Sermon #049 - Matthew 7:16 - GRAPES are God's amazing natural medicines...
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Welcome to today's sermon.
I'm Mike Adams of Abundance.Church.
That's the website.
You can check it out now to hear all the other sermons.
And the topic of today's sermon is, well, grapes or vines.
And grapes and vines, and by the way, in the Bible, when vines are mentioned, it usually means grapes.
But grapes and vines are mentioned possibly more than any other fruit in the Bible or even any other plant.
I mean, maybe figs, but grapes are mentioned a lot and they're mentioned in many, many different contexts.
Now, largely speaking, The Bible mentions the presence of grapes as symbols of abundance and symbols of God's grace so that when, for example, in the Old Testament, when the ancient Israelites are doing well and when they are obedient to God, then God grants them grapes and vines and figs and all kinds of food sources.
When they're doing horrible, sinful, wicked things, which of course happens again and again, then the grapes are taken away and the garlic and the cinnamon and no cinnamon for you!
You know?
It's like the God version of the Soup Nazi.
It's like, no soup for you!
No grapes for you if you're doing bad things!
But grapes are also mentioned metaphorically, which is about spiritual obedience and honesty and Diligence and things like that.
So in Matthew chapter 7 verse 16, this is one of the most famous lines that even many people who don't read the Bible may know this, this phrase, you will know them by their fruits.
You will know them by their fruits.
And from Matthew says, do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?
And then a similar verse is in Luke 6, verse 44.
It's essentially saying the same thing.
For every tree is known by its own fruit.
For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush.
Now, we're going to discuss today the nutritional powerhouse, which is the grape, especially red grapes.
And we'll talk about resveratrol and some of the modern science that talks about what's amazing in grapes.
This metaphor is also very important spiritually, so we'll discuss that too.
You know, overall, when the Bible says, you will know them by their fruits, it means you can judge people by their actions, by the results that they achieve.
Not by their talk, but by what they actually produce.
So, in Matthew, when the question is, do men gather grapes from thorn bushes?
The answer is no.
Grapes don't come from thorn bushes, and figs don't come from thistles.
If you're going to produce grapes or figs or something that's valuable in life, you're going to have to care for an orchard.
You're going to have to nurture something.
You're going to have to have Discipline and diligence and put in effort.
You're going to have to sow the seeds that ultimately create the fruit that you can later harvest.
And this requires maturity, it requires planning, it requires patience, it requires humility.
And all of these properties that God talks about, or Christ talks about in the New Testament, or his apostles talk about, these are properties of good people.
To be able to produce fruit.
And remember this was long before the days of tractors and diesel engines and mechanized agriculture.
To produce fruit.
took a level of maturity and dedication, and it said something about the farmers that produced it.
And I would argue even today that the small farmer, not just in America, but anywhere in the world, the small farmer in China or Canada or Germany or Russia or anywhere, or India, you know, the small farmer in South America, they tend to be good people.
Why?
Because the process of growing food is a humbling process, and it's hard to be an arrogant person if you're growing food.
You know, people can become bankers and they can think that they're billionaires and we're so rich, you know, and they have all these paper profits and numbers on the screens.
Look at all these numbers.
Well, my numbers are bigger than your numbers.
Well, my screen is bigger than your screen.
You know, and this is the world of arrogance and pretentiousness, pompousness.
That's finance.
That's Wall Street.
You get a lot of arrogant, crazy people in that realm.
But in farming, you get solid people.
Mostly.
You get people who are close to the earth, and that's why God talks about grapes and vines as representing blessings and good things for humanity.
So, if we go to our favorite reference book, Herbs of the Bible, by Dr. James A. Duke, He cites John chapter 15, I am the true vine and my father is the gardener.
He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit.
While every branch that does not bear fruit, he trims clean so that it will be even more fruitful.
So this is talking about the principle of spiritual pruning, which also is very powerful.
That is to let go of those things that are not working.
And to make room for the things that do work in your life, and it's very powerful information here, because this has to do with every area of your life, including your relationships.
If you're in a relationship that's just not working, and it might be a family member, a friend, it might be a significant other, a partner, I don't know.
Relationships that do not work can sap your energy horribly, and sometimes you need to change your friends, you know?
And that happened a lot during COVID, I know.
A lot of friendships broke apart over the issue of vaccines and masks, and sometimes that's necessary.
Because who wants to be hanging around with a bunch of people that are jabbing themselves with transhumanism bioweapons all day long anyway, right?
I don't want to be around those friends.
They'll shed all over you.
But anyway, in your life, maybe it's in your business, do you need to prune something in your business?
Is there waste?
Or in your job, or your career, or your hobby, is there waste?
Is there something that's not working?
You might need to prune it.
And so that's a great metaphor.
From the gospel according to John.
So, the possible benefits of grapes, as mentioned by Dr. Duke, includes arthritis, heart disease, herpes, hypertension, rheumatism, and tuberculosis.
And grape vines, he writes, are the first cultivated plant mentioned in Genesis.
Did you know that?
The very first plant.
The vine became the symbol for Israel, according to the book of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea.
In the New Testament, Jesus declared, I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener.
And that's the verse we were just reading.
In the first book of Kings and Micah, the vine represented peace and prosperity.
When Noah stepped off the ark, he planted a vineyard.
He also embarrassed himself by getting quite drunk from the fruit of that vine.
