AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Plenary

Scott Ritsema

Grow Grow Grow: A Living Parable

Well, thank you for the introduction and the kind welcome, Alan, and everybody at the Ad Agri Conference.

It is such a blessing to be with you again.

It was 3 years ago that it was held here at Camp Kalakua in Florida, and I had the privilege to just dwell on the beauty of nature, the joy of this message of agriculture.

It just makes me breathe easy, take a deep breath with the beauty of nature and the gardening images, and here we are to think about the living parable that is agriculture.

But I have to say that in the last 3 years, since I was last with you, my love for and appreciation for nature and agriculture has increased dramatically.

And my commitment to issuing the call, the invitation to detach from endless media and start to rediscover what it means to be human again.

And of course, most of you are familiar with our ministry through Media on the Brain, Belt of Truth Ministries, of course, we've been at this for 7 years, and a little over 7 years now.

So it was 2012 when Media on the Brain came out, and things were already getting out of control with media use then.

And so the latest, the Media Mind, 7 years later, 2019, just last year, came out with a new series on media.

And I have to say, with all the media problems that I'm talking about continually at churches, weekend after weekend, doing hundreds of these seminars over the past few years.

The best antidote to anti-social media is agriculture.

Agriculture, the antidote to anti-social media.

But the crisis is only growing when it comes to our culture and what we are facing.

In the digital era, we have witnessed now a 50% increase in ADHD in children, a 60% increase in teenage depression, and get this 1, a 70% increase in teen suicide.

All of this just happened to spike immediately after the advent of the smartphone, social media, and ubiquitous media use among the youth.

I'll tell you something, there's a whole lot more to be said about that in the media mind.

We're going to focus our attention on this concept of a living parable.

Yeah, I'll weave a little bit on media in and we'll do this grow, grow, grow concept in the latter half of the message.

But just suffice it to say that we've got a crisis of magnificent proportions.

View the whole thing on The Media Mind, you can go to beltoftruth.tv to understand how much bigger the media problem is now than when I first started talking about that.

But I like this image on the screen, a living parable.

You see the image of the produce and the garden implements there.

It just makes me just slow down and want to open with prayer this evening with you and thank God for this wonderful gift He's given to us in nature and in agriculture.

So would you bow your heads with me for prayer.

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for the opportunity to seek your will in our lives, in our practical endeavors, in our entrepreneurial outlets, and everything that you've given to us to enjoy you and to live for you in service to the God of heaven.

And so Lord, as we seek to understand this concept of the living parable, we pray that you draw us closer to you, closer to your creation, and closer to 1 another.

I am a strong believer in the mission of Ad Agra and this is about really committing, communicating the everlasting gospel to the world in this generation.

You might say, well, where's the connection there?

I have to tell you right out of the gates that when we talk about matters of agriculture, this is not simply for earning a living, for doing something productive.

Those are great things, but it's about our character development, and that's what this living parable is about.

We're gonna get into that in the last half of this message, grow, grow, grow.

A teacher will use an object or a story from everyday life and will expound upon it as a spiritual lesson.

So an everyday occurrence will be used to teach a spiritual lesson and a teacher is teaching the parable.

Listen to this statement in Testimonies, Volume 6.

This land about the school, speaking of Avondale, is to be reserved as a school farm.

It is to become a living parable to the students.

The students are to look upon it as a lesson book.

Notice that, look upon it, meaning the farm, as a lesson book.

The farm is a lesson book, open before them, which the Lord would have them study.

Its lessons will impart knowledge in the culture of the soul.

A living parable is teaching through nature its lessons.

I have a teaching background, so I enjoy teaching.

But even better is when the divine voice, when the presence of God through nature is communicating to us.

And I don't mean that in a New Age sense.

I mean that in the divine, biblical, spirit of prophecy sense.

Like it says in Job here, now ask the beasts and they will teach you.

And the birds of the air and they will tell you.

And the fish of the sea will explain it to you.

Go to the ant, consider her ways, that's from Proverbs.

Now this is taken from a testimony on education, page 70, where the rest of it says this.

We are not merely to tell our children about these creatures of God.

The animals themselves are to be their teachers.

This is another concept of a living parable.

The animals, the farm, and all of the beauties of nature and the lessons embedded in nature by God's divine wisdom are teaching us directly.

Even with the children, isn't that something?

They can allow the animals to teach them themselves.

He desires us to read his message in every lily and every spire of grass.

On the Holy Rest Day, above all other days, we should study the messages that God has written for us in nature living parables.

And Christ has linked his teaching not only with the day of rest, but with the week of toil.

And notice specifically what kind of toil.

In the plowing and sowing, the tilling and reaping, he teaches us to see an illustration of his work of grace in the heart.

Then Our daily toil will no longer absorb our attention and lead us to forget God.

Our daily toil will continually remind us of our Creator and Redeemer.

The thought of God will run like a thread of gold through all our homely cares and occupations.

For us, the glory of His face will again rest upon the face of nature.

We shall ever be learning new lessons of heavenly truth, and growing into the image of His purity.

