Standing Firm In the Battle

As we look around and see the unprecedented times we live in what should be our response as Christians? In this episode of the Redeeming the Dirt Podcast we take a look at the reality of the battles we face today both generally and in agriculture. We also wrestle with our responsibility as Christians to stand firm in these changing times as we seek to be prepared for the return of Jesus.

To view the text of the "Stand Firm" poem I shared at the end you can click here.

I want to give credit for inspiration from a video I watched shortly before giving this talk. It was a talk between Eric Metaxas, Francis Chan, and Mike Bickle at the International House of Prayer. I would definitely recommend watching it if you would like more inspiration on standing firm. https://mikebickle.org/watch/7DD5E0AB8FDb578e347B25047e3F 

Please send me your thoughts and comments to noahrora@protonmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Welcome to the Redeeming the Dare podcast. This is Noah Sanders. I'm a farmer, homesteader, and follower of Jesus out here in Alabama with my wife and our six children, and so grateful to be back with you today. Well, we definitely live in interesting times and uh a lot of challenges faced in agriculture and in our nation, in the US, economically and culturally, and all sorts of things, and definitely is a uh a uh you know a challenge to think as Christians how we should respond to the times we live in. But ultimately it boils down to the fact that we are uh called to stand firm. And today I want to share a talk that I gave uh back in July at an event in uh New York where I talked about the importance of us standing firm and the battle, uh and the battles going on around us in both agriculture and other things. And uh so I'm gonna share that with you today. Hopefully, uh it's an encouragement. It's a bit uh it's the first time I gave uh talk on this topic, so it's a bit rough. So I hope you forgive that and uh any uh any errors or anything like that. But hopefully you hear my heart behind it and would love to hear some of your feedback. Um I'll share a uh another uh a poem that I wrote after that event um at the end after I share the talk here. But uh we're gonna get right into it. I hope you enjoy. So last night uh I enjoyed giving that talk. That's what I'm uh talk about all the time. I love talking about Jesus and farming and putting them together. Uh but every once in a while, God tells me, like, I'm like, I want to be open to whatever you want me to say. And so today I was like felt like he said that uh he wanted me to share some things that I really haven't shared before or that I'm less comfortable sharing. So that means that I get to come not in like I know all this cool stuff and I'm like an expert in this, but just sharing honestly my heart and weakness, um, but trusting that there may be some truth that God has through that that you can receive. So if I can ask for some grace in what I share, that I'm you know, uh there may be things that I say that aren't completely accurate, or I don't, you know, just make sure you just listen. What is God trying to tell me through this? And I want to be willing to share even when I uh um it's something that I feel weak in sharing about, but you know, we can be weak in ourselves and bold in obeying Jesus, even though we're not gonna do it perfect every time. Does that make sense? So, Lord, I just pray that you would um speak to all of us now, teach us all something, Lord, and just equip us, Lord, for uh what you have for all of our journeys in the future. In Jesus' name. Amen. So today um I want to talk a little bit about standing firm in the battle. So one of the things that excites me most is to see people coming together who are passionate about the Lord, but also passionate about like expressing Him through parts of culture, whether it's art or it's for me agriculture, because I think that is what people are hungry for, right? They're hungry to see Jesus lived out. Um, because I think it can have a huge impact on people being able to see Christ in us. But we have to recognize just like Christ is eager to see that in us, we also have an adversary, right, who doesn't want to see that in us. And oftentimes when we do step out and we uh come out of the foxhole or the trench and we start charging the enemy's camp, what happens? You get shot at. And soldiers expect that, right? They know they're gonna get shot at. If you don't think you're gonna get shot at, then it's a little disturbing uh when that happens. You've tempted to jump back in your foxhole and be like, what did I do wrong? Um and so it helps us just remember the battle uh that we that we are operating in. So I just want to talk a little bit about the the context of that battle, a little bit about how that's fleshing itself out in agriculture, and just some of the things I see there, and just some encouragements, hopefully, that'll help you as you're moving forward in whatever God calls you for or calls you to. So the reality is we have always lived, ever since the beginning and the fall, we've always lived in a conflict, right? Good versus evil, light versus dark, truth versus lies, right? That's always been in conflict. And there's this unseen spiritual battle that's always going on behind like the things that we actually see, right? And the warfare takes place ultimately in the hearts of people. It's not me versus you know a bad guy, it's the enemy and those who are serving him. Basically, remember last night we have either God's way or we have doing it our own way, and ultimately that's where the battle is is fought. But the battle, the goal is to rescue people and to see God glorified. And we'll talk about that in a second. But it's just helpful if we recognize we as followers of Jesus, those that he's rescued, we follow a narrow way. Jesus actually said, Woe to you when all men speak well of you. For so they spoke about the false