Faithfulness requires focus
Why faithfulness requires focus and killing things that are working, how dreaming about work on the New Earth makes it easier to focus today, and why you should stop asking, “What can I learn from this person?” and start asking, “What is God teaching me through this person?”
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[0:00:04] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast. I'm Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of Mere Christians? Those of us who aren't pastors or religious professionals, but who work as archivists, blacksmiths, and SEO strategists. That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to Noah Sanders. He's a farmer and the author of Born-Again: Dirt Farming to the Glory of God. Noah and I recently sat down and had a terrific conversation about why faithfulness in our work requires focus and killing things that are working as an act of worship to the Lord.
We talked about how dreaming about work on the new earth makes it easier, much easier, in my case, to focus on the work we believe that God has called us to in the present. We talked about why you should stop asking what you can learn from a particular person and start asking what is God teaching you through that person. My mind was blown at this section of the episode. I thought it was such a brilliant question and way of thinking. Guys, trust me. You're going to love this conversation with my new friend, Noah Sanders.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:28] JR: Noah Sanders, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:30] NS: Thanks so much, Jordan. What an honor to be on here with you.
[0:01:33] JR: I'm super pumped about this. Hey, so did you grow up on a farm? What's the story here? Did you grow up in this business?
[0:01:40] NS: No, I didn't. I come from a bit of a legacy of farmers in Indiana, but like so many family farms, by the time it got to my granddad's generation, he was just doing it part-time. Then by the time it got to my dad's generation, the farm had to be sold off for inheritance taxes. There was no farming. When I was growing up, we grew up in town, but we did move out to 11 acres when I was around 10, because my dad did want to have some place for us kids to run around and experience some of that country life.
It was during that time that I really got bit by the bug of gardening and God's creation. It really was just a journey of discovering that all the passions God had given me, equipped me really well to do what he called me to do in agriculture, because it's a very diverse field, but it was something that I had to learn from scratch. Part of that was a blessing, because I had to start with my first passion was my love for Jesus. So, I'm like, well, how do I farm in a way that reflects that? Rather than having to unlearn a bunch of stuff, I got to build from the ground up, which has its pros and cons, but I'm really grateful for that part of the journey.
[0:02:50] JR: Were you thinking seriously about how your faith influenced your vocation as a farmer right from the get-go, like when did that happen for you?
[0:02:59] NS: Yeah. I was really blessed. My dad got saved after a failed marriage. He had a pretty good, like a really good childhood, like he hadn't had any bad things growing up, but he just realized that he couldn't just be an okay parent. He needed to really invest in his kids. I was really blessed with a dad that mentored me, decided for me. I came to Jesus, to know Jesus when I was pretty young. Then I just remember when I was 10 or 11, this is that tap on the shoulder. God's like gave me that hunger just to know him and want to live all for him.
I have very diverse interests. I was looking at this question you had towards the end of the show that you say you ask about. What would you want to do on the new earth? I'm like, I’m just excited about all of eternity, because I want to do everything, and because I have so many different interests. But Jesus was the one thing that never ran out and it made everything else come to life, but I remember when I was had that early Christian passion for the Lord going to this one prayer retreat for young people. There's that call at the end for how many people want to commit their lives to full-time ministry. I remember seeing – thinking that point in time
I really appreciated those young people going forward to commit to that, what they were referring to as full-time ministry, but I had seen so much of what God had done in my heart and life and then through my dad's life, just as a Mere Christian with his work and the hospitality that we did that I'm like, my heart was for everybody that didn't go up to commit to full-time ministry. I'm like, “What about the rest of us? We aren't just here to just support these guys.” When I started farming, it was really a part of like, I just want to do something that allows me to glorify God and to love other people, but that it began a journey of trying to understand what that actually looks like in a profession rather than just sticking a fish bumper sticker on your farm truck.
[0:04:52] JR: Amen. I love it, man. I love it so much. All right, so let's go there, right? You say in your website, “I help people who love Jesus and love agriculture connect their faith and farming, so that they can find purpose in glorifying God and serving others while excelling in land stewardship.” How does agriculture, how can land stewardship glorify God practically, Noah? What does that look like?
[0:05:16] NS: Yeah. That's a really good question. I think I've wrestled with the over the years of like, what does it mean to glorify God? Because sometimes we have this idea of whatever you do, as long as you do the glory of God, it's valuable. One way of thinking about that, it's true, but in another way is, you look at in Matthew chapter seven where it's like, hey, some people did all these amazing things, casting out demons and performing miracles in Jesus's name, probably for Jesus, but then he is like, I never knew you.
[0:05:43] JR: Yeah. These are the people saying Lord, Lord.
[0:05:45] NS: Right.
[0:05:46] JR: They believe Jesus was Lord. Yeah.
[0:05:48] NS: Right. I think the first thing I tell people about how do you glorify God with agriculture is it's got to be an active obedience, not just something cool that you want to do for God.
[0:05:59] JR: What do you mean by that? Go deeper there.