Thus shall we be taught of the Lord, and in the lot wherein we are called, we shall abide with God.

Doesn't that just fill you with inspiration to spend that time in that toil, in that garden, and hear the voice of God, and have his golden thread woven through all of our daily tasks when we allow the living parables to teach us.

Now, what a contrast that is with this generation.

This concept is totally lost upon the culture around us who spends all their time indoors so many hours playing Video games and other media.

In fact, do you know how much how many minutes of screen time the average American consumes in?

2018 it was 666 minutes of media per day.

And you're looking at that number, you're going, whoa, that's a ominous number from Revelation 13.

This is not a fulfillment of Bible prophecy, of course, but it is an ominous number, and a very large number at that.

That's an awful lot of numbers of minutes, an awful lot of minutes per day.

This 1 right here by the way as you watch the the b-roll transpire here.

I want to tell you half of teens now admit that they are almost constantly on their devices.

Those who are listening or on the live stream and not watching it, guy walking down the street on his phone, right into the hole, the manhole, he goes right through the barrier, just walks right through it, falls right in.

The average American touches, taps, and swipes their devices 2, 617 times per day.

Philip Samaan

The Seed and the Wayside Soil

Well, I grew up on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and our farm extended all the way to the shore.

Beans, green beans grew very well close to the sand and pebbles of the sea.

My parents had 6 kids, and I'm the youngest.

And then the extra produce and fruit and grain and olives and olive oil we sold for money to manage.

By the way, when people hear my accent, which is really not southern, not northern, it's just a mixture of things.

They hear my accent, especially where I live in the South.

Anybody ever ask you, where are you from anyway?

And I intentionally do not say Maryland, Texas, Oregon, Tennessee.

I say, even though I've been in this country 54 years, came here as a teenager, I just look at them and say, I was born in Syria.

Some of them actually act nervous because they think I'm a terrorist from that part of the world.

And they say to me, can anything good, Can anything good come out of Syria?

Because of all the violence, civil war and trouble.

You know, I came from where the family feud, the longest running family feud in the house of Abraham still is being waged today among the children of Abraham.

So then I as I see them getting nervous and you know like being a bit suspicious I say relax.

I said you know they asked the same question of Jesus Christ.

By Nathanael, he told Philip, who brought him to Jesus, and my name is Philip, he said, can anything good come out of Nazareth?

How we view people based on their background.

And by the way, sometimes it's how we think of people.

Because they come from this background, this nationality, you know, they're a bunch of rednecks, farmers, intellectuals.

But you know, Jesus thinks differently than we think.

Zachary, I mean, Nathaniel in essence was saying to Jesus, you're no good because you come out of Nazareth.

He said, no, Jesus now addressing Nathaniel.

He said, you are a true Israelite, when he saw him, in whom there is no guile.

For a Hebrew, it's the greatest compliment, the most affirming statement.

Nathaniel, you don't think highly of me, You don't think I have any good in me, because I come from Nazareth.

But Nathanael, as I look at you, I'm telling you, you are a genuine, true, authentic Israelite, in whom there is no guile.

That's the greatest compliment you can give a Jewish person.

Even though we're not good and there's a lot of guile in us, Jesus believes in us against all odds.

You know, It reminds me of what Gibran Khalil Gibran, an author from Lebanon, said, a true friend is someone into whom you can pour out the contents of your heart, Both wheat and chaff together.

With a gentle breath, you blow the chaff away, and you hold on to the kernel.

That's the kind of friend we have in Jesus.

And if we focus on the chaff, We maximize the chaff, we minimize the wheat.

But if we focus on the wheat in people's lives, we maximize the wheat and we minimize the chaff.

That's Christ's approach, that's Christ's method in how we impact people's lives.

Anyway, so this is a little introduction.

I tell the people who ask me this question, can anything come out of your part of the world?

And I say, yes, wonderful things come there.

I don't say, look at me, I come from, I leave myself aside to the end.

He didn't come from China, he didn't come from Britain, he didn't come from the United States.

The quality is the best, the quantity is the most, and the duration is forever.

And I say the 10 Commandments, the Bible, the apostles, the prophets, the patriarchs.

So when I say all these things with a smile, they begin to listen, and they want to ask more questions, and I start witnessing to them.

That's my effective way of starting with somebody on this note, and they become very curious.

Now, on our farm, which is not as big as your farms here, this is a big country.

I met farmers here who have 800 acres, 1, 500 acres.

It was like a family farm to provide us with food.

You know, it's interesting how important what you're emphasizing is.

In times of crisis, people will not be able to go to Walmart or grocery store to buy food.

And it's really wise for everybody to know how to have a garden, to survive, to make it.

Everything was manual, labor, nothing mechanized, like in the Bible times.

Even now you go to my village and other villages, people plow the same way, they sow seeds the same way, they thresh the floor, they use the winnowing fork.

My wife asked me, how do you know all of this?

Well, how do you know how to plant tomatoes?

How do you know how to plant fruit trees?

And you know something, more than anything in my life, Farming, agriculture had an effect on me and my ministry.

