Today is the last of the seven days of Sukkot before we launch into the Last Great Day of Shemini Atseret tomorrow. Sukkot is the last of the three harvest festivals that began with barley, then wheat, and now grapes.

What have we reaped this last year? And are our barns filled so that we can overwinter without the fear of hunger, particularly if there is a global collapse? Such were the concerns of our forefathers, and they're still our concerns today which is why prepping is so important and will likely become a permanent feature of family life hereon and until the Second Coming. If harvests fail, people starve. Even in the modern world with all the science and technology at our disposal, if the farmers have not been fruitful, the lives of millions are threatened. Sometimes we forgot how important the work of farmers is. I've long said they should be paid well.

The same is true spiritually. If we have not been fruitful, we're in trouble. Whether in the physical or the spiritual, fruitfulness is everything. It isn't a mere luxury. It's an absolute necessity for life and living. And that is why Yahweh linked spiritual truths to the Israelite agricultural cycle because they are so closely related.

A tree is as good as its roots, and its roots are hidden beneath the ground. Our life in this world will likewise be as effective as our spirituality. And because both tree roots and the human spirit are hidden things, we can't see them any more than we can see the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) which is compared in Scripture to the coming and going of the wind (Jn.3:8). We can feel its effects on us but we can't map it with our eyes. With so much of the tree hidden beneath the ground, the paramount importance of faith in life becomes self-evident. If we don't cultivate the invisible, we will suffer and possibly fail in the visible. Being productive in both the physical and spiritual realm is therefore essential. It is success in these, practically speaking, that brings us simcha - joy.

Taking care of one's health by living wisely is likewise vitally important. I confess to have been somewhat negligent in this area and as a result am suffering in my latter years. I produced this talk to you yesterday evening standing up as I can no longer sit down in my present condition. I don't know how much longer I can do that as standing up for hours on end is as exhausting as the exhaustion caused by the pain of sitting down. This maddening situation was the result of one bad decision and my failure to listen to the Ruach (Spirit) crying out within not to take that decision but I was in a hurry to sort out other medical issues. The older you get the more careful and considerate you must be in the decisions you make, particularly ones that affect your health.

The root (in Hebrew, sheresh) on which we depend in life must be carefully cultivated. Yahweh chose ancient Israel, an agrarian society, to be a model of the way a life in Him should be lived. The way we live today would not have provided a good spiritual model because we have become lazy and indolent in our abundance (compared to then) of wealth (especially in the West). But the countryside, beautiful though it is, can be terribly harsh too.

I remember years ago watching a 3-4 hours Swedish movie produced, if I am not mistaken, by the famous director Ingmar Bergman. It's about a Swedish farming family about 200 years ago. The Swedish climate is a harsh one, the soil unforgiving. There was little soil back then and what you see today was largely created by clearing rocks over the centuries. That was back-breaking work in the days before mechanisation. This family was so poor it didn't even have a horse for ploughing. Humans had to pull the plough. In the film the farm was worked by a widowed father and his family of sons and their wives.

In those days farming was on a subsistence level as it still is in so many parts of the world where famine is, in consequence, common. For the most part, farmers produced only enough for themselves with a tiny surplass with which to get cash to buy those few luxury items we now take for granted and which are available to us in abundance in our local stores. That man injured his back trying to move a heavy rock and as a result became just another 'useless' mouth to feed, a burden on his family who were barely getting by as it was.

You see, old people were a liability in those days. In many ancient cultures the old folk were put out to die when they became a burden on the tribe. The Inuit used to leave them on the ice to perish. They accepted this as the only means of survival. The Swedish family in the end decided to immigrate to America to seek a better life. Much of the northern part of the USA in the Great Lakes area was settled by Scandinavian (principally Norwegian and Swedish) farmers like this one in the movie as the climate was similar to the one we have here but the soil was much richer, much more fertile, so farming became a dream come true for them. No more back-breaking clearing of boulders and rocks. Every autumn and spring when they till the ground here, you still see large stones come to the surface, but now machinery takes acre of it. But it's still hard work.

The survival and success of Sweden is all down to those farmers who sweated blood and tears over many generations. Never forget them. Never fail to appreciate those who work the land. The city people are nearly 100 per cent dependent on them as will become clear once again after the Collapse. To those of you in Third World countries this is old news - you will likely do a lot better than those of us here in the West.

To have deep spiritual roots in our lives we need deep spiritual soil too. The ground has to be tilled, and tilling is no less difficult in the spiritual life (dealing with your mind, heart and fleshy impulses) than it is in the agricultural. The festival of Chag haMatzah or Unleavened Bread teaches us that truth. What we reap at Sukkot all boils down to getting on our hands and knees to systematically and painstakingly remove the leaven of sin out of our lives, a little here, a little there.

