GYC 2014: At The Cross

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Creation, Agriculture, and Evangelism

Paul Dysinger

1. The Pattern of God

This message was presented at the GYC 2014 conference at the Cross in Phoenix, Arizona.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

We're going to have a beautiful time sharing together about the garden.

I'm guessing all of you are interested in agriculture and the garden and gardening and the natural world.

And for the first few sessions here, it's a real honor and it's a privilege for me to share this seminar with Amy Smith.

I guess she's trying to stand at the other door to route people here.

For these first 3 seminars, we're going to be specifically talking about the spiritual aspect of the garden and understanding God and knowing Him through the nature that he has created and the beauty that he has created in the natural systems that give us a little picture into his heart.

And that is really where my passion lies because, you know, you can go into the garden and it can just be a garden.

There are hundreds of people, thousands of people that get into agriculture and that do agriculture that never know the God of agriculture.

And my passion is to know God, to know Him intimately.

And at the foundation for every single 1 of us in gardening, in working with the soil should be to know his heart, to know who he is.

And so we'll be talking in these first 3 seminars about the pattern of God, the image of God in the garden, what He is seeking, how He is seeking to reveal Himself to us, because I believe there's no better place to learn what it means to love than in the garden.

So let's start out with a word of prayer together.

Our Heavenly Father, Lord, I am so small, And there is so much to know about you.

Father, I pray that you would send your Holy Spirit into this place.

That you would humble our hearts before your throne.

That we would come to know You through Your created works.

And I should share as well that, so in these first 3 seminars we're going to be going over the spiritual side.

In the last 3 seminars, Amy is going to pick it up and talk about evangelism in the garden and how gardening and agriculture opens up avenues for evangelism to other souls and some practical agriculture tips and experience as well.

I wanted to start out with sharing a quote here from Christ's Object Lessons.

It says, in these lessons, direct from nature, there is a simplicity and a purity that makes them of the highest value.

All need the teaching to be derived from the source.

In itself, the beauty of nature leads the soul away from sin and worldly attractions and toward purity, peace, and God.

Too often, minds of students, how many of you all are students in here?

Too often, the minds of students are occupied with men's theories and speculations, falsely called science and philosophy.

They need to be brought into close contact with nature.

Let them learn that creation and Christianity have 1 God.

Let them be taught to see the harmony of the natural with the spiritual.

Let everything which their eyes see or their hands handle be made a lesson in character building.

Thus the mental powers will be strengthened, the character developed, and the whole life ennobled.

That's my desire in a nutshell, to come to know God and see Him through His creation.

The pattern of God, the image of God in the garden.

In Genesis 1, 26 and 28, God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air.

In the first sentence here, you'll notice that I bolded a couple of these.

It says, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and then what is that right after likeness?

It means that the next part after is going to explain some of what he just said, right?

Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." God created us in His image, in the image of God, but his image has a certain characteristic about it.

God, in essence, has a dominion that he is in control over.

It's the dominion over the whole universe.

And God has, so God has this dominion, he has a seat of dominion that he is ruling over.

And he makes man, in his image, after his likeness, to have dominion in a smaller sphere over something in the same way that God has dominion over His sphere in a larger way.

He has a throne and just think about it for a little bit.

Let's just say that this is the throne, okay?

If you have a ruler that is sitting on his throne, from his throne comes in essence a reflection of who he is, does it not?

Because from the throne comes his decisions, the decisions that he makes, the judgments that he makes, come from his throne, from his seat of dominion.

If he is a cruel ruler, basically from his throne comes cruelty, right?

Or if he is a loving ruler, the decisions that he makes, think of it like Jesus coming before Pilate.

Pilate was sitting on the judgment seat of dominion and the decisions that were made were basically an expression of His character, of who He was.

So God has a throne, He has a seat of dominion that he is ruling from.

God's ruling from his throne and out from his throne comes an expression of who he is.

Now we all have this, everyone knows that God is love.

This is maybe kind of the bottom line, if you summed it down to the very bottom line, we would all say who is God and we would say God is love.

