AdAgrA 2021: Hidden Treasure

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Plenary

John Kelly

Agriculture Part of the Right Arm

I just wanted to share a little bit about my background and experience in agriculture and have a sense of my journey with God.

We all have a journey and it's going to be fun through eternity to hear and share those.

So anyway, you can see I've, you know, I'm an old guy, so I have a lot of, have a lot of experience, done a lot of different things.

I started off on a farm, actually a tree farm, you know, For those who don't know, that's what they call the timber business.

My father had a vision for making a living with trees in Appalachia.

So I'm from the Appalachian Mountain region.

I guess I'm what you would call Scotch-Irish.

Anyway, I don't want to spend a lot of time on this aspect of it.

So, I have much to share with you on this amazing topic this morning, and so I ask you to please buckle up and listen fast, and I'm going to move right along.

So Let me start by asking you a question.

What is the 1 thing, the 1 issue at the center of the great controversy?

I would like to submit to you that it's about whether God can be trusted or not.

The gospel is not really just that God has forgiven our sins, but that he loves us with an eternally self-sacrificing love, and that he can be trusted to do only what is for our best good.

This is my personal struggle, this is my personal issue, why I don't always do what God has instructed me.

And I don't think I'm unique in that experience.

Certainly Paul wrote a lot about it to his own struggle.

In fact, Paul described himself as chief among sinners.

And so my desire and my design in this topical study today is to see how agriculture and health fit into God's plan for revealing Himself and demonstrating his love so that we can really know him, love him, and put ourselves fully and totally in the center of his benevolent will.

So let's ask God to do this for us as we explore this topic.

If you would, I want to just have a prayer this morning.

Our Father in heaven, Christ our creator and Redeemer, Holy Spirit, our comforter and teacher, Have mercy upon us.

Help us see this matter as you view it, Lord, and want us to understand it.

May we gain a deeper perspective on working the soil and how it relates to your plan to redeem us and restore all that was lost when our forefather sinned against your will.

As you have taught us, we ask it In Jesus' name, amen.

So my personal studies have led me to believe that agriculture and health is a vital part of the Day of Atonement, of the Day of Atonement, 3 angels, cleansing of the sanctuary.

But also that we as God's people do not yet fully grasp its role and importance in the redemption of man and resolution of the great controversy.

To establish some context for what I'm about to share.

Recall that the Day of Atonement in heaven began in October of 1844.

Recall that a very special work was done not only in the sanctuary, in the earthly sanctuary, on the typical day of atonement, but also in the camp.

Each family head did no ordinary work on that day of atonement, but sat in the door of his tent, afflicting his soul in a confessing, repentant spirit, making sure that his heart was right with God.

So here's, I'm basically sharing for what we read in Leviticus 23, and I'm not going to read these.

I put the scriptures on slides so that hopefully I can move a little faster instead of waiting for you to be able to look them up in your Bibles, although if you have your Bible and want to look them up, that's wonderful.

But friends, we are living in the most momentous part of eternity in a sense.

What part of eternity will be more fraught with significance than the time in which we are living.

We're living at the end and the conclusion of the great controversy.

And so I mean everything I do, everything that we do is in that context.

It does sober me, but it doesn't frighten me.

I mean, you realize the Scriptures tell us that the prophets of old, the angels, longed to be in the time where we are.

What a privilege, what a privilege we have.

But it's also a sobering call, call to study, to prayer, to contemplation that we might really be all that God wants us to be in and desires to use us to do.

So what we are doing is no ordinary work.

All right, well let's let's get to the meat of our topic then.

It's a study on agriculture and health in the context of the great controversy and the cleansing of the sanctuary.

Well I believe in its purest form and deepest meaning, it's what you might say, working the soil to produce and maintain the products of the soil.

It certainly includes growing food, but doesn't it include growing non-edibles as well?

Of course we have flowers, we've had a little, Christina I believe is her name, that is doing flowers as agriculture.

But ultimately I want to say to you, if you go deeper, I believe it's about restoring and maintaining the condition of the soil and its products as they came from the Creator's perfect hand.

When God saw that it was good, there, Genesis 1, 10.

So, and then the other part, what is health?

Well I believe health is about restoring what was lost when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and suffered the consequences of becoming subject to death.

Health is not simply about physical well-being, although that is surely part of it.

Is it real health about restoring the condition in which mankind and the creation were created?

And that includes optimal physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

And we see here Genesis 131, that God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good.

That's the description of hell, as I understand it from scriptures and my own personal studies.

So I believe this, the core topic, agriculture and health, is about dressing and keeping the soil with the purpose of redeeming mankind from the effects of Eden's fall.

To speak of agriculture in the sense of food production only is to take a narrow and I would say somewhat secular perspective.

We need to look at agriculture as God looks at it, not as man in his fallen sinful state does.

And to speak of health in the sense of mere physical wellness is to take also, I believe, a narrow, somewhat secular perspective as well.

We need to look at health as God looks at it, not as fallen, sinful mankind does.

So it is my hope and intent, by God's grace, to open our eyes to how God looks at working the soil in relation to the plan of salvation and how that relates to experiencing complete health relates to experiencing complete health and helping our neighbors experience health.