[0:06:00] NS: Yeah. Obedience is, I believe, really the definition of success in the Christian life, because it's what requires a relationship. Us going and doing cool things for God, we actually don't even need to know him. It's like I could go do cool things for the governor of Alabama, but I don't have to know them to do that, but obedience, like if I'm really doing it for them, it's got to be out of obedience.
There's a story I tell about one of my dogs that used to help me around the farm when I would move these flocks of chickens, because we did these free-range chickens and part of the ways that we protected them from predators is we kept geese in there. So, we would move, I'd have to take down the fence and move the flock to a new location. The dog was really good and helpful, but the geese were very aggressive, so my dog felt like he needed to protect me from them, and he listened pretty good and would not mess with them, but one day I remember he got into a squabble with the geese on the other side of the chicken pin and next thing I know, he's chasing them all over the farm.
I just remember knowing my dog, I mean, you couldn't fault him for his passion and zeal and really his desire to help, because he was always looking for something to help as a little collie dog. So, you could maybe say he was doing it for the glory of his master, but what he wasn't doing was listening to me saying, “Stop, stop, stop chasing the geese.” So, I felt like God's like, you know that's like you know that sometimes. You're out there chasing the geese for my glory, but what you're not doing is listening to me and obeying. So, for some people, agriculture can be something that it can be a distraction from the Lord.
It's easier to go work in your garden than to work on your marriage. It's easier to anything we can run to apart from God, so that's where it's got to be first of all, something that we're pursuing, because we feel like it's God, something God's leading us to do. Then I feel like it's more not so much that I glorify God through my farm, but it's God glorifies himself through my obedience to farm, if that's what he's told me to do. The way he glorifies himself might be through me succeeding in a way that everybody applauds and I point to the Lord, or it could be I have some friends in Africa that they have great testimonies of what happened when they lost their farms.
It's just like, that's not up to us. Our job is to obey and then God gets to choose how he glorifies himself. That's the first thing as far as glorifying God in there. Every aspect of life we have the opportunity to reflect the truths of the gospel and learn to live that out. I can go some more into some more detail in agriculture in particular, but agriculture is a particularly interesting area, because it deals with life. I think there's a moral dimension and complexity there that adds a different - in the past, I've done things like blacksmithing or musical instrument repair and there was not near the intensity of controversy around how you do that as there is in agriculture.
[0:08:58] JR: What's the controversy around how you do agriculture? Educate me on this. I'm ignorant here.
[0:09:02] NS: When I first started farming, I was like I want to just do, be the very best farmer I can in order to honor God. You think I'm going to be moral, I'm going to have high standards of character, all that kind of thing in the way that I reflect God, but I'm just going to excel in being the best farmer that I can. The challenge was you have to oversimplify it to competing camps in the world today. One is our status quo conventional agriculture. Then there is the more environmentally organic approach.
It was interesting, because I grew up in Auburn, Alabama, which is where our land grant college is, so it was very much the industrial agriculture aspect and I got to see a lot of that, but they were just so, if I succeeded according to industrial agriculture, though, there was a whole group of people over here saying, “Oh, you're a horrible person. You're destroying the earth and producing unhealthy food or whatever.” Then if you're over there into the organic agriculture aspect, there's a whole degree of people that are like, “You can't feed the world that way. You're just worshipping the earth.” It was like, “Whoa.” If I'm just like, “What's the best way to grow to made a plant to honor God?” There's a million different options, and people that would tell you that you were failing if you were succeeding according to one standard of the other. That's what really made me delve into why.
I realized that really was a difference of worldview and worship, really. On one hand, industrial agriculture elevates and worships man, and what we can accomplish through science, and how we can manipulate nature and creation to do what we want it to do. It looks to science to solve all of our problems and the environmental agriculture, on the other hand, worships nature, and natural processes, and looks to nature, and factoring it rules out a bit. Sometimes man's role in nature as a steward, but it worships that.
[0:10:50] JR: It's like almost there's idols on both sides.
[0:10:52] NS: There is. It's an idol of man or an idol of nature, worship.
[0:10:57] JR: How did the gospel help you find a middle third way? Talk about that.
[0:11:00] NS: Right. I realized just like anything in life, Satan doesn't mind if we get what God's called us to do imbalanced you can have a partial truth, which is still a lie. So, on one hand, we, industrial agriculture does a great job of focusing on productivity and fruitfulness and making stuff. On the other hand, then environmental agriculture really excels in how do we care for it? How do we sustain it? How do we make sure that it’s going to be here for the next generation?
It's interesting, because then if you go back to Genesis, God told man to care for and work the garden, both of those. That requires this tension of how do you do that, like there's no formula for how do you balance care and work at the same time. It's something that I feel like God with all these things that we had to hold and balanced, it requires a relationship with God to ask, what does this look like for me in my context?
That's where, as I began to say, “Okay, if the worldview and the belief systems of these two different camps produce a particular expression of agriculture, shouldn't my worldview produce a certain expression of agriculture, shouldn't it make a difference, shouldn't my farm look different, because I worship Jesus and the Creator, than man or nature.” I just began to ask those questions so that I wasn't unwittingly living out an orthopraxy that didn't reflect my values.
[0:12:29] JR: Yeah. It's really good. All right, so in what ways does your farm look different, because of your apprenticeship to Jesus?
