AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Morning Devotional

Barry Mosier

Morning Devotional: Thursday

Kind Heavenly Father, we have appreciated the morning time for sweet time together with you in prayer.

Be with us now and as we, in our talk this morning, as we open your word, bless us this day.

If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness and your darkness shall be as the noon day.

The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your soul in drought and strengthen your bones, and you shall be like a watered garden and a spring of water whose waters do not fail.

This morning I'll be sharing our family's testimony about starting to farm.

My wife, Mary Beth, grew up in the country and loved it in the country.

I grew up in town, so I was a city kid in a town of about 5, 000 people.

My father was a carpenter, but he was also a very avid outdoorsman who hunted and fished and trapped and even though he was not an Adventist, he gave me an enduring love for nature and the things of outdoors.

Because my mother figured I'd go and fish with dad every day, she took me each Sabbath after church to my uncle's farm.

You know As I grew up, most of my dreams at night took place out on that farm.

In the summers, I enjoyed making hay out on the farm and I enjoyed, not quite so much, walking the bean fields, weeding his soybeans.

And after college, I became a certified public accountant and Mary Beth and I bought a home on the outskirts of Rochester, Minnesota.

I took a job working for an Adventist CPA in Dodge Center, Minnesota.

The practice where I worked, we did a lot of farm income tax returns.

And so I was very acquainted with farmers.

At the time back then they weren't doing very well financially.

In fact, the joke around the neighborhood really was, how do you become a millionaire?

Well, You start with 2000000 and you farm for a year or 2.

I viewed farming as a lot of work and a great lifestyle, but no money in it.

That was how it seemed to me as I was doing these tax returns.

And I remember the farm crisis of 1986 there when land prices dropped from 3000 an acre to about 600 dollars an acre almost overnight.

Probably 20 percent of our farm clients went broke.

I can tell you I wouldn't have dreamed of starting to farm myself.

The Bible says, and the Lord will guide you continually.

Have you found that to be true in your life?

Someone once told me that sometimes in our lives it's so dark that you really can't see the place to put your next step.

And yet when we turn around and look behind us, we see a four-lane highway of where God has led.

Well, after 5 years of living on the outskirts of the city of Rochester, Mary Beth and I knew for sure we needed to get out into the country to raise our family.

I bought, I tried, I tried so hard to buy a little 5 acre place with a house out in the country and God said no.

I tried so hard, I tried to sell our house, it wouldn't sell, nothing worked.

Finally a man came into my office and said, I heard you're looking for a place in the country.

He was selling an old farmhouse and barn and 50 acres of land.

God didn't want me to have just a couple acres.

And I'm so thankful that God wouldn't give me what I wanted.

You wanted something and God said, no, I've got something better for you in mind.

Well after 20 years of accounting work I felt God's call to serve in the mission field as a volunteer.

We were volunteers in Africa for 11 years, Marybeth and I, and Andrew sitting between us there.

We started, we sold my accounting practice and moved to Kibidula Farm in Tanzania.

And we lived off the rent from my home and the house.

And then after 8 years at Kibidula in Tanzania, we were in the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, for 3 years.

I was involved in evangelism, publishing, church planting, and of course, always the accountant.

Well, it was a blessing to work with our son Keith and Tammy there in the Congo and that was just a real blessing.

And Nathan and Starla are here at our meetings.

And they're going to be moving to Tanzania to work with Kibidula Farms in March of this year.

But once again, I saw the farming was discouraging there in the village, seeing the struggle of subsistence farmers, usually farming an acre, maybe 2 of corn, maybe they were getting 10 bushels to the acre.

Hunger, hard work, battling weather, lack of soil fertility, bugs, disease.

It was heartbreaking to watch it, really.

People were flocking to the cities, seeking to fulfill their dreams, and when they got there, they saw their dreams crushed and lost their families, oftentimes.

Their lives out on the farm were simple, no crop, no eat.

And you know, it was sad because if you wanted to insult someone, you called him an mshamba.

And I would ask young people, what does your dad do for a living?

Well, that was the kind of mental attitude people had toward farming.

And how much we need to be able to go to these other countries and lift up their ideal of what God's plan was for farming and give them knowledge so that they can see a better way of life.

I appreciate these agricultural missionaries.

And I see some of them sitting here right now, and I'm just so thankful for the work you're doing.

And when we extended the gospel message to them, they readily accepted it.

If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness and your darkness shall be as the noon day." How true that is.

The thing I learned working in the mission field was to trust in God.

I didn't know what I was doing, but I tried my very best.

I made so many mistakes, But in spite of these, God blessed our work.

They are exponentially beyond what we could imagine.

Cavell Blood

Morning Devotional: Friday

Dear Father in heaven, we thank you for waking us up this morning.

We thank you for giving us another day of life.

We thank you for giving us air to breathe.

And this morning I pray that your Spirit might be here among us, that your Holy Spirit would be here teaching each 1 of us.

And I ask Lord that the words that I speak might be from you not from me.