prophets. And blessed are you when people falsely accuse you and say slanderous things about you because that's how they treated the real prophets. You know, it's tempting for me to think if I can just be go and be an amazing farmer, then I'll be like, you know, everybody will uh, you know, I'll say, Oh, he's such an amazing farmer, and you know, I'll just be like rid up in all the newspapers and all that kind of stuff. But if all men speak well of me, then I might not be accurate accurately representing Jesus all the time because we are promised that if we want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus, they may look at the things that we do and see excellence, but there's also going to be the aroma of death about us that threatens their way of doing things. Does that make sense? And the temptation for me as a people pleaser is to want to hide that odor of death, to try to live in a way that is beyond anybody saying anything negative about me because of my faith. And that's a dangerous road to go down. And Jesus said, All men in Mark 13 will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved. And what I want to talk about about standing firm today is that as Christians, our goal is not to go and like engage and find ways to get into conflict or to be like different or radical. But Jesus just says, you just stand on what you know to be true. And guess what the world is gonna do? They're no, they're gonna keep moving a little bit at a time and telling you just to move a little bit of time this way, and and as the world gets more and more evil, guess what? We're gonna be further and further isolated from the rest of wherever what everybody's doing. And it doesn't mean that we're trying to go off and be weird, right? But it's because we're trying to stand on what we know to be true, and things that might not have cost you in the past may cost you in the future to be able to stand. You know, I think we'd all acknowledge that the battle is growing hot the last few years. Evil is not only increasing, but also being more aggressive towards those that would stand up for truth. Um, good is being outright, good is being called evil, and evil is being called good. You know, it's easy just to think about today and to kind of like have this vision for our life that doesn't really include the battle. You know, I don't really like to factor that in to my life goal and like vision. But I remember reading and uh we were reading through Luke, and we got to chapter 12, Jesus was talking, and he said, You know how to look at the weather, and you can tell when the sky is red that it's gonna rain, right? He said, But you're blind, you you aren't even paying attention to the times that you live in, and you're missing basically the Messiah. He didn't say it, but he's just saying, You you are ignorant of the obvious signs that's going around you. And part of me wants to check out from what's going on in the world, you know, and just ignore it and not be bogged down by it. But on the other hand, we have a responsibility as followers of Jesus to be aware of the times that we live in. We don't have the option to opt out. The stakes are high, you know, the glory of God is at stake, and the souls are men are at stake. And if we ignore the battle, whether it's in agriculture or art or in family or whatever, guess what? We're going to be abdicating to the enemy just by default. Our goal, though, as Christians, like I was talking about last night, is not to go accomplish all these amazing things for God, because that's us doing something, right? It's for us to say, what has God given us? Me? How can I be faithful with that? And that ultimately is what God's going to judge us on. But we have to make sure we root out other ideas of like what a successful life looks like that other people may impose on us or that our flesh may have. Like, for instance, uh, a successful life looks like nobody ever speaking ill of me or living a long time and surviving, you know. Um throughout history, Christians have been willing to lay down their lives for what other people thought was, you know, a trivial thing, but they knew what was at stake, and they knew that their success, according to the Lord, was going to be based upon whether they were faithful to what they knew was true, no matter what it cost. But God determines the fruit. Does that make sense? Like you read through Hebrews 12, some conquered kingdoms, right? Some escaped the edge of the sword, and others were sawn in half and had their heads chopped off. Both of them had faith. God just chose how like a different fruit to come from that phrase. So are we willing to have an obedience that's motivated by faith in God, not just motivated by results we want to see happen? Does that make sense? Because that's up to God. So our call is to stand firm no matter what it costs us. In 1 Corinthians it says, Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourself fully, talking about that wholeheartedness, to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. You remember Jim Elliott and the missionaries that got killed by the um Indians in Ecuador? Um it would seem that their their labor was in vain, right? Because they didn't get done what they wanted to. It would seem, but that's why it's saying, but it isn't in vain. You know, even their sacrifice, it's amazing because I got to earlier a couple months ago train people from Ecuador who are working with some of those Indians in agriculture and to be part of that story, which is so amazing. But their investment was not in vain. I just want to share a little bit of a story that I kind of um was reminded of lately about the dangers of not standing firm and how vulnerable we are all to this. And just to give a context, I want to talk a little bit about Germany and um right up before the time of the rise to power of the Nazis, Germany uh went through historically is the nation where who of uh church father was and took a stand?