[0:12:37] NS: Yes. That's a good question. It's not legalism and it's not license. Neither one of those requires a relationship. It's this idea that the gospel is not, hey, I've arrived at this particular place that you can arrive at too, but it's a walking in the reality that I am not where I need to be because of the fall. God had an original design for creation and for my life. That was broken, because of our rejection of God's way of doing things, so everything that we see around us is these broken relationships with ourself, with God, with others, with His creation.
Daily now as through God's provision in Jesus, I can be restored to my relationship with the Creator. Then I need to say, “Well, how does he want to then heal my relationship with myself, my role as a steward, my role? How do I relate to other people? How do I relate to his creation?” So, it's asking those questions, okay, so if I'm to approach a garden and I believe that it was made by the Creator and I'm the steward of it, and my natural approach to this is selfishness and unfaithfulness, and pride, how can I understand how those impact the way that I do? How can I build this garden in a way that reflects the humility of Jesus, the faithfulness of Jesus, and the unselfishness, and generosity of Jesus? It actually does in amazing ways.
What we tend to focus on, we work with a ministry that's international called Foundations for Farming. It's a network of people utilizing some methodologies and discipleship principles that came out as Zimbabwe, Africa, but we build that foundation as Jesus Christ, and practically how we do that is we start with His heart of humility, faithfulness, and unselfishness. Practically, the humility causes us to say, "You know what? This land isn't mine, it belongs to God, and I'm here for a short period of time.” God knows a lot more about this than I do, so when I'm facing challenges with not only, well, if He owns it, first of all, I need to say, “What am I supposed to do with it?”
That goes back to the Garden of Eden when God made all His creation and He said, “It's good.” Then He put man on the earth and said take dominion, I often think if I was Adam, I'd look around and be like, “Man, it looks pretty good. What am I supposed to do with it?” Like, just take a walk. But you look at God planted the first garden, and I think there's three attributes that I've always noticed in that one, it was His creation reordered for an increase in beauty, because it says, He planted all kinds of fruit trees that are pleasing to the eye, and increase of productivity or usefulness that they were good for food. Then it was also a place for man to live, so the habitability of it.
Increased beauty, productivity, or fruitfulness and habitability is what God was like, “Look, this is what I want you to do with the rest of creation.” It's interesting, because whether you're, even when you're a craftsman making a table or you are designing a software or whatever, you're still doing the same thing. You're using God's creation to create more beauty, more usefulness, and something reorganizing in a way that it can interact with humans. A garden has paths, a tool has a handle, and computer has a keyboard.
When we understand that that's our role is to reflect Him as the creator in the way that we continue to develop His creation, then we recognize, I can't do that in my sinful state. I'm just going to keep messing that up. I need Jesus to help me, to sit at the feet of the creator and say, “What does my father do?” That's what we teach people to ask the question is if I'm – okay, well, how do I plant stuff in my garden? How do I prepare my garden? Well, what does my father do?
Let's just go look at his creation, not because we worshiped it, but because we know it's His wisdom in ways are so amazing. Even if we can just apply a few simple things in child-like faith, there's incredible benefits. It's like the more in farming, the more you appreciate the design of the creator and you utilize it for every one thing that you do to shift your production models closer to the way that the designer intended it. There's always these numerous unintentional beneficial side effects. Every time we deviate from that and we do something unnatural and we forced, manipulated to do things it wouldn't do otherwise, then there's all these unattended negative side effects.
[0:17:03] JR: Yeah. You've been handling this theme a couple of times that I want to get explicit and practical. You've said that a couple of minutes ago you said, “God knows a lot more about farming than I do end.” On your website, you talk about learning from the master farmer. It made me think of Isaiah 28, that says, “That God instructs farmers and teaches them the right way.” What does that look like practically for you? What does that process look like of sitting at the feet of the Lord and learning how practically to do this craft in the right way? How does that show up? What's an example of that?
[0:17:37] NS: Well, let me just share a quick story that I share with like all the time. I teach people that we train to teach. That's the story of my mentor out of Zimbabwe, Africa. He was a commercial farmer and what was originally Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He was a tobacco farmer for 20 years. He ended up getting saved in the end of the 70s and then was convicted about growing tobacco, because he hated smoking. He thought it was bad for you, but it's what he made his living doing, so his kids called him out on it. It's like, “Hey dad, why do you do this?”
It was actually, he woke up one morning and read that 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” He became convicted. He was been having his dual standard in his life, so he promised God he'd never growing tobacco again. They started growing food, he and his wife. It's like, instead of the blessing they thought they would get, they ended up having two terrible droughts and they lost the farm. They were poor for a while, but he would say, “God has to humble us before we listen to him sometimes. Before we can really be used by him.”
He ended up getting a job working in another farm that was also struggling and the yields were going down every year. They were doing this deep plowing, which is what they were taught at the time. They were having real erosion problems, their costs were going up, their yields were going down. He finally get to the end of himself and he was like, there's got to be some other answers, but there wasn't. They didn't have Google back then and that kind of thing, but he read in Romans 1 where it talks about how God's attributes, his divine nature is clearly seen being understood through what has been made. So, he said, “Well, maybe I can go learn from him in natural creation.”
