this morning are all about the harvest.

They mean something to me in the context of my own Christian experience.

I'll tell you briefly how I became a Christian.

I was not raised either Christian or an Adventist.

I was heathen, I guess, if you want to call it that, secular.

1996, Mark Finley had his Net96 meetings in Orlando, Florida.

My mom and dad about when I was 10, I think, separated.

And my sister found the flyer for the Net96 meetings at my mom's house in the mail.

My local church was doing the meetings via satellite and a couple days later we went to my dad's house and she found the flyer in the mail and so now she had 2 flyers and she came up to me and said would you like to go to this.

Now we were not religious, okay, We were secular.

I'll skip the details of what I was doing, but I was not a good boy.

And you guys can figure out some of what that means.

So we weren't interested in attending this from a spiritual point of view, we were just kind of fascinated with the end of the world.

When I was about that age, 18, a lot of the movies were end-of-the-world movies.

Actually, if you notice that all movies kind of tend towards end of the world.

Back in that time period, the movie Armageddon had just come out and Independence Day and all these various things about the end of the world.

So she said, hey, would you like to go to this?

And we were just kind of curious about how the world would end.

And of course on the flyer it was talking about how the world would end.

And so I went with her to the very first meeting.

My hair about shoulder length, and I'll leave the description there just because you're entertained by me being up here with long hair this morning.

I sat through 1 meeting, and I didn't go back to any of the others.

She went to all the meetings and was baptized.

The pastor of that church has done something that, to be honest with you, I've not had a pastor do since.

That is, that he visited us in our home after my sister was baptized.

I don't know what happened to pastoral home visits, but I've observed in the last 20 years have kind of disappeared.

But this pastor, he visited my sister in our home regularly after she was baptized.

Kept studying the Bible with her, and you know what happened next?

Now I'm a guy, and you know ladies, guys are kind of slow sometimes, and it took me about a year before I was willing to start studying the Bible with him, but I did.

And I was sitting in the basement of the church, that's where our fellowship hall was, and studying the Bible with the pastor, and I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't remember a single Bible study.

Now maybe you're thinking he's a bad pastor, I don't know, or maybe I was a bad student, I don't know, but I don't remember a single Bible study.

He couldn't tell you about the investigative judgment or the Sabbath or the second coming or, you know, eating clean or unclean foods, and I don't remember a single word he said out of any of those Bible studies.

I remember 1 sentence he said, it was a short sentence he said, had nothing to do with the Bible study.

He looked across the table at me and he said, David, God has a purpose for you in your life.

Hadn't been baptized yet, but on occasions I was going to church.

Now, I had a friend that lived less than a mile away from the church, but you had to kind of go the roundabout way to get to his house because he lived in the neighborhood behind the church, and on Sabbath I would sometimes go over there and we would do things we're not supposed to do.

And so what went through my mind is when the pastor said, David, God has a plan for you, I'm thinking, you're crazy.

And the next thought that hit my mind was, Lord, I have no clue who you are.

But if that is who you are, I want to know who you are.

And that moment for me was really decisive.

Because up until that point, I had never met anybody who would believe in a worthless young person like me, like God had just said He would do for me.

Remember in my early years studying the Bible with passion, studying the Bible with desire, wanting to know everything I could know about God.

How many of you remember those early days?

I'm sharing this story with you because the 3 scriptures we're going to look at this morning relate to what happened to be next in my Christian experience.

Let's go to Matthew chapter 13, if you're not there already.

Scripture says, Jesus speaking, the kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed, what in his field?

Viable seed, okay, that means the seed hadn't been sitting around for a long time and gone bad.

Okay, maybe the right seed for that field or that climate?

How many of you are farmers and you buy a seed?

You buy certain seeds and there's a guarantee And there's a guarantee that the seed would be what?

97 98 whatever percent weed free Weed free pure seed I was at a farming conference a couple years ago listening to a lecture on small grains, a whole small grain process, how small grains are grown, how small, and I mean small like scale too, and the lack of equipment for small scale grain growers and how do you handle processing grains.

1 of the issues is there are some seeds that are very similar to Certain grains certain weed seeds that are similar to certain grain seeds It's very difficult to separate on a small-scale farm to separate weed seeds from Your desired seed and they went through how they made these devices to to separate very low-tech, but very creative ingenuity solutions to separating seed and 1 good seed in your field here, And it's the point of the parables, this is about weeds in the grain crop.

So, the kingdom of heaven's like a man that sowed good seed in his field, but while he slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and then he went his way.

But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then what happened?

So the servants, now let's stop here for just a second.

His disciples, his followers, his people.

So the servants of the owner came and said to him, Sir, did you not sow, what's it say?

I want you to say that question 1 more time.

Why is it that Christ's disciples, When they look upon a field, the first thing they see is the weeds.

I'm going to tell you about mine in a second.

Why is it that when we go to church, it's so easy to see the person sitting beside us is wearing jewelry?

Why is it when we go to church and we're sitting in the congregation, it's really easy to see what's wrong with the music?

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Recorded

Children of the Kingdom

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Plenary Meetings

Crucified with Christ

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Just Shall Live By Faith

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Delicious Grape Juice

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40m

A Final Generation

A Final Generation Part 1

33m

Avenge Not Yourselves

33m

Encounters With Jesus

Jesus’ Encounter with Blind Bartimaeus

38m

Finding Peace in the Time of Chaos

06 Salvation or Seduction

45m

ASI 2012 Youth Meetings

ASI 2012 Youth Meeting

1h 17m

Revival and the Mind of Christ

49m

Sound Doctrine