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Martin Luther.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Well, Bonhoeffer, but before that, Martin Luther. Oh Martin Luther. And so Germany was very steeped in a culture and tradition of the scriptures and like going through public school, you went through the catechism, you learned the scriptures and all that thing. So the culture was very Christian, was very religious. Um and in after World War I and uh into the 20s and 30s, they had this uh in the late 1920s, I believe, they had a collapse of their economy. They had hyperinflation, they had food shortages, they had a lot of um disruptions that really was wrecking Germany. And a man came on the scene named Adolf Hitler, who said a lot of amazing things. And if you go back and you read what he said, they were actually things like Germany is strong because of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Like, who wouldn't say amen to that, right? But what the German people ended up doing is because of their fear and because of their um suffering they were going through, they found a man and then they guess instead of putting their faith in God, they put their faith in that man and they gave him the kind of uh place that only is can be filled by who? God. Hitler was an attractive person. He didn't rise to power because he just bashed people over the head. He rose to power because everybody loved him, he did incredible things for Germany at the beginning, but he had dangerous ideas, godless solutions to problems that they faced. And you know, the German people were not used to ever having to take a stand against anything because they had a Christian culture, you know, they were fairly moral people. Um, they weren't used to their faith costing them something when they had to take a stand. And so we look oftentimes at Nazi Germany and say, how did this people go to where they were allowing, you know, millions of people to be systematically killed? Well, what happened was a lot of good Christian Germans chose to be silent and not say anything. They chose to make small compromises that didn't seem that big a deal in order to not rock the boat. Now, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a pastor who chose not to do that. He in fact stood up early on and was like, we cannot, like, we're not gonna convert Hitler, Hitler's gonna convert us. But at the time, people were like, You're just like you're you're you're creating too much disturbance, like that's just you know, just go with the flow. And what happened was the German people never had a choice where we said, Would you like to follow God or follow the devil? Nobody would have said, Well, yeah, I want to follow the devil and do something horribly evil. No, it was very small compromises over a long period of time. Hitler was in power for like nine years, it wasn't until the last few that the things that we remember happened. And it was the German people not knowing and not being used to standing firm in even small things that cost them that all of a sudden meant they were on this hill over there and they never intended to be. Now we all know that's how sin works in life, right? If you don't stand firm, you're like just uh just a little bit, just a little bit, you know, and all of a sudden now you're doing something that you never decided to do, but you slipped into it. So it's a slippery slope. So through that, they became part of one of the greatest evils of our time, and yet they were not people who had the opportunity up front to choose that. The battles we have to recognize battles are of our time and especially related to morals are lost not by choosing oftentimes to fight for the enemy, especially as Christians. We're not choosing to fight for the enemy, but it's there the battles are lost by slowly giving ground just to avoid conflict, you know. I don't want to be have conflict, and they're like, You're being you're you're you know, you're not moving. You're why are you causing so much tension? You need to say, Well, I'm not moving, you're moving. You know, that's the view we need to recognize that is the reality. And our goal as Christians isn't to create conflict, to be radical. We're actually like the loyalists, right? We're actually standing on what's true and what's always been true. And when Satan is corrupting and corrupting and corrupting and corrupting the things that God says are beautiful and good, then we are accused of being different, right? But they're actually the ones that are being different. So it makes sense. It's like the early American colonies, they were actually being loyal to the original principles of British freedom. And it was the king who was rebelling against the way that the rights of um his subject of his traditional rights of subjects. So they were standing for the they were actually the loyalists, and the king was the revolutionary. Being normal, unfortunately, today, being what would be normal a few years ago is quickly becoming now you're radical. Even it's amazing the shifting, like the oh, morals are changing. You know, there were uh like almost every liberal politician, Hillary Clinton or whoever, a decade ago would say they were for traditional marriage. Would they today? No, if they just had stayed on what they believed and what they were what was okay for them to believe 10 years ago, they'd be considered a radical today. And so we're not trying to change, but if you just have a normal view biblically on marriage, on gender, on freedom, on truth, then all of a sudden it starts to cost you. Not because you're deciding to do something