He went out to what they call the bush or the forest and he just sat down in the forest and said, “God teach me how to farm. Teach me how you do this.” So, he came with just two simple principles he saw that contrasted with what he was doing, which was one, there was no regular deep plowing in natural creation, like he had been doing. There's always a blanket, a mulch on the ground. So, he just said, “Well, let's just – I'll have the faith to try those two things.” I mean, you're not talking some complicated design system that he came away with.
There's just two simple childlike principles he saw. He did that on just a very, very small part of the farm. It was so successful, once they implemented on the whole farm, that they were profitable every year and ended up being the second largest privately owned farm in Africa at the peak. So, from that, they began to teach the poor. That's where foundations for farming came from, but it really is rooted in this. When you have a challenge, you literally can just go and say, “Okay, Jesus, show me how you've designed this to work.”
It's like going back to the owner's manual, which really you can only read, like that's where the heart has to go with it. If you approach creation without the humility, then you're not really going to learn from it, but for me, it's teaching people to say, how does my father do this? So, when I face a bug problem in my garden, I'm asking, okay, so I'm trusting that the original design of this, though it's flawed, there's wisdom in that. For instance, when we have bugs eating our crops. It's not like we're ever going to have a garden of Eden where there's none of that, but we have to understand and appreciate to the design of some of these bugs.
Sometimes we have stressed vegetables in our garden, because we're growing crops that don't grow in this part of the world, and we haven't done a good job of watering necessarily. God, actually built into his natural creation process where bugs come and eliminate weak and sickly plants. Sometimes that's my garden. Even though I can protect that garden from the bugs, I want to – with humility say, “What is it about my management as a steward that's causing this problem in the first place that I could learn from and improve?” A lot of it goes back to just appreciating the fact that soil is so important, just like, that represents our heart. We don't want to just deal with behavior issues. We want to deal with the heart. Same thing in the garden. It's almost always a soil issue that's being reflected in the plant itself.
Even just practical things were just asking God for solutions and asking Him to give us eyes to see. There was a community in Africa where they had elephants coming through and trampling all their crops during the growing season. They have been taught. We’ll just ask our father what to do. So, they just did that and started observing to see what he would show them. They showed them that elephants rarely go near their own manure, so they collected elephant manure, put it around their fields and that kept the elephants out. It's just trusting that God wants to speak to us. He wants to us to learn from Him. it's just sometimes we don't think He really has those practical solutions for us or those are the kind of things that we should go and ask Him about.
[0:22:10] JR: Well, yeah. I know. This is really good. Those are great examples of learning from the master farmer, but in God's grace, the master farmer also gives wisdom to broken human farmers.
[0:22:23] NS: Yes.
[0:22:23] JR: Right? Entrepreneurs, believers and non-believers alike. Talk about that. How do you think about how much time you spend learning from the master farmer God himself versus the human beings that through God's common grace, He's given wisdom to?
[0:22:39] NS: Yes. I definitely think it's a both. The question is, are we, like even when we're listening to another farmer, are we asking what can I learn from this farmer or what is God teaching me through what this farmer is sharing with me?
[0:22:55] JR: That's good. Talk about the difference of that question makes.
[0:22:57] NS: Well, what it does is it's so easy to have an us versus them mentality of, do I agree with your farming or not? If I don't, then I'm going to be combative and try to convince you of my position and not really appreciate anything that you have, which is really a false view of all of us as Christians. I tend to think of it as this, we're in different places, right, so if you look at picture, kind of a chart, I maybe over here on the left-hand side where I am at in my farming journey, you may be over here on the right-hand side. We maybe have different starting points. You have a large-scale legacy industrial commercial farm, and that's what God's entrusted you with. You've got to figure out how to grow and your faithfulness to reflect God better there.
I do as well, maybe I'm just starting in an urban lot in town, but what we don't need to do is say, well, who should be where – like should you be where I am or should I be where you are? Jesus is way up at the top somewhere in terms of what he's calling us to. Can we unify around calling each other to grow towards Christ? That's really where when I'm listening to that other farmer, I know I'm so far from what I need to be. I don't expect him to be exactly where he needs to be either, but what can God teach – it's like when we're around other Christians that are different than us, but we do have a heart for Christ, like we really – then it's like it gives us a way to triangulate on Jesus in a way that we can't by ourselves or with people that are just completely like us.
Going and saying, “What can I learn from this farmer?” Learning to listen is one of the most unselfish things we can do. It's where wisdom comes from. It's where God teaches us. One of the most humbling things is to listen to somebody in depth and in detail that you know you don't agree with, maybe even 80% of what they're saying, right? But you're mining for that like common grace of truth that they have that you can appreciate and affirm in them, because you want to see even more of that in them.
The thing that's not helpful is to just this is danger in trying to glorify God where, it could be everything from, “Hey, I don't grow genetically modified crops, because I love Jesus. That's an expression of my love for Jesus.” If you do grow genetically modified crops, you must not love Jesus as much as I do or I use essential oils, because I love Jesus. If you don't use essential oils, you must not love Jesus as much as I do. That's just Satan's way to really distract us. So, that’s the ideas. We can unify around the fact that we both are broken.
