AdAgrA 2021: Hidden Treasure

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Chad Kreuzer

Changing Lives, One Seed at a Time

I'll share with you just a little bit about myself even though it's just been done.

You'll probably be seeing her along with me this week.

Just about halfway up Michigan on the west side of the lower peninsula.

We've traveled full-time for the last, I guess it was 20 years, it would have been 20 years now, it was 19 years and then COVID hit and then the last year we've hardly traveled at all.

But we've made a living for a number of years making documentary films with Anchor Point Films, our website is anchorpointfilms.com.

We go around to archaeologists, historians, theologians, scholars, and medical professionals and make documentaries on the Bible, history, health.

And we have a YouTube channel where there's a bunch of free material to watch on there.

If you go to YouTube and you go to Health and Homestead, just all spelled out with spaces, health, and the word and, and the word homestead, we have Various things on growing food, planting, country living, scientific studies comparing head-to-head drug medication with natural remedies and showing, often, the ones we look at that are generally just as good or better than the drug medications than natural remedies are, with significantly less side effects, at least the ones we typically share.

And so before we begin our message this morning, which is changing lives 1 seed at a time, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, thank you for a beautiful, sunshiny morning.

Even though it's crisp out with the frost on the ground, we still enjoy the light of the sun.

And we pray that the Son of Righteousness would shower down upon us this morning.

We're talking about changing lives 1 seed at a time, and we're going to be talking about some history, but also it's a fact, it's purpose, things that we can learn for our future.

This is a quotation here from a book called Ministry of Healing.

It says, Christian farmers can do real missionary work in helping the poor, to find homes on the land, and in teaching them how to till the soil and make it productive.

Teach them how to use the implements of agriculture, how to cultivate various crops, and how to plant and care for orchards.

How many of you here have been involved ever in your life in gardening?

Okay, Most of you have been involved in gardening, and I guess being at a conference on agriculture would make sense that probably some of us, at least most of us, have had some kind of connection with that.

And it's 1 of the great blessings of life, and we're told that this can actually be a missionary work.

This can be a missionary work that can help people out and it can help teach other people how to make a living from the land.

And these days many of us think, ah, you can't make a living from agriculture anymore unless you're a millionaire, you know.

The average farm in America is 444 acres.

And how many of us can go, unless your parents are quite wealthy, because most of you are young right now in this room, how many of us can go buy 444 acres?

Probably not, unless, like I said, you got a mom or a dad with some deep pockets.

But the good news is people these days are making a living off of agriculture with just a few acres.

And yes, still your average farmer who has 444 acres hardly breaks even.

He actually statistically loses a little bit.

But there are ways to make a living, and we're told, on the screen that you cannot see, let me try to unplug that again, we're told that people can learn if we would teach them.

And so we Need to learn how to actually do this and by the way I don't mean that everybody needs to I do not make my living in agriculture I make my living through mainly through video work through traveling but regardless I'll let my wife try to get the, I'm not sure why the, I don't know if it's just a bad connection, which may be the case, and if it is, we can go without it, it's not a necessity.

And so, by the way, once again, I just said it, but I do not have the belief that everybody has to go into agriculture.

Agriculture as far as in education is not made primarily for most people to go into agriculture.

It is made as a part of the growing process, the character growing process, to teach us skills and diligence.

And also, 1 of the things you may never have thought of is that we're told that 1 of the aspects of agriculture is to basically make the people who are trained by it immovable so that they are not swayed by the practices of society.

And I think 1 of the reasons that is is when you're living a practical life when people live in just headspace and what I mean by that is they they just simply live in books and in Educational ivory towers they can lose practicality So they can be influenced into many different things just by simply words.

Whereas a man or a woman who has lived a practical life, it's not as easy to sway them according to their thoughts because they have practical experience.

You can trick a little child who has no experience into believing all kinds of things.

But a grown man or woman who has learned the practices of life, learned habits of diligence, learned how to work, learned how to do agriculture, learned practical skills, they're harder to sway into strange and unusual teachings.

Now, I wanna go back through a little history of agriculture in our faith, And this is more on foreign missions, but before we make it to foreign missions, I want to start out with a school called the Madison School.

We're going to talk about the Madison School.

We're also going to talk about missionary work that was done in China, some very, very powerful information.

I have a feeling on the back end there's just a shh.

We can just skip it, because I will need to read some stuff on there.

So, I will share with you about a man by the name of Denton Reebok.

So, Denton Reebok was a man who lived in 1897 to 1983.

And to most of you being young people, that sounds like a long time ago, but part of that was during my lifetime.

And Denton Rebok was a young man who grew up on a farm, if I remember correctly, in Nebraska.

And as he was there, he learned diligence, he learned work with his family, and then he ended up, God led him to do, into education, and he led him to China.

And if you, How many of you grew up in families where your parents would read like good books to you like missionary books or these kind of things?

A lot of them have corny looking covers are unbelievably good.

You read the stories and you're like, man, that is an incredible story.

And 1 of those, if you ever want, and by the way, since there's almost no parents, is anybody in this room a parent?

But if you were a parent, and anybody listening on AudioVerse, if you are a parent and you want to read to your children some beautiful story of a person that they could look up to, a man that has masculine attributes, someone who has diligence and thrift and ability to make decisions and someone that you would just be proud to have your child try to emulate, you'd wanna read the story of Denton Rebok, which is, it's called For the Love of China.

And it was by Herbert Ford, by Herbert Ford.

He wrote the book, but it's about Denton Reebok But Herbert Ford wrote a book called the for the love of China and he was the founder of the China Training Institute a junior college with a farm about 160 miles from Shanghai.

He has this, there's this incredible story of while he is over there in China, things happen on a number of different levels.

Sorry for everybody that you have to go through this.

I think the, I wonder if the back end just has, yeah, it comes and goes.

So Denton Reebok tells a story of while he was there in China There was a terrible famine taking place.

There was no water There was no rain and because of that there was well going to be no food and this had gone on I don't know 60 70 days and these Chinese people didn't have a way to really get enough water to water their fields.

So what did they end up doing is 1 day, Denton was walking down the road with some of the students from the school, because he's the leader of the school there.

And some of the Chinese walk by him and they said, hey, Mr.

Li, because that's what they called him in their language.

Do you believe in the old man up in heaven?

That was the terminology they used for God there in China, at least that region of China.

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Changing Lives, One Seed at a Time

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