different, but just because the price is going up. And one thing I want to talk about is the danger of deception. When the disciples asked Jesus, what's it gonna ask Jesus, what's it gonna be like before you return? The first thing he said is, watch out that, be careful that you are not deceived. That no one deceives you. Both in Mark and in Matthew, that's the first thing he says, watch out that no one deceives you. And what's even disturbing is in Mark 13 it says, talks about even the elect might be deceived, right? You know, I think we we recognize we live in a time of increasing censorship and increasing inability to discuss what is true. Um we're told, don't think, don't be discerning, just trust what an expert tells you. Trust what everybody else is believing. And I think the reason Jesus said, watch out, is because if we don't watch, guess what's gonna happen? We're gonna be deceived. There's a reason he tells us that it's it's an active thing, that if we're not actively doing it, we're going to fall into deception. Just like the German did, Germans did. They weren't even on the lookout, they were like, nothing like that could ever happen, so they weren't even guarding against it. We got to stand firm for the truth. And what I kind of want to ask myself and challenge us to think about is will we be ready for the return of Jesus and the times leading up to it? What frightens me to death is when I think about the idea that when Jesus first came the first time, I mean, how many people have like read all the prophecies Jesus fulfilled when he his first coming? I mean, there's a lot of them, isn't it? It's just amazing. I mean, like to a T, he fulfilled all those. And except for a handful of people, everybody who saw him come missed it completely. So when you couple that, that the first time he came, people missed it, even though he fulfilled to a T the prophecies. Coupled with what Jesus said, when I come the second time, there is going to be mass deception. Do you think it's going to be this clear choice that's a duh to everybody? Are you going to follow the Antichrist or are you going to follow Jesus? It's probably going to be a bit more subtle than that. And a bit more um, yeah, not as cut and dry as I always kind of thought that it would be. Do we fear and tremble lest we be deceived? Because if we don't have that spirit, guess what? In 1 Corinthians 10, 12, what does it say? If you think you're standing firm, be careful lest you fall. And you know, in this battle for truth, we need help. We need to help each other. We can't, you know, we need to stand alone if we need to. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, like people, he had all his friends, and like the more he took a stand against evil in Germany, the more he like people fell by the wayside. And by the time it was the end, it was like him and just a few other people. So we need to be willing to stand alone. But at the same time, in order to see truth, in order to um uh to wrestle with this, we need each other to do that, to listen and help one another as we seek to align with reality. Sometimes we have to say the emperor has no clothes, right? And we need to be able to respond rightly in the times we live. And and that's not something that's something we have to struggle with together. But one of the one of the things that I've kind of that's come from my talk thinking about agriculture is I felt like a lot of the times the reason that we are like going along with methods as Christians in agriculture that don't reflect the heart of God is not because we're choosing, I want to be an evil farmer and hurt a bunch of people with deadly food or something. No, we just Haven't even asked if let God speak into that. We haven't even asked is there a battle in agriculture where either Jesus is winning or we're reflecting man's solutions? So part of being deceived, unfortunately, is the reality that when you're deceived, do you know you're being deceived? No, because if you were knowing you were being deceived, you wouldn't be deceived, correct? We don't realize when we're compromising often. We don't part of being deceived is that we don't even realize that there is a battle. And the enemy's one number one strategy is to think that there isn't any battle. You know what God wants or serving the devil. But we need to watch. So these are the things Jesus told us when he said, This is what we need to be doing until he returns. Watch, keep awake, be on your guard. He didn't say like, um, make sure you, you know, wait until I come. I don't think he ever says wait, because wait is something I can just go and be like, huh, sit and take a nap on the log, right? Now, if you're a sentry in a battle in a in a war area and you fall asleep at your post, big no-no, right? You are to be watchful, on guard, like awake, aware. Because if we don't, we will give way to let the enemy through. So I want to talk a little bit about the growing battle for agriculture. I mean, I talked about problems yesterday, right? That we've we've been facing with agriculture with no new farmers, all these all these things that are kind of a result of unfaithfulness on our part to reflect the heart of Jesus. But I want to talk about a few more things today just to help make us a bit aware of the battle in agriculture, and I could do the same chat on other topics as you know, other areas as well. But one of the problems is in agriculture, we've abdicated it to, as a church, we've abdicated it, which means we've kind of let other people take care of it. We haven't taken ownership, we haven't said, How can we let Jesus be Lord