That's the hard part is we feel – it’s getting that place where we feel open to admit that we're not where we should be, and that we're never going to be where we should be. I need you to help me to see where I can grow. You need me to help you see where you can grow. Agriculture is, that's a big part of mine, because I feel like the church won't touch agriculture with a 10-foot pole oftentimes, because it's too controversial. We don't know how to talk about it in a healthy way.
[0:25:58] JR: That's good. I love that question. I love that framing. Not like what can this person teach me versus what does God teach me through that person? It's a totally different, more humble posture. Recognizing that by God's common grace. Everybody's got something to teach me, right? Believer and nonbeliever alike, right? I'm going to learn more. I'm also going to serve more, because I'm in a much humbler position to serve that person. Man, it's really, really good.
Hey, so in farming, I think farming is a really interesting case study of this theme that I write a lot about. This tension between trusting in God to produce results through our work, which scripture tells us he produces every result in our work, right? You got this on the one hand trusting God, but on the other hand, this frequent command throughout scripture to hustle, to work hard, to make things happen in our work. What are some signs for you in this profession that you are or are not holding that tension between trusting and hustling and hard work well?
[0:26:57] NS: Yeah. Well, I don't know that it maybe doesn't relate exactly to your question per se, but we talk a lot about with stewardship, the idea of faithfulness and generosity, which is really just an expression of contentment that God as our provider is giving us everything we need right now for wholehearted faithfulness and wholehearted action. Everything we need right now to be generous in every way that he gives opportunity he gives us to be generous. But practically, a lot of times what we're trying to look at and evaluate in our lives is, is God adding to me or taking away from me? Not just in terms of money, but in terms of increase in my relationships, and my walk with him, and my health, and all those things.
Easily we can measure profit in one area of life at the expense of others, right? But it's this idea that he adds to faithfulness, he takes away from unfaithfulness, he adds to generosity as you measure, it'll be measured to you. If I'm losing, if I'm being taken away from, I need to reevaluate whether I'm really truly being faithful to what he's called me to or whether I am just trusting in myself or the way I think it even planning takes a lot of faith. This idea of anything that's not done in faith, which is really just like taking action in light of who God is and what he's called us to is sin.
Anything that's not done in faith is sin, but the biggest – a lot of this factor is you can measure it by the joy factor. If you are losing your joy, which in farming burnout is a big, big thing for a lot of people is then I think it's an indication of not being faithful, because God adds. He doesn't add any, it's like talks about the income of the wicked and when he gives income to the righteous. He doesn't add any sorrow to it, but this idea of the joy, the Lord is our strength.
Typically, in our family as we're working or we're doing stuff and somebody starts losing their joy level, we need to say, “Okay, you may be being hustling right now, but is this really for God or for you? Is this you trying to get done what you want to do or not, or is it you not wanting to do what God's told you to do and you're being lazy.” There's some other idle in life that you want right now instead of like investing in what God's given you to do. So, that's where we're always kind of like, we need to monitor our joy level, because our joy is connected to the spirit of the Lord.
You may be doing something that's good, but if you don't have that joy, something's off in your heart that is not going to produce good results at the end of the day. Again, it's not like happiness or comfort I'm not talking about, but it's that joy that motivates you to do your work without the stress. I think we all can tell when you flip that switch. It's like when I'm trying to get this, the garden planted and I would just, I had in my mind, I wanted to get one more bed planted before I go in. Guess what? I'm out of time. It’s just really time to go in to the family, but I'm like trying to do whatever I can to get it done.
Then now, I'm like clicked into this hustle, stress factor to try to finish that bed instead of just stopping and being content with what I got done. Then, I'm only get half of it done. Then the household is not running well, because I'm not there quite yet for supper. Then it's just, it all goes downhill, because I held up something that I wanted rather than saying, “Okay, God, am I going to be content here with what you told me to do and go for that?” But that joy level is something that we really feel like has been lost in a lot of, or been left out as far as an important thing to monitor in the farming world. There's a lot of people that work hard. Diligence is like people love, like we really work hard, but we can do it to the point where we're losing our joy. It really is an evidence that we're not content with what God, the limits God's put on us and the rest that he promises to us every day.
[0:30:47] JR: Yes. That's really good. I don't know that I've ever heard joy connected to this idea of trust, hustle, rest that I write so much about. Yeah. That's a pretty good indicator. If you're not on the right side of that tension, it's really good. Hey, you as a farmer at the mercy of weather in a lot of ways, right? The weather doesn't always cooperate with us and our planning, in our planting, this side of Genesis 3. But if you come to see that as a blessing in a roundabout way in that your profession by its very nature just makes you more obviously and practically reliant on the Lord.
[0:31:24] NS: Oh, definitely. Like you said, it's just more obvious for just as depending on the Lord and other professions, but –
[0:31:30] JR: All of us are dependent on the Lord. You could just see it up close and personal, right?