You know I think that we are as beings as human beings I believe we are too prone to looking at what we can do, we conceive for our careers, for our lives, for our, like I'm a physician, you may be a farmer, someone here may be an accountant, whatever.

We look at our work as, and think of it almost entirely as, what can I do?

And it's nothing, I mean it is important.

Our part is an essential but infinitesimally small part of it.

What we need to, I want to learn to do, and I want to encourage you, us, all of us, I want us to learn how to actually not think so much about what I can do, but what God can and wants to do through me.

What he, in other words, I'll talk about this more later, talk I'm giving today, but I do want to share with you that, you know, why would a 50 year old guy go back to school to study medicine?

You know, that's really stupid in the sense of, I mean, I was in the, when I went back to school, medical school at 48, I was sort of in the peak of my career, if you wanna say that.

Why in the, and you know, the thing that led me to go back to school is amazing to me now, but at the time it was so obvious.

We have been called, do you understand this?

We have been called to change the practice of medicine.

God established Seventh-day Adventist health message, not to survive in the middle of a secular world, but to change the way we do medicine.

And I had worked in Blue Cross and Blue Shield and been around health institutions long enough to know that we weren't doing a very good job of it.

But who in the world am I to think that I can make a difference?

All it takes for you to change this world is for you or me to step into God's will unreservedly.

I want to be more completely and unreservedly in His will.

He will change the world with 12 of us and we've got a room full.

Anyway, I mean dear ones, humility is right.

It is good to be humble, but it is not good to be timid.

Be bold, but not reckless in the confidence of what God is going to do.

He is going to do what He has said He will do.

Well, that was not part of the sermon, but that's part of my passion.

So anyway, this is not a sermon, but it seems like 1.

So Anyway, if we were to ask an ordinary person on the street to define agriculture, we might be told, well, it's farming.

Others might say agronomy, A little more education there.

Maybe agribusiness, like Archer Daniels Midland.

Alan Seiler

Final Charge

Dear Father in heaven, I just want to thank you for your goodness to me.

And Lord, you know that I'm not perfect, you know I have many faults, but your continuous love and guidance has drawn my heart, and I pray that it would continue to draw, and that with the message I speak tonight, it would draw others as well.

There is a story that I like to do when I start anything that I present.

I've forgotten a few times, but it's about 1 of the older kind of movies of Martin Luther, where he goes through this whole thing.

And basically his mentor comes to him and he's like, you can't find Christ and make yourself acceptable by beating your soul.

And so obviously if anyone's read the history of Martin Luther, it's a very dark and despairing beginning.

And so in the movie 1 version, his higher-up says, I'm going to send you to Wittenberg so that you can study the word of God and you can teach it because you need the word of God.

Little did he know that it was gonna start the Reformation.

And in the movie, Martin Luther says, Father, I don't know the Word of God.

How can I teach the Word of God if I don't know it?

And the guy looks at him and he says, we preach best what we need to learn most.

And in many ways, I feel like that tonight, where I haven't arrived, but the idea is that I see the end goal.

I see the point, and by God's grace, that comes out tonight.

So if you would start with me, turn to Matthew chapter 6.

And we're going to read through starting in verse 19.

And it says, "...lay up not for yourselves treasures upon the earth where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.

But lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

Christ is addressing here a situation that he sees in the population that he's speaking to where their confidence and their hope for this life is in their ability to lay up treasures on earth, to have security.

And he's saying, look, you need to change your perspective because that's a shifting sand situation.

You need to lay up your treasure in heaven.

He says, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

And then he says, the light of the body is the eye.

If there then the, sorry this is Old English.

If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

But if thy eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.

If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?

In treasures on earth, and Christ wants to move them to put their confidence in treasures in heaven, right?

And then we get this thing of evil, right?

And it's interesting that if we take evil all the way back to the original situation in the Garden of Eden, right?

We've heard this story a thousand times, right?

So Eve comes to the tree and she's told not to eat of it because the knowledge of evil is there.

She falls, she's deceived, she eats of the fruit, their eyes are opened, Adam and Eve, and obviously the rest is a downflow history of disaster, of which we are the wonderful recipients of today.

Evil is the principle, the knowledge of evil is the principle that God cannot be trusted, Okay?

So if you take the perspective in life, the eye of evil, right, and you believe that God can't be trusted, then what great darkness is there?

Because if God can't be trusted, He's your creator, He's your sustainer, then who becomes your sustainer?

Who becomes your foundation on which you plant your feet?

And Christ is saying, look, if your eye is evil, if you've taken into yourself this principle that I'm not trustworthy, that you can't depend on me, that you can't put your weight on me, that puts all the weight on you, and it's a great darkness.

And if any of you have ever been in a situation, and I'm so blessed that Uncle John gave this and talked about their testimony.

You know, the idea is that he's in this dark, anxious situation with their strawberries.

And he can either say, the Lord can't be trusted, right?

Or he can say, I'm gonna take a notebook and I'm gonna walk up into the hills because I know my God has answers, Right?

But then you take upon yourself the entire weight.