of this? And so, guess what happens as a result? The enemy starts coming in, and he knows that food not only is linked directly to people's freedom, but he knows that food is directed to people's lives, right? And what did Satan come to do? Kill, steal, destroy? Do we really want him in charge of agriculture? Probably not, right? But here's some of the things I'm seeing right now. Um, first, some more recent issues that agriculture is facing because of the global government's response to the coronavirus has been not love-based, um, not uh people are the solution, but it's like man and fear and people are the problem and churches are the problem, and like every way that we've seen a response has almost all been opposite of the way that God approaches problems. We're treating them with solutions like shutdowns that then destroy more people's lives, right? God's solutions don't create more problems and hurt people in the process of trying to help other people. And so, anyways, through that, what's happening now is in farming, we're having there are problems with transportation, both with shipping worldwide and with truck drivers where they're in all around the world being able to move produce different places. There's labor shortages, there's supply and packaging shortages. We don't see a lot of these things because it's kind of like when you turn on a hose, if muddy water starts coming out, the hose over here, or if the water stops coming out, the rest of the water still goes until the like out the end of the hose, until you it moves there. Does that make sense? It's like a line. But there it we were the shutdowns in particular are causing some serious issues in farming, and it threatens, unfortunately, a food supply that's been set up to be very fragile in the first place, it's not very resilient like we used to have food supplies. So that's just kind of uh things that uh are natural results of that. But I'm but also what I'm seeing, I'm sharing these things not to say that I know that I'm completely right, but just for your consideration. It looks like the enemy is using basically power-hungry people, whether it's you have Marxists or you have uh globalists or environmentalists or whoever it may be, people who want to basically people with godless solutions to fix the world. Does that make sense? People who say we can fix the world without God, they are working to attack freedom-giving methods of agriculture because they want to build a more centralized, easily controlled system where people who consume are rewarded and people who produce are penalized. And some examples of that are there's a general movement towards uh the depopulation of rural areas. A lot of uh farmland is being bought up not by family farms, but by large corporations, even government. And I think some of you have probably seen, like, there's just odd things where you have, for instance, Bill Gates now has is the largest owner of farmland in America, which I'm not gonna say what all that means, but at the same time, it doesn't uh indicate that small-scale, resilient, family enterprise kind of farming is being promoted. Um, it's more there's a and a perspective, and again, we're talking about Mansway here to say the best thing for the world would be to move everybody into this into cities where we can have a smart city and everybody can, you know, live with minimal footprint. And those were nice ideas when it's like, okay, that's kind of crazy, but more recently those ideas have been more aggressively implemented, and policies are starting to reflect that. We also have, interestingly enough, more it's just in the last like year, this demonization of meat and eating meat, which seems really crazy, but it actually is really true. If you look up animal agriculture, the other day I heard somebody say that animal agriculture is now they're accusing it of being the greatest threat to climate change, even more so than any transportation pollution. Which is interesting because guess what? These are the same people who are producing, like promoting the kind of huge industrial facilities that are the ones that are bad in the first place, you know. Um there's also this huge promotion of how environmentally friendly lab-grown meats are, which is, you know, meat, plant-based meat that's grown in little dishes, because guess what? It can be centralized, it can be produced in a factory. You know what's really interesting is in 1 Timothy talking about the end times, Paul actually says, in the last days, people will come forbidding marriage and commanding you to not eat meat. So, and and I also watched this other video the other day where there was an expert, science expert, talking about human genetic engineering, how we can improve the human species through genetic engineering, saying, Because meat and steaks are so bad for the planet, the problem is that people like them too much. We love steak. He said, But just like we have lactose intolerance, we could create genetic engineering that would enable people to be intolerant to meat, which would then help us get rid of meat consumption. And it's it's like a great solution. I mean, they're like not evil. This is like gonna be awesome for the planet. Seeds are very critical for food production. Um, if you you know, you can grow your own food, but if you have to buy your seeds from somebody else, you're just as dependent on them as you are on buying food from somebody, right? There's just a little buffer there. Uh, we're seeing, you know, we've seen more recently, you know, in the past several decades, a move towards whether you agree with genetic engineering