We have to work on it every day because sin, like working the summer garden, otherwise weeds will intrude and eventually swamp us out of the joy of living in later life. I see how we have lost control of parts of our garden now owing to older age. So don't neglect the good harvest of youth which can so often be misspent only to reap a harvest later in life you come to bitterly regret. Use your younger days wisely to be productive, living in the present but also investing in the future. It's the same principle as prepping - a little put aside every week soon grows. It's how this ministry's website has also grown to such an enormous resource over 35 or more years, and all in response to a vision I saw on a train. It didn't make itself.

Yahweh has given us free will and yet our will is also potentially our greatest enemy. I think one of the most frightening passages of Scripture is one whose promises we are usually eager to claim but whose interpretation the flesh is liable to twist when we separate it from other Scriptures on the same subject and isolate it for potential exploitation. Let's quickly look at it:

"...if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven" (Matt.18:19, NKJV).

Imagine how the world would turn out if millions of pairs of believers applied this passage without reference to the clear boundaries - conditions for the granting of prayer requests - that Yahweh has put around it? Imagine if the promise worked without any preconditions at all? The basic problem in the world is the conflict of wills. It is the conflict of wills that leads to the terrible competition that exists for power and supremacy everywhere. Prayer, if applied only using this Scripture, would result in what? Matters becoming considerably worse!

Imagine if all the contradictory prayer requests were granted. One pair of people prays for country X to defeat country Y in a war and another pair of people prays for country Y to defeat country X. Isn't that what happened in World War I, without regard for the righteousness or unrighteousness of the cause of each? In the next World War they either stopped praying or cynically used priests simply to motivate the people to carry on the fight in the interests not of Elohim's (God's) will but of human power structures, even in officially atheistic nations like the Soviet Union!

Common sense alone tells you that there are limits to free will. Calvinists and Moslems go to the other extreme and tell you we don't have free will at all! Liberalism and fatalism are equally dangerous untruths. Liberalism (no boundaries) leads to anarchy and fatalism (total containment) leads to darkened minds insisting that evil deeds are in the will of Elohim (God)! Calvinists insanely believe that evil brings their god glory in the same way as good does because their god ordains it!

That is why Yahweh has established limits or boundaries around our free will and those limits or boundaries are the mitzvot (commandments). They're there to ensure that free will is exercised righteously - properly - to teach us that we can't have our own way in everything, that we must learn to yield to others sometimes because we cannot override Yahweh's overall historical agenda. He must sometimes intervene to protect those who might be injured if our wills are served. Individuals have to work within a collective world where we all impinge on one another.

It is by such training and self-discipline that we eventually learn to submit to the will of Yahweh and to ask Him for His will before seeking our own. That is why we are commanded to be in agreement with the Master's (Lord's) Prayer that includes the plea: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Mt.6:10, KJV). Do you want Father's will done rather than your own? Your answer to that will determine who your god actually is and whether you are aligned with Heaven or the world.

Yahweh's will at this time is that we daily overcome sin in our life in the little things and the big, so that we can better become His instruments in bringing to pass His Kingdom of earth that is represented by Shemini Atseret that we will be celebrating tomorrow. Human will exerted against the will of Yahweh brings pain. 'No pain, no gain,' as the proverb coined by Jane Fonda in her aerobics classes goes, but in truth the only gainful pain is the pain we learn from that which persuades us to stop sinning or to otherwise endure for righteousness' sake when others wrong us in the exercise of their free will. There is joy to be had in doing Yahweh's will not just because of the eventual outcome but in the shalom (peace) we derive from it in the here-and-now. Some good things we must wait patiently for, sometimes even to the next life. We are constantly investing for the future yet also enjoying some of its fruits in the present.

I wanted to end Sukkot on a realistic note given the terrible struggle going on right now between the forces of good and evil in the world. Today in town a shopkeeper asked me, knowing I was British, what I thought of what was happening in America and who would win the Presidential Election in under 4 weeks' time. He was tired of the constant hype in the Swedish media and actually seemed quite scared. Fear abounds, and not just because of a clash of political wills, but also the ongoing Corona scamdemic. Indeed the headline of a local newspaper today was that a child in Kindergarten had tested positive. People are scared and increasingly hysterical. I think we'll all be glad when both the election and the 'pandemic' will be over (as the two are obviously linked) because the survival of Western Christian civilisation is literally hanging in the balance now. If it falls, as it has done in Europe already, then the last holdout will be in the old Byzantine world with a very different and unfamiliar (to us) Moscow, Russia, at its centre, a city which in my own lifetime threw off communism in the 1990s but which has no longstanding tradition of democracy upon which to build a society of authentic freedom.

Sukkot will end at sunrise tomorrow but we are commanded to tarry another day, which we shall do. I have no idea what Yahweh's message will be. I only know He wished me to remind you that Sukkot rests on the foundation of what the six festivals before it stand for, and in particular, Chag haMatzah (the Feast of Unleavened Bread). Until we have worked out our salvation (Phil.2:12) at each of these seven levels, we will not be able to fully dip our buckets into all the wells of salvation to slake the deepest thirsts of our spirit. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for Shemini Atseret, the Last Great Day! Amen.