[0:31:34] NS: You really can. The other year it was interesting, because I felt like the Lord wanted me to put together this gardening resource. I just didn't have time to do it. So, my wife and I just knelt down one evening and we were just praying, “Lord, just show us if you want us to write this little handbook for churches about planting.” These gardens is for outreach in the community, because we're in the middle of the farming early spring is about this time of year in April. So, we prayed that and the next morning we woke up and this massive hail storm came through and just decimated most of the crops in the garden. I felt like, God was like, all right, well, now you don't have to make any deliveries this week, so you can write that book.
It was interesting, because I made a little YouTube video that some people shared in our community about, “Hey, look, this is discouraging, obviously, but God tells us to rejoice when there's trials.” Ultimately, I work for him. This is his garden. It's all his lettuce. If he wants to like – despite my best efforts for a catastrophe to destroy them all, like I just had to – I work for him. It's not my stuff anyways. There was so much fruit that came from even that struggle. So many of those crops grew back, so there was a lot of other beautiful pictures in that.
Also, the neat thing, too, is we've seen the more that we appreciate and honor the design of God and creation, the more resilient our farms are. I think part of what we are always looking for, and I would recommend there's a book called, The Glorious Pigness of Pigs, by Joel Salatin. What he does is he talks about how can the attributes of God be reflected in our agriculture, whether it's forgiveness, or his abundance, or freedom versus slavery. Those kinds of things, and what does our agriculture reflect. So, things like that, resilience is one of those.
In places like Africa, you'll end up having these droughts and stuff, but what we've found is a lot of the people that we partner with and that teach. For instance, if you just apply those two principles of not plowing the ground and putting a mulch on the surface of the ground, if you have a rain, there's been tests that show where they did rainfall tests.
In one, the normal plowed and unmulched field, 90% of the water ran off and only 10% infiltrated into the ground, which means, if you had two and a half inches of rain, only a quarter inch is down there for the plants to utilize. Whereas on the field that was not plowed and had a mulch on it, 94% infiltrated and only 6 percent ran off. It means that all of a sudden now you don't need rain for weeks and your farm is way more resilient. It's a beautiful picture, both of, yes, life's storms, whether they're real or figurative, can come and go, but the more we apply in humility and look to God to give us wisdom and how we live our lives, the more resilient our lives end up being towards those storms.
[0:34:20] JR: I love it. It’s so good. Hey, so about two years ago, at the time of this recording, you walked away from a pretty successful farming business. You still farm for your family, right, but you're not farming for anybody else. Your family is your only customer now, and you walked away so that you can teach others how to glorify God through farming. I loved the way you framed this in your announcement. I read every single word of it and prepped for this episode. You said basically, hey, you realized, I can't do both farming and teaching this stuff really well at the same time, or at least that's how I interpreted it. Tell us more about your conviction here around focus and the need to go deep on one of these two things, Noah.
[0:35:01] NS: Yes. I am still learning that idea, but its faithfulness requires. I've told my kids in the past, to obey God requires us to be faithful to what he's told us to do. Faithfulness requires focus, and focus requires us saying to know to everything except what we've been told to do.
[0:35:19] JR: Amen. Come on now.
[0:35:20] NS: Yeah. All my kids, it's like they're doing all these good things. I'm like, but that's not what I told you to do, right? The challenge in life is God tends to direct more through limitations than he does through opportunities. Those limitations change as seasons change, and that's part of the humility. We learn how to live one season well, and then the limitations change, and the opportunities change too. We've got to adjust as we follow him in our mission, but if we keep saying yes to everything and we don't allow him to prune off things. I was talking to one of my farming mentors yesterday from Africa, and we were talking about this principle. He said, “The harder you prune a tree, the more fruits you get.” He said, “It's so hard, but it's, that's the way it is. That's the way it is in our lives.”
I was at a point we felt called for 13 years to show that you can make a living as a family, small-scale farming, because everybody told me you couldn't do it. I’m not necessarily to prove them wrong, but I felt like, man, if God calls me to do this amazing calling that he had from the beginning, surely, he has the wisdom to show me how to do it. There was just, we ended up running a small-scale farm selling vegetables, and meat chickens, and eggs, and different products to families that we knew and delivering them.
We also had a lot of people mentoring us and teaching us not only good ways to farm, but how to integrate discipleship and how to apply a biblical worldview to it. I wrote a book called, Born-Again Dirt: Farming to the Glory of God and had some opportunities through that to share about this topic. As my family grew, I have seven kids now, my main ministry is to my kids and my family. Ultimately, the biggest ministry that we have is when people come to our farm and learn from us, they often say that they're more impacted by just seeing us in the struggle of learning to do well, just the basics of life and family. It's not in this, a discipleship center kind of setting conference center, but it's like seeing our life on a day-to-day basis that is really where the foundation of us being able to show the gospel to them comes from.
After 13 years, our farm was what we had set out for it to be. We had about 30 customers we delivered to every week. It was just our family growing food for families and doing it together, and it was really great, but we had more and more opportunities, especially after 2020, people are like, “How do we grow food for ourselves?” I feel like in the future, the biggest area of freedom in food and farming is going to be in self-production and in local community production. The larger scale commercial agriculture, there's a lot of war going on right now in the food realm over that, because it affects people's freedom. Some people want to control that and other people there's – I feel like the most impactful thing we could do is teach people to feed themselves. We had been very passionate about living out what we were teaching people.