or not. People who are doing this are patenting these seeds and these genes so that you cannot save them yourselves. Um, and then more recently, it was disturbing for me to talk to a missionary friend of mine who has done work in Laos in China, and he said when he first was working in Laos in the early 1990s, um, they had like thousands and thousands of local rice varieties, and he said they were amazing, every village had their own rice variety. And he said, now the big companies that come in, they're trying to get the local people to get rid of theirs and grow the GMO corn the rice instead. And now he said there's maybe like two or three main varieties in Laos, and they've lost a lot of those. And he said he knows for a fact that some of those indigenous varieties yielded more. And then he said in Thailand, now where he was been working, that they're actually working, um, trying to pass legislation to make it illegal to s to plant seeds that you saved yourself just outright. And who knows? I mean, it's not far-fetched when we think of a few years ago. I think it was last year. Do you remember? You may not. I'm a farmer, so I pay attention, you know, the little my radar's up, right? Um, but there were mysterious packages of seeds showing up in people's mailbox from China. Is it far-fetched, too far-fetched to say this is a bioterror threat, and so therefore, you can only plant seeds that are quote unquote certified so that you're not propagating noxious species. You know, I mean it wouldn't be too far-fetched to see that kind of um change happening in the fruit future. And then us farmers have been always dealing with regulations and things like that that makes it harder for small farmers to you know to really make a difference but or to to survive. But more now, they really, in the name of food safety, are trying to push things like um blockchain tracing of every leaf all the way back to the original plant, which can only be done by a large-scale like factory production techno farm. You know, you can't do that outside as easily with in your in a dirty, dirt-grown head of lettuce, you know. And I went and got some certification in the Food Safety Modernization Act, which is the new regulations for produce, and the entire day that I spent there was all about the dangers of manures and compost, and not one single thing about the dangers of chemical use. It was all trying to regulate the use of organic fertilizers. Um, and interestingly, like even in uh in Australia, they just reclassified manure as a toxic waste product, so farmers are not free to use it on their fields anymore. So, you know, is this crazy or is this something that we should expect to see based on what Jesus said? You know, Jesus said before he comes back, one of the things we would expect to see is famine in various places, and we haven't experienced that thankfully here in the US, but it is not uncommon around the world. There's millions of people that die every year from starvation. There's about one in one and 150 million people that were on the brink of starvation before COVID, and that's expected to double because of these types of things. And we should depending, like you may disagree with me, but I believe that one day we will see a global Hitler figure rise that will promise to fix everything. With a system that gives people exactly what they desire through a consumer system that requires that they give allegiance or they'll lose, quote, normal life, or even their life. And it will most likely be gradual and not it won't happen all at one time. So I don't I don't want to you know be saying that I'm trying to be prophetic or predictive or something, but I'm just I I want can you set me free to just be honest with what I'm thinking? I don't want to hide things that I'm thinking just because I'm scared you might think that it's weird or whatever. Does that make sense? So you just take it for your consideration. I'm not in all humility, like I don't have all the answers. I'm just trying to seek the Lord, but I want to be honest so that we can help each other, you know, and I'd love to hear from you as well on things. But when I from my position as a farmer and stuff like that, I'm looking forward. I believe that what we've experienced so far with some of the disruptions and stuff in the last year is just basically like unfortunately, like a dress rehearsal of things that will be coming in the future. And in the near future, I I believe possibly even this fall that we could begin to see things like global food shortages, not because there's actually real shortages of food, people starve around the world and there's plenty of food, but both because of engineered and natural disruptions. And I'm just saying I believe that it'll allow people to make climate change the new COVID-19 emergency. And they'll blame it on animal agriculture and on all this agriculture that's not regulated and controlled, and it'll give them an excuse to come in and say we have all these solutions that are now gonna fix it. Because they want to remake our farming and food systems because they don't currently control them. You want to say things like, if you imagine if all of a sudden there was not food in your grocery stores, you know, for a few months, people would really freak out and then they would say, We never want this to happen again. We're gonna do everything we can to make sure this never happens again, which will justify going in and making changes that will radically change the way that our food. And what I just want to warn you about, just so you can just keep this in your mind, is no matter how