For instance, if I came down to you and I said, you know, I love you.

Okay, so he said, I assume it by the way you present yourself to me.

I mean, is there any reality going beyond that?

Just in our little interaction maybe, but then, you know, what if I instead came and put a gun to your head and said, love me?

It's a little bit hard to actually define what love is just by itself.

I mean, we have 1 Corinthians 13 where it says love is patient, it's kind, you know, it goes into a whole description.

But when it comes down to it, love has to connect with a heart.

And so God is love, but what does that mean?

2. The Pattern to the Third Power

All right everyone, Let's go ahead and get started here with our second presentation.

And if anyone is new, I just want to mention again it's a real privilege to share these seminars with Amy Smith.

She's sitting back here and she's going to be going a little bit later into real practical agriculture and evangelism and agriculture in itself.

In these first ones, we're talking specifically about the spiritual link between agriculture and our lives and really knowing God through the nature that He has created.

So let's pray real quick before we go into our second 1 here.

Our Heavenly Father, I pray that you would come to this place, that you would fill us with your presence as we look at your word, as we look at nature that surrounds us and the lessons that can be learned from it, and as we seek to learn and to grow in You.

And we'll go into this a little bit and you'll see what we're talking about.

But first of all, let's start out with this question.

It's a little bit of an ambiguous question.

I mean, it's kind of like, for instance, it's like parenting advice.

And I'm not a parent myself, but I have 2 sisters that are married and have kids and you know the conversations about parenting and and parenting advice.

You know you have parenting advice that you know on-demand feeding versus rigid schedules or Leaving a child alone and let it cry itself to sleep or baby it and keep it in your bed all of the time or you know or never spank your children or Spankings are really good, and you should spank your children a lot you have these variety of yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said it in that way, but you have this variety of advice and when it comes down to it, what is love?

What is reality when it comes down to it?

How do you know what truly gives life and what truly causes a child to be nurtured and to thrive and to grow?

And like when it comes down to the garden, There's a whole bunch of different philosophies in gardening as well.

How do you know what truly gives life and what causes it to thrive?

Just a quick recap on what we talked about in the last seminar, God created man to have dominion in his image, in the image of God, in his smaller sphere of influence, in the same way that God has dominion in his larger sphere of influence.

And dominion is, like we were talking about, a channel of blessing that flows out to give life to everything in its sphere of influence.

Think of the life of Abraham and how Abraham had a huge family, right?

I mean, probably most of them, not all of them were really his family, but he had this sphere of influence where people joined him because he was, in essence, a little river of life out to all of these people that were surrounding him.

And again, just the contrast between dominion versus domination, where godly dominion is this channel of blessing, and domination on the other side is sucking life.

It's like a ruler that is seeking to suck life from those that are under his sphere of influence for himself, to keep everything for himself.

So Where do we see a picture of God's dominion?

Where did we talk about seeing a picture of God's dominion?

In nature, in His creation, in the garden, in the sanctuary.

Remember that out from God's throne flows this expression of who he is, his way, the derek, the Hebrew word his way, his manner, his course of life, who he is.

And So God is the source of life, and as such, he is the 1 who ultimately defines life.

He defines what life is and what life is not.

He is the way of love, which is his manner.

He was a reflection of God's dominion on this earth.

Out from Adam's life was to flow a river of blessing, nourishing and cherishing the plants and the animals and the people within Adam's care, within his sphere of influence.

So that was just a little recap of what we were talking about.

In this 1 we're going to talk about how does God communicate his way to man.

Okay, Through His Word, that's the first 1 that I heard from everyone.

The spirit of prophecy, which is ultimately His Word.

We're going to specifically touch on his word.

Ultimately, when it comes down to it, God communicates.

When we communicate to each other, we speak.

And our words communicate what we're trying to express to someone else.

Of course, there's also our facial expression and all of that that goes into it as well.

But specifically, God communicates his way to us.

He describes his way to us through his word.

And you'll see that his word takes on more than just the words that come out of his mouth, or the word of God as we have in his written form and his word.