No man can serve 2 masters, for Either he will hate the 1 and love the other, or else he will hold to 1 and despise the other.

Let's say that you're in a relationship with someone, okay?

Practical example, most of you probably are or have been or will be, So this is very practical.

And let's say that there's there's something holding you.

There's some distrust that you have in that individual.

Like maybe they're doing something behind your back or what.

What's the full extent that you can actually trust that individual?

If anything, it's going to go the opposite direction, especially if your fears are justified.

And God's saying, look, you can't be back and forth with me on this.

You either are going to trust me or you don't.

Therefore, if we take, put our treasure in heaven, if we don't have the evil eye, taking the principle upon ourselves that it's God can't be trusted and we take on that weight ourselves, if we don't, if we reject that, Christ is saying, therefore I say to you, take no thought for your life, "'what you shall eat, what you shall drink, "'nor yet for your body, what you shall put on.

"'Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?

"'Behold the fowls of the air.'" And now he's giving examples.

But that word, that word thought, obviously in the the King James Version it's thought, but a more correct translation is a tearing to pieces feeling that's connected with anxiety.

Okay, so it's really saying don't take anxiety or don't be anxious about these things.

It's not saying don't think about preparing and trying to earn a living, don't think about this, don't think about that.

Don't take the weight of that responsibility, that anxiety that weighs you down.

That's something that I want to take for you.

That's something that you don't have to weigh upon yourselves, and if you're willing, I'll take it for you, right?

So, behold the fowls of the air, verse 26.

They sow not, obviously this is an agricultural reference.

Obviously Christ is talking to a lot of people that are involved in agriculture because he had to back then.

It was like probably 80% of the population at least.

Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, neither gather into barns, that your heavenly Father feedeth them.

Which of you, taking thought, anxiety, this fear, this...

Which of you taking thought can add 1 cubic to a stature, and why take ye thought for raiment?

Chad Kreuzer

History of Ag for Our Future

Before we begin, I know we already had a prayer, but I'd love to say 1 more prayer just before we start.

Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to study your Word, to study history, more history.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide us, give us wisdom in Jesus name, Amen.

Now this message is actually, it's called a history of agriculture for our future, and it's more of a history of agriculture than, this is not so much of a sermon or a Bible study.

This is more just looking at some snippets of history within, well, the history of our church.

And now we know, obviously, an agricultural conference like this, we all know here who the very first gardener was and that was God, right?

Because it says that God planted a garden Eastward in Eden, right?

So God actually did plant and then he had his people Adam and Eve and and we've been doing it ever since And slowly we've gotten away with it or away from it not away with it We've gotten away from it because now it's probably like less than 1% of people who actually earn a living as farmers, right?

So humans are doing it less right now than in any part of Earth's history.

But 1 of the aspects of agriculture that we believe when it comes to life and education is that it affects the character.

Character, you may have heard the saying, this is just kind of a human saying, is that character is what you do when no 1 is looking.

But it's also probably what you do, I think it's also, it may be what you do when no 1 is forcing, you know?

Because if nobody's forcing you to do something, really your character might come out.

Now think about agriculture and character.

This is kind of a bad illustration of it.

Well she was a gardener, she was a farmer, she was in a garden and nobody was looking.

And what did she do when no 1 was forcing her or no 1 she thought was looking?

Now God was looking, and I'll bet the Garden of Eden looked a whole lot better than that picture I gave you, right, you think I could have come up with something better than that.

Well, when no 1 was forcing her, when no 1 was keeping her, she went and she did something that she shouldn't have done, and here we are today, with all the suffering that is in the world.

But what she did when no 1 was forcing, revealed her character.

You see, character is kind of a revelation of who you are to the world, right?

Your character reveals who you are to the world.

In agriculture, agriculture is a field of work where largely you don't have an overseer or ruler other than God.

Agriculture is a field of work where largely you don't have an overseer or ruler other than God.

Agriculture is a field of work where you don't have somebody always, now, okay, if you're managing a farm and you have an overseer over you as the manager, okay, you may have an overseer.

But in general, there's something about agriculture that basically is a connection between us and God and learning the laws of nature all around us.

And might it be, in part, that agriculture might be a training in self-governance?

We're going to talk about self-governance.

Remember, this is more a history lesson than it, this is not so much a sermon or a Bible study.

We'll hit a few Bible verses but this is more a history lesson.

You may have read from Studies in Education by E.A.

Sutherland, this great educational man from our history who started, what school did he start?

Yes, right, he started the Madison School and he also worked with Battle Creek there before that and notice he wrote in his book, so this is a kind of a long quote from his book, about Horace Mann who was a kind of a historical figure in education in the United States.

Horace Mann wrote, 1 of the highest and most valuable objects to which the influences of a school can be made conducive, consists in training our children to be self-governing.

Mann had the following experience in dealing with students.

He gave the young men to understand that he looked to them to be their own police.

When a tutor who had resided in a gentleman's dormitory to keep order was exchanged for a lady teacher, Mr.

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Series

Plenary

Final Charge

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Agriculture Part of the Right Arm

49m

Final Charge

38m

History of Ag for Our Future

51m

Sound Doctrine