bad things can get, don't fall for the lie that the same people who are behind the flaws that we have in our agriculture today are the people that you should trust to fix the problem. My heart is I want to see the church equipped to be prepared for these type of things, not because it's the type of things that we should be living in light of being prepared for throughout all of history, right? But we live in a time that is unprecedented now. And one thing that I'm always looking for, where is God? I want to be there. You know, I don't want to be just doing my thing and asking God to come along. I want to be like, where is God? How can I be there? And right now I really feel like God is moving in agriculture. I mean, he's put it on a lot of Christians' hearts. And I believe it's because he wants there to be alternatives and islands of freedom where Christians can stand firm without being dependent on man's like savior solutions for the whole world. Okay? That's why, you know, regardless of the science behind it, when I hear something like a vaccine being pushed as the solution for the entire planet, that you're like, ugh, you know, is that the spirit of trust in God or not, you know? And you know, so that's what we need to be guarding against. And you may disagree, but I'll just share. I believe that the reason Jesus gave us so many warnings about is because about what before his coming is because that some of us are gonna experience some of those hard times before he returns. I don't believe that we're just gonna get out of here before anything hard happens. I mean, you go to people Christians that are in Iran, they're not gonna be like, oh yeah, I think Jesus is gonna come back before anything bad happens, because I mean they are experiencing serious like persecution, tribulation even now. Um, but I do feel like, especially in the West, there's a danger that if we aren't expecting something to be difficult, that that could be a reason that we aren't aware or that we fall away or that we are shaken to the core because we're like, I didn't expect to have to go through things like this, you know. I hope that Jesus comes back before anything bad happens. But I want to prepare as if I'm trying to heed his warnings as much as possible. And we need to be aware of the times. I mean, the things that Jesus said we would experience before he came back famines, plagues, earthquakes, wars, all that, I mean, that's been happening ever since he left, right? So everybody and all generations could always live in expectancy of him coming back any moment. But if we're honest, we live in a context right now that we're born into, we think it's normal, but the fulfillment of those kind of signs in the past hundred years has gone from like 40 miles an hour to 120 miles an hour. Okay, it's it's very unprecedented. We also uh have seen a rise of an industrial tech-based system that can just paves the way for some of the things that we may could see with the kind of things Jesus said would happen. And here's an exciting thing to me. I'm I'm friends with a guy that's been working with discipling the nations his whole life, multiplying discipleship. And he works with people who are trying to reach every nation. And he I had him over for supper the other night, he and his wife, and he told me a few years ago there were like 3,000 still unengaged people groups. Nobody had ever gone to share the gospel with them before, you know, and that's kind of the thing Jesus told us to do, right? And he actually said before he comes, the gospel will go to all the nations. And he actually said, and then the end will come, not necessarily right away, but he said, right now, the people that are working on there's they are down to 62 unengaged people groups that they expect to finish in the next 18 months. And there won't be any more unengaged people groups that we that we're familiar with. I mean, that gives me like makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up because I'm like, that is so exciting. I mean, we're that close. I mean, then we can move on to like trying to get as much more done as we can. These are not people that are like all, but like there will be no deaf group within a culture or like, you know, I mean, we're talking not just a nation, we're talking like every little subgroup, and that there will be somebody trained to go and share the gospel with them. And isn't that exciting? I mean, that is so exciting, but it means we need to make sure we're ready to be a light in the darkness of the times ahead. So let's not fall asleep, okay? So here's my conclusion. Agriculture I'm sharing is just a part of the battle, right? There's battle right now going on for the family, battle for gender, battle for health, and and how we approach health and government and how what proper government is, and free speech and energy and transportation, all these different areas. And it's just accelerating. And it really always boils down to a simple question: are we looking to man for solutions or to God? And we got to recognize that we cannot compromise towards man's solutions just because it's easier. Will we stand firm? You know, and I'm not telling you just to breed fear, but to help wake us up so that maybe in some areas of your life you can move for, oh, I was trusting in man in that area. I didn't even know it. I'm gonna move that faith to God now, you know, because I need that as well in my life. So here's a few suggestions, applications. First of all, learn to be a productive person. You know, if for instance, you can't buy or sell unless you deny Christ, that implies that you're buying