The word of God, ultimately when it came down to it, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, the Word of God literally defined their existence, didn't it?

It defined, in fact, His word was what came to them and said, you can eat of all of the trees except this 1 tree.

So in essence, God's word defined their existence.

What they could do, what they could not do.

And then His Word defined their existence in that it was His Word that created everything that was around them as well.

The Word of God, and ultimately we know God's image through His Word.

The Word of God gives us the reality of who God is, it gives us the reality of what gives life and the reality of what brings restoration.

Going back to that original question, you know, what is reality?

Ultimately, there's only 1 place that we can go and that is to the Word of God.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

It is the reality of what gives life and what brings restoration.

So the pattern to the third power, God's word revealed 3 times over.

And this is where we are going to, the first part of this is, I'm going to touch on how nature reveals the image of God.

And we're going to spend most of our time on this 1 and on the last 1 because specifically we're here to talk about agriculture and to talk about nature and how it reveals God.

And I would like to just make the point here as well that whenever we see the Word of God in any of these 3 forms that we're going to go through, starting out with nature, we are catching a glimpse into who God is.

We're catching an understanding of who He is.

The seen world that is around us, the nature that surrounds us, teaches us about the unseen.

Nature in the last seminar we were talking about how nature is literally a product of God's thought.

And so in his nature we're catching a little glimpse into his mind, into who he is.

And Psalms 33, 6 through 9 talks about how by the word of the Lord were the heavens made and all the hosts of them.

And God put Adam in the garden, surrounded by nature, to catch a glimpse of who he is.

We catch a glimpse into God's mind through his creation, like a painting tells us about the character of the painter.

And when it comes down to it, Jesus over and over uses it, uses nature for his parables.

So let's talk a little bit about a few different aspects of nature that show us a glimpse into God.

We talked about this in the last seminar as well, fruit being that the farmer expends his life for fruit, does he not?

We put our energies into the garden to expend our life for fruit, and then He ends up getting life back from the fruit, from the energy that he put into it, right?

3. Practicing the Pattern

Okay everyone, We're going to get started here.

We're a little bit, running a little bit.

We're going to get a little bit more practical here with the gardening and the application in our lives.

So let's begin again with a little word of prayer and then we'll jump right in.

Our Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this opportunity to come together and to talk about the garden and nature and creation and the things that you've made and how they give us a glimpse into yourself and how we can put our hands into the soil and learn how to grow the food that we eat.

And I pray that you would fill us with your spirit as we talk and share together in Jesus' name.

You know, so I live with my family on Bountiful Blessings Farm.

To just give you a little background to where we're coming from.

I live with my family on Bountiful Blessings Farm and we, my uncle and my dad, have partnered together and we grow a whole host, a whole variety of vegetables and herbs and berries.

Over 50 different varieties of vegetables, herbs, and berries.

We do it pretty intensively, so we have greenhouses, and then we grow stuff out in the fields as well.

And we do it all organically, and most of it, We're doing it as a business, and most of it is sold directly to the customers through a CSA.

And so I could get up and share with you all kinds of statistics.

Being in the agriculture world, all kinds of statistics about how the average piece of food travels over 1, 500 miles before it ends up on your plate.

How many of you have heard about GMOs, genetically modified foods?

So we're talking to the choir here on genetically modified foods and the kinds of things that they're doing to put into foods and all of that.

Amy is going to be sharing a little bit more about health.

I don't know if she goes into some of that kind of stuff.

Well, just the health aspect of gardening for sure.

So I'm really excited to be hearing some of the things that she's going to be sharing.

So there's a whole host of reasons to be growing our own food and to learn how to grow our own food.

And in some of these, in these first seminars, we kind of stepped back and looked at perhaps the bottom line.

The bottom line reason, because I believe that the fundamental reason to put our hands into the soil is to learn about our creator and to get to know him better.

And all of the other reasons are extremely important, but this is a fundamental reason because it shows us our own hearts.

As we work in the soil, it softens our hearts, it subdues us, and it works a work of humility that might not be found in other areas.

I know that God has really sought to work on my own heart in letting go of myself and seeing how he works with the ground and with nature and with all of that.