Even without thinking about it, it affects me in so many profound ways.

Look for example at fruit trees and I plant fruit trees.

And I have ways that they survive in Tennessee without being killed by the frost.

If you want to talk to me afterwards, I can maybe teach you something, even though you are the ones to teach me.

For example, there are figs in the United States.

You know when they ripen on the tree, they're sweet?

I mean, I was speaking at the Cairn meeting in central California and northern California.

Luke Fisher

Chantee Fisher

Restoration Farming

Dear Lord, we ask that you would use us to bring glory to your name.

Thank you for the opportunity you have given us, and I ask that you would use our words to inspire others.

Alright, so I mentioned, and my uncle Edwin mentioned, I grew up on a family farm.

Raised on the same farm that my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather were all raised on.

It was actually my great-great-grandfather that moved to Oklahoma around 1905, a few years before statehood.

And he had been farming with his young wife in the deep river bottom soil of the Missouri River back in Missouri, when he accepted the Adventist message in the very early 1900s, and decided he wanted to raise his children differently than the way he was raised.

And he received a bit of pressure from his family farming community to conform and decided to move to the country, so to speak, from the country where he was living to way out in the country of Oklahoma Territory.

And so he brought his family out in a wagon or something or another in the very early 1900s, a few years before statehood, started the family farm where I grew up.

My great-grandfather took that over, expanded it.

He was a bit of a business entrepreneur, got into the threshing business before people had combines, bought a lot of land during the Great Depression era when people were moving to California.

And out of that has been birthed 2 family farms and then my family would, it's carved out a niche of a third 1.

And so I've been blessed with a long farming heritage based on the original reasons for going were reasons of true education.

So I was raised with all the benefits of country living, and I don't take those for granted.

You've heard, read, know about, I think, most of them.

1 of the hidden blessings, or for some people may be a cursing, but by God's grace, a blessing.

For a multi-generational farm, you learn how to live with and work with your family.

A lot of people can survive by living parallel lives.

1 works here, 1 works there, 1 goes to the office, 1 stays at home.

When they're home, they do 2 different things.

But if you're living and working together, you have to make it work or to survive, and so I can't say that the road through all the generations has been a smooth or easy 1, but that heritage has been passed down to me.

And those lessons learned by earlier generations were passed to their children.

And So I was born into a home where my parents had a strong marriage, my grandparents had a strong marriage, all of my siblings are in the church, all of my aunts and uncles of my father's 5 siblings are in the church.

And I don't take that heritage for granted.

And 1 of the reasons why I'm choosing to stay on the farm and embrace that lifestyle is to pass on those values and that legacy to the next generation.

Oh, so the subject, the title of our presentation today is Restoration farming.

So you may put 2 and 2 together already, but let me summarize a passage from Christian education.

The true object of education is to restore the image of God in the soul.

You know, in the beginning, God created man in his own likeness.

You know, things have gone wrong, and it is to bring back, bring him back to perfection, the perfection in which he was created, that is the great object of life, the object which underlies every other.

And that's 1 of the real reasons why we farm.

That's an education quote, But nature is 1 of God's favorite textbooks, and the farm is a really great classroom.

So I was not raised in a farming environment, but at 8 years old, my family was, My parents were convicted by reading the Ellen White compilation, Country Living.

We were living in the suburbs of Chicago at the time, and we moved out to the country of Michigan, and we eventually ended up going to the mountains of New Mexico.

But my mother, even when we were living in Chicago, she inherited from her mother a love of plants.

And I remember the first gardening book she bought, it was something along the lines of yardstick gardening.

And we had a little garden plot in our suburban backyard, And 1 of the things that I appreciate her doing is she gave each of us our own little plot of ground to take care of.

And so I had my yardstick garden, and I chose my plants, and it was so exciting.

And I remember, if any of you have young children who are a little bit picky about eating vegetables, go ahead and give them their own plot of ground and have them grow some themselves.

They will learn to love things that they never would have imagined eating before.

I couldn't understand who would eat these things.

But when I learned how easily radishes can be grown, and they were growing so beautifully in my yardstick garden, suddenly I loved radishes, and I love them to this day.

I remember my younger brother thought well if 3 feet by 3 feet, if small is good then even smaller is better, So that first year he had a square foot garden, literally, 1 foot by 1 foot, and he planted 1 red cabbage in the middle of that square foot.

But his red cabbage grew and it was very inspiring.

So as we moved to the country and then to the mountains, we had increased opportunity to start to learn the lessons, the great object lessons that you can learn outdoors.

As our garden expanded, I remember spending many hours in the Michigan summer, hot, humid environment, weeding that garden.

We hadn't learned some of the lessons about how if you, you know, cultivate early on then you won't have to weed a whole bunch later.

So we spent a lot of time weeding and then when we moved to the tail end of the Rocky Mountains we must have hauled bushels and bushels of rocks out of our garden.

But starting to learn perseverance and self-discipline out under the open sky together, working as a family was a huge blessing for me.

As a teenager, I remember that I would try to swap chores.

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