We were going to share with them about how to make a living farming. We needed to be doing it, so we had that to share from. Once we felt the passion and the urgency to teach people how to feed themselves, we were like the farming, commercial farming, just was getting in the way of being able to do that. So, we said, “Well, we just maybe we are supposed to just do what we're telling other people to do, which is grow food for ourselves and free up the time to teach them.” Because I used to do some of my redeeming the dirt ministry on the evenings or the weekends, but once you have a family, it's like there's no more – your workdays, is your only flexible time.
I said, either that's what we're going to do for work or we just can't do both well. So, we just need to see once we gave that up to the Lord. We felt like, because it was doing well, it's like David said, I don't want to give the Lord that which cost me nothing, that that was a good time to step away from that. The Lord has just provided so many opportunities for us to be able to basically help several different – our goal is really to equip the church to understand how to be good stewards of creation, especially in the realm of food production and food security, so that we can have the answers to the challenges the world faces and not be in the same boat.
We spend, we have a lot of opportunities now to help people that are doing missions in different parts of the world that understand the importance of bringing that in what they're doing. Also, people that are in agriculture who want to integrate more discipleship into what they're doing. So, whether you're coming from the faith side or the farming side, we're helping them connect those two and that's what our family focuses on doing at the moment.
[0:39:44] JR: I love this so much. I just got to commend you for the courage that it takes to close off one thing. I wrote a whole book about this called, The Master of One. I wholeheartedly believe we glorify God by pursuing excellence in all things. We simply can't pursue world-class excellence at many vocational things at the same time, right, or to use farming language in the same season. I love this idea of faithfulness requires focus. The harder you plant a tree, the more fruit you get, and like calling isn't static, right? God might be calling you to something right now in this season, but he may be calling you to something totally different in the next season. Thank you for that reminder, Noah.
Hey, one more question before we get to our final rapid-fire round. One of my favorite passages of scripture is Isaiah 65 where God says, “I will create a new heaven and a new earth. My chosen people will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others, live in them or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people. My chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands and they will not labor in vain.” That's, I think, verses 17 to 23.
I mean, he’s a farmer, right? This can't mean that on the new earth, we are going to plant a strawberry seed and the next morning we wake up to perfect strawberries, right? It's still going to be work. It's just without the thorns and the thistles, right? In your mind, I know this is a nearly impossible question to answer, but what is that going to look like? What is it going to look to long enjoy the work of our hands, but that work could not be in vain on the new earth?
[0:41:27] NS: Yeah. That is a good question that I definitely don't say that I would know what that would look like per se.
[0:41:33] JR: I don't think anybody does.
[0:41:34] NS: I know, but – part of my heart and that is one of the things I like about, and I think most people do about gardening, we do it with the anticipation of the harvest on one hand, but if you're a really good gardener or you're a really good craftsman, you do it for the love of the craft. I like harvesting, but I really don't, because it's like I've been taking care of these carrots for so long. It's just, I love coming out every day and seeing this beautiful carrot bed that I've just – to pull it up is sometimes like, oh, but I really have loved taking care of this bed of carrots. It's just, it's so satisfying or the same thing with a craftsman. I mean, it's the process. Yes, you like the result, but it's really the process you enjoy. To be able to participate in that in a way that you don't have the stress of like, just get it done so we can make a living or whatever it is.
Then like you said, the idea of it, if it's not in vain, I'm not going to grow the strawberry and then go out, like yesterday I went out in the morning and we had all these new fresh green beans coming up in the garden, but one of the chickens had gotten out of, one of my kid’s chicken pens and went gone over and scratched up a big bunch of the row. You're like, “Oh, my little baby beans.” There's the tragedy in that. I think that's the beauty is it's not in the consumer culture, we think instant gratification is bliss, that that is utopia, but it actually isn't. It's the process of creation, and creating, and producing where we enjoy fulfilling the way God's created us the most in reflecting him, I think.
[0:43:06] JR: 100%. Adam and Eve, listen, before Genesis 3, it was hard work. I don't think it was pain. It clearly was a painful toil. The words of this was it was a different kind of difficulty, right, but it was still challenges, right? Because that's essential to human flourishing and flourishing work, right? That's the essence of craft of having to work hard at this thing, but in a, from a position of rest and peace, not to earn rest in peace, but out of a position of rest in peace that is perfectly secure, because our relationship with the Lord is perfectly secure. Does that make sense?
[0:43:43] NS: Yes. I think I look forward to the really deep, long, satisfying size at the end of whatever work we're doing in the new earth, where it's like, oh, yeah.
[0:43:56] JR: Yes.
[0:43:58] NS: That doesn't come without the excitement of a challenge.
[0:44:01] JR: Correct.
[0:44:02] NS: That is that God will be there to allow us to experience. It's so much more to look forward to than I think most of us think about on a regular basis.
[0:44:11] JR: Agree. What do you want to do in the new earth? Do you want to farm?