Well it is a humbling experience to to be sharing what I study in devotions with with you this morning.

It's usually not, This is usually not my position.

I just pray that God might speak this morning.

If you have your Bibles with you, turn with me to James chapter 2 and we'll start at verse 14.

I will have most of the verses up here on the screen too if you don't have your Bible with you.

This is going to be a study of faith and what is needed to be combined with faith in order for it to be profitable.

It starts out by saying, what does it profit my brethren?

Though a man say he hath faith and have not works, can faith save him?

If a brother or sister be naked and destitute of daily food, and 1 of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled.

Notwithstanding, ye give them not those things which are needful for the body.

What doth it profit?" And then it continues in verse 17 saying, even so faith that hath not works is dead, being alone.

So we can see here that a true faith, a living faith, is going to produce holy fruits.

And it's shown by its effect in the works.

Hoping for the best and not doing anything about it is kind of like a dead tree.

This is from Matthew Henry's comments on James chapter 2.

He says, true believing is not an act of understanding only, but a work of the whole heart.

That a justifying faith cannot be without works is shown from the 2 examples, Abraham and Rahab.

Further on in James chapter 2 it talks about the examples of Abraham and Rahab in their in their faith.

Abraham believed God and it was reckoned unto him for righteousness.

Faith producing such works advanced him into peculiar favors.

We see then, verse 24 of James chapter 2, how that by works a man is justified, not by a bare opinion or profession or believing without obeying, but having such faith as produces good works." So we're here at an agriculture conference.

Can we be a farmer while only having a bare opinion or profession, or believing without obeying the rules in the physical world.

People wouldn't trust, people wouldn't trust me or us as a farmer If all we do is talk about growing crops, but we've never done anything or have nothing to show for it.

I can't just believe that the seeds will grow without giving them the right environment to grow in.

I would need to plant the seed, I need to water the seed, give it light, shield it from harsh temperatures, but doing those things doesn't make the seed grow.

I think the same can also be said too about being a Christian.

Can we really be Christians while only having a bare opinion or profession without believing, or believing without obeying?

Can people come to us and expect us to be a Christian if we're not obeying what God has told us to do.

Through heathenism, Satan had for ages turned men away from God, But he won his great triumph in perverting the faith of Israel.

By contemplating and worshiping their own conceptions, the heathen had lost the knowledge of God and become more and more corrupt.

The principle that man can save himself by his own works lay at the foundation of every heathen religion.

It had now become the principle of the Jewish religion.

This was at the time of Christ, when Christ came.

This was just the beginning few pages here of Desire of Ages.

Now I know there's a lot that could be studied into that quote, but I want to focus on the section that's highlighted.

Sometimes I wonder how much of this principle holds true today, that a man can save himself by his own works.

That this didn't just stop back then, but does it still happen today?

Am I doing good works to save myself, or are the good works results of my connection with God?

Doing good works will not give us any more merit that will make us any more worthy to be saved.

A lot of times we can look at the Israelites or the Jews in the time of Jesus when he was here on earth and think about how far we've come and how different we are.

It's easy, I know, reading like patriarchs and prophets and you think, oh, the Israelites, you know, they were out there doing this and that, but oh, I wouldn't have done that.

Or then you advance to the Jews in the time of Christ, or you even think of those who were around when Ellen White was alive, and you think, wow, I would have just believed her, you know?

But how often do we do that but then in our own daily life we're still just like they were.

What does it say in James chapter 4 verse 7?

You can turn there or I will have the verse on the screen here as well.

Resist the devil and he will flee from you.

You resist the devil and he will flee from you.

Draw nigh to God and he will draw nigh to you.

Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.

Now yes, God can humble us, but it's probably better if we humble ourselves.

We have a part to do and God has a part to do.

God is not going to do for you what you can do for yourself.

God has given man land to be cultivated, but in order that the harvest may be reaped, there must be a harmonious action between the divine and human agencies.

The Plow and other implements of labor must be used at the right time.

If he is careless and negligent, his unfaithfulness testifies against him.

So the seed must be sown, and who sows the seed?

I know in the parable of the sower, Christ is sowing the seed, but in the physical world here, if we're sowing, I just gave it away, yeah, we must be doing the 1 sowing.

The harvest is proportionate to the energy expended.

We can't expect to have a big harvest if we're not putting a big amount of time into our farm.

That would be against the laws of nature.

So there are also must be how much time are we putting in with our relationship with God?

How much time are we putting in in drawing nigh to God?

As we are drawing nigh to God, he will be drawing nigh to us.

There must be a harmonious action between the divine and the human agencies.

So what did it say on the previous slide?

If he is careless and negligent, his unfaithfulness testifies against him." The quote continues, should be, so it is in the spiritual things.

Man is to work out his own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who worketh in him, both to will and to do of his good pleasure.

There is to be a co-partnership, a divine relation between the Son of God and the repentant sinner.

I know this next part is a little bit long but I left it in here for the sake of the quote.

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Morning Devotional: Thursday

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Morning Devotional: Friday

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