everything that you consume, right? But if you learn to be a productive person, where you can produce things that you need yourself, like our ancestors did 100 years ago, then you can be free not to have to participate in that. And that may not be just agriculture, maybe other things, you know. But I would encourage you to learn as many useful skills as possible because you can always use it to serve somebody else, to save yourself money, or to make money, you know. I mean, there's always something useful. Changing uh, you know, uh oil in your car, fixing engines, you know, doing carpentry, whatever it whatever it is. Um, and then grow food and teach others to grow food. I mean, not all I don't want to be a chef, but I'd love to know how to cook, right? So we don't all want to be farmers, but growing food is a really good skill to have and to pass it on to other people. So if they needed that skill in the future, then we could know how to do it. And unfortunately, the type of attacks that I'm seeing, commercial agriculture where you're growing it to sell to other people, I don't know exactly if it will survive or not, you know. But small-scale local food production for ourselves and our communities, we can like it would be really hard for somebody to take away that option. Um if you go to wellwatergardenproject.org, I have a thing that you can download that is a teaching garden and you can also use it to share with other people. And just pray that God would help you identify areas of compromise or cowardice in your life. Just ask Him for discernment. And I really was blessed, I'll just finish on this, with a friend of mine who's from Zimbabwe and she was talking about this idea of like even elect will be deceived. And she said, Her prayer has always been, she's like, God, I am not smart enough to know how to not be deceived. If there's information that you want me to know that helps me to not fall for a lie, can you just bring it to me, please? And she said, There's always, whenever she has a question about some issue or something, God always sends just the right information at the right time, and we can trust Him to do that. So let me, I'm just gonna read one scripture and then I'll let you, I'll pray and we'll be done. But first, uh James 5-7 says, Be patient then, brothers, until the Lord comes. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and guess what? Stand firm because the Lord's coming is near. Lord, we just thank you so much, Father, that you love us, that you uh uh are pleased even with our stumblings. Lord, if we have the intention to walk to follow you in obedience, pray that you would give us discernment, that you would show us how to live in a way that is discerning of the times, that we would not um yield uh in any way uh Or compromise the truth, but that we would just stand firm on what we know to be true, and that you would use us via light, Lord, and that you would give us the resolve and whatever you call us to, Lord God, to um show how much you're worth it, Lord, and how much our hope is in you and in not just for this world. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, I hope you enjoyed that.

SPEAKER_00 44:26

I know that whenever we talk about end times uh Jesus coming back or current events or history, uh, that there's always a lot of room for error, and it has to be done with great humility and a desire to stand for the truth, but to maintain a humility and eagerness to learn. So I would love to hear uh thoughts, uh comments, criticisms, encouragements from you on some of the things the Lord's been telling you lately and what you might have gotten from this talk or uh other input you might have, you can email me at noarora at protonmail.com. That's N-O-A-H-R-O-R-A at P-R-O-T-O-N-M-A-I-L.com. And I look forward to uh hearing from some of y'all and hopefully growing in my ability to understand how I can stand firm in these times uh and be ready for the return of Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

And as promised, I wanted to share a poem that I wrote. Uh I don't do I'm not like a real poet, but I had uh this kind of came to me while I was uh out working in the garden one day and I kept going over and writing down bits of it, so maybe it's something that will be the encouragement to you, but it's called Stand Firm Stand Firm, my brothers. Will you move and yield before the world's multitude? For we're a remnant, small and few, rejected like our master too. Dare we close our eyes to the battle, lest we go to slaughter led like cattle? A sentry who yields is not polite. He is brother to one who for the enemy fights. Stand firm, my brothers, we do not rebel, that is for those who journey toward hell. We would return to that which is right, ever the same, known by faith, not by sight. Sin is so sly a choice you don't get on which destination, only direction you set Serve the devil a question that rarely is seen. Instead, pressure to shift faith from God to a king. Stand firm, my brothers, the price grows day by day. If your faith does not cost you, have you chosen the narrow way? Our ancestors wouldn't have suffered at all if they had always agreed to follow man's law, if they had just gotten a license to preach or gone to the state approved church down the street. It would have seemed wise to compromise and keep their respect in the public's eyes, but compromise steals your influence from the direction of your descendants to come. Thanks so much for listening. This has been the Redeeming the Dirt Podcast, and as always, I encourage you to be faithful, be humble, and keep redeeming the dirt. God bless.