[0:44:13] NS: Definitely. I would love to start with that. I have so many interests and things I've thought, like I really do need all of eternity with Jesus. I'm like, I just want to be a Greek fisherman for a bit, an alpine dairyman, a composer, I want to be an Australian cowboy for a bit, craftsman and make all sorts of stuff, learn from Jesus and how to do that. Definitely a gardener for maybe a couple thousand years. But it's just, this idea – one of the things that in Proverbs, it says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean out on your own understanding and in all your ways, acknowledge him and he'll direct your paths.” Somebody once shared that the idea of that acknowledge him can mean more of that to know him more. Acknowledge, kind of like a husband knows his wife in that intimate way.
It's this idea of, in all your ways, seek to know him more and he'll direct your paths. That's what I feel like in gardening is most rewarding when I'm pursuing an experience of Christ through that. A fuller understanding and knowledge of him. On the New Heavens and New Earth, that's what I'm most excited about. There's elements of Christ that I can experience through gardening and agriculture, but there's other things too, that I'm looking forward to doing as well, because it'll give me a whole another aspect of being able to experience and see him through that, but that'll be the biggest thing is I want to experience Christ in all those for rich ways.
[0:45:30] JR: Yes. That's so good. I so resonate with your perspective. I’m like, man, there are a million jobs I want, right? I want to play piano on a cruise ship. I don't know – on the earth, right? But I want to be a photographer. I want to do all these different things. I want to write screenplays. Here's just the interesting. Going back to the conversation we just had about focus.
I found that the more I meditate on the promise of billions of years of perfect work, the easier it is for me to focus on the one thing I believe God's called me to do professionally today and not get distracted by all these side paths, because I'm going to billions of years to do all those different things, right? It's so interesting. It's made me so much more committed to the work I believe God's called me to do right now, because, man, I just know I'm going to have forever to do everything else. Does that make sense?
[0:46:25] NS: Oh, it totally does. That's what should set us apart as Christians is our commitment to understanding the season that we live in now, what the stakes are, what the battle is, and that we want to hold nothing back, because we're living for an eternity of what the world is trying to live for today.
[0:46:44] JR: Yes, man. Come on. That's so good. All right, Noah, three questions before we wrap up. Number one, which books do you find yourself gifting most frequently to others?
[0:46:54] NS: Yes. Well, I've only written one book, Born-Again Dirt, so that's one that I would encourage people to get. I probably don't want to promote mine a lot, but I've probably given more away, because I just happen to have them. Another one is a mentor of mine and disciple-making is a guy named Curtis Sergeant. He wrote a book called The Only One. It's interesting. It's the only book he's written, I think. It's about, it really is about like – it's helpful, because it relates to what you said about focus. It's about intimacy with Christ. It said like, what if there was only one thing we had to do in life, and that was pursue Christ? He's like, that's it. I really recommend The Only One, I've Given. It's one of those books that I never have, because I've always given it away.
Another one that I really love is Beautiful Outlaw by John Eldredge about the personality of Jesus. Then there's another book about productivity and consumerism that I like to share with people. It's actually open source or not. You can find it free online. It's called, Henry and the Great Society that a pastor wrote in the late 60s. Then The Glorious Pigness of Pigs by Joel Salatin. It's also a really great one related to this topic.
[0:48:02] JR: That sounds amazing. That sounds really good. Hey, Noah, who would you want to hear in this podcast talking about how their faith shapes the work they do in the world?
[0:48:09] NS: I don't know if you had Joel Salatin on?
[0:48:11] JR: I've not. No.
[0:48:12] NS: Yeah. I would highly recommend. He's one of the guys that impacted me a lot in applying a biblical worldview to agriculture. He would be great as far as talking about, I would love to hear his conversation with you for sure.
[0:48:25] JR: It's good. The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs. What a great title. Oh, my gosh.
[0:48:29] NS: Or maybe it's The Glorious Pigness of Pigs. I can't remember.
[0:48:33] JR: That's so good. I love it. Hey, Noah, what's one thing from our conversation that you want to say before we sign off or something you simply want to reiterate from our conversation thus far?
[0:48:42] NS: I think the biggest thing is like what I tell people at our farm trainings is my goal is not that they go away to garden, but that they go away more in love with Jesus. I would just say don't just work for God, but work to know God more in everything that you do. That's the biggest reward that we can get from anything that we do.
[0:49:03] JR: Yes. We know him more as we work, because he is a creating working God, right? Who reveals his character as we co-labor alongside him through the power of the Holy Spirit. Noah, brother, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you do for the glory of God and the good of others for giving us just a really compelling case study of what it looks like to apply the gospel to your field of agriculture and just for reminding us of something. I know, I forget even though I've written books on it, faithfulness requires focus, right? Guys, if you want to learn more about Noah and his work, check out redeemingthedirt.com or his book Born-Again Dirt. Noah, thanks for hanging out with us.
[0:49:43] NS: Thanks so much, Jordan.
[0:49:46] JR: Man, I love that episode. I hope you did too. Hey, if you're enjoying the Mere Christians Podcast, do me a favor and go leave a review of the show right now on Spotify, on Apple Podcast, wherever you listen to the show. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week.
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