So we're gonna dump into a little bit, real quick about practicing the power pattern.

We've talked about the dominion of God, how he has a dominion, a sphere of influence that he is a life giver to.

And we'll jump into that a little bit and then we'll talk about specifically some practical aspects of gardening itself.

How many of you would like to go into, get a little bit into gardening itself?

All right, yeah, there's some good interest.

So, I like standing down here better if that's all right with all of you.

It feels a little bit more closer to you all.

It should say, the slide here should say 3 levels of dominion.

And this is a quick little recap but also touching a little bit on our lives, because our lives are to be like a farmer that is nourishing and cherishing the garden.

There's the physical and natural realm like we've been talking about that we actually physically can learn how God's dominion works.

While we are creating an environment for a plant to thrive, the same lessons can be learned and transferred over to how to create an environment for our hearts to thrive and for our families to thrive.

In learning to care for the natural world and ourselves, we end up learning how to care for others as well.

And so there's the very physical part of the soil and building up the soil and making the soil a place where plants will thrive and grow.

And then there's the soul, which is our heart.

And we talked about a little bit in the last 1 how our hearts are representative of the soil and God's work of breaking up our fallow ground and opening up our hearts to God.

Do you want to share that real quick about breaking up our...

Because our mind and the thoughts that we have in our mind is what influences our heart.

And So when Paul was talking about preparing the soil for your plants, and a lot of you said, we really need to get the weeds out, we need to get thorns out, we need to get rocks out, so that the little plants can grow that we're transplanting in the seeds.

And the Lord's been showing me that, you know, unless I take every thought captive, it crowds out the seed of the Word of God.

So I was thinking of practical ways that we can take thoughts captive by filling, You know, you need vacant space.

Remember Jesus said, you don't leave the room empty.

You have to fill it or other demons will come in.

And so, I've been practicing memorizing scripture and sharing them.

You know, because every time we speak the word of God to others, even if we're memorizing it ourselves, and it blesses others, then it comes back into our heart again as we say it verbally, as we think it, as we share it.

So just, I was wanting to think about that, about developing a soul.

And for those that are listening to the recording later, she was talking about how taking our thoughts captive and that being a part of breaking up our hearts and preparing the room for God's Word to grow in our hearts.

You know, ultimately We have nothing to give unless we have received something from God, like we were talking about in the other session.

But not just receiving, but actually incorporating it into our lives.

1 thing that goes along with our soul and the breaking up of our hearts is something that I have a real passion for, and that is truly seeking God with all of our hearts.

And that's something that has come out in the last 2 seminars, seeking God with all of our hearts and being willing to let go of the sin that is there and being willing to go and repent.

And, you know, as you seek the Lord, He will bring things to your mind, thoughts to your mind that you'll remember and, you know, he may ask you to do, I think of it like an illustration of the compost pile.

You know, for instance, we have a, we, How many of you are gardeners already?

How many of you know what a compost pile is?

OK, for those of you that don't know what a compost pile is, it's a place where you take all of this rotten fruit, or leftover fruit, or if you clear out a place of land, it's the old plants that were growing, and you put them into this pile, and the natural processes of nature break it down, and it actually breaks down into beautiful soil, believe it or not, for those of you that don't know.

And so you take what's called humus or compost, and you take that soil and you put it of the broken down plants that have decomposed or the rotten fruit, and after it's totally decomposed, you can put it back on your garden and it really builds up your soil and adds a lot of nutrients to it.

And in many ways, we, all of us have rotten fruit in our lives.

All of us have rotten fruit that needs to go through the furnace of the compost pile.

A compost pile actually heats up, it gets extremely hot, and it needs to go through the furnace of the compost pile, and God is calling to our hearts to repent, to let go of our sin, to be willing to go, and to make something right.

Series

Creation, Agriculture, and Evangelism

2. The Pattern to the Third Power

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

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How We Can Be Sure Christ Will Soon Come

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The 4th Angel: Literature Evangelism Made Relevant In A Postmodern World

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Sound Doctrine