Noah could have taken a little advice that the Talmud offers women in dealing with this potent sexual stimulant.
And here it is from the Talmud.
One cup of wine is becoming to a woman.
Two cups are degrading.
And if she has three, she solicits publicly.
And if she has four, she solicits even an ass in the streets and cares not.
Yeah, that should be written on every bar near a college campus, actually.
And not as an achievement chart, but rather a warning.
Now, if we look at the nutrients that grapes contain, and by the way, my overall approach on this when I'm talking about foods of the Bible or any kind of superfood or herb, but especially fruits, is I'm not going to focus so much on the minerals and the vitamins that they contain.
That's easy to look up and different fruits and nuts and herbs, they all contain You know, different assortments of vitamins and minerals, and you're going to find calcium and magnesium in all plants, otherwise they would not grow.
You're going to find trace amounts of zinc or copper or what have you.
In grapes, yeah, you're going to have various vitamins, you're going to have niacin, which is really important, and folates and things like that.
But what is especially interesting to me are the nutraceuticals.
These are the highly medicinal molecules that are synthesized by plants in accordance with God's creative vision for God's medicine that we cover here.
And these include various antioxidants, carotenoids, polyphenols, and so on.
And in grapes, in grapes is one of the most potent nutrients or nutraceuticals that is found in any plant anywhere on this planet and it's called resveratrol.
This is a polyphenol and resveratrol is so potent at preventing cardiovascular disease and enhancing cardio health that it has been studied by numerous drug companies who are trying to turn it into a drug.
If it were a drug, like an FDA approved prescription drug, Have no illusions that it would be front page news, the biggest breakthrough to prevent heart disease in history.
Everybody should be on this drug.
You know, it's kind of the way they used to talk about statin drugs, which are toxic, by the way.
But when statins first hit the scene with the drug companies paying all this money to the media, So the media giants ran all these articles, those statins are going to save the world, everybody should take statins, and there were even doctors proposing that statin drugs should be dripped into the water supply to make everybody drink them.
You know, without a diagnosis, without a prescription, without notice, without consent, anything.
That's how crazy the shadow medical system really is.
They want to dose everybody with everything, including fluoride, by the way, which they do put in the water.
But since resveratrol cannot be patented because it's a natural molecule from Mother Nature and God, you will hear no media stories touting the benefits of resveratrol.
But it has been at the top of my list of potent nutrients for many, many years.
And if I'm just going through, I just search for the word resveratrol at naturalnews.com.
And here are just some of the headlines.
Resveratrol in red wine shown to lower blood pressure in animal subjects.
Resveratrol can help treat alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Resveratrol and exercise found to reduce risk of bone fractures in elderly patients with Alzheimer's.
Resveratrol and exercise found to attenuate fracture risk in mice.
Resveratrol improves the efficacy of paclitaxel in treating liver cancer.
Resveratrol treatments can slow lung disease.
Resveratrol is good for your brain.
It improves blood vessel health.
Resveratrol compound in grapes found to kill cancer stem cells.
Wow.
Resveratrol, a compound found in grapes, can protect against cognitive decline.
Study resveratrol from Japanese knotweed extract.
That's actually where most of the modern day supplements get their resveratrol.
It's from Japanese knotweed.
May help reduce cancer risk linked to processed meat or sodium nitrite.
And it goes on.
Resveratrol, the miracle nutrient to prevent heart disease.
Resveratrol lowers breast cancer risk by blocking estrogen growth factor.
It just goes on and on.
And if you go on to PubMed, In fact, let me do this.
If you search PubMed for resveratrol, here's one that comes up in, let's see, Health Benefits of Resveratrol Evidence from Clinical Studies.
This was published in 2019.
Here it is.
The efficacy, safety, and pharmacokinetics of resveratrol have been documented in over 244 clinical trials, with an additional 27 clinical trials ongoing.
Resveratrol is reported to potentially improve the therapeutic outcome in patients suffering from diabetes mellitus, obesity, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, multiple myeloma, Metabolic syndrome, hypertension, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, cardiovascular diseases, kidney diseases, inflammatory diseases, and rhinopharyngitis.
Yeah, there's one.
So it goes on and it talks about the efficacy of resveratrol, but you get the idea.
This may be the closest to a natural cure-all of any nutrient ever found in the world.
Again, if it were a prescription drug, it would be called a miracle molecule.
I've taken resveratrol every day for maybe 25 years, something like that.
Of course, I get it from Japanese knotweed, but I also like to eat fresh grapes, and you get resveratrol from grapes.
But think about the fact that this resveratrol existed in the grapes in the days of the Old Testament.
So as the people there, if you're wondering why didn't they get skin cancer even though they had no sunscreen lotions, right?
Why is that?
Well, they had resveratrol.
You know, they had powerful plants.
They were eating God's medicine and thus they didn't need to take a trip down to the CVS pharmacy and buy some toxic fragrance-filled lotion garbage product and slather it on their children.
They were eating natural foods that solve that problem for them.
And by the way, grape plants produce more resveratrol in the presence of natural molds or fungi.
So when a grape plant is attacked by fungal spores, it will naturally produce its own defenses, which include resveratrol.
And thus, in modern day agriculture, when grape vines are sprayed with fungicides, that kills the fungal spores than the grape plant when it's ultimately harvested, either the leaves or the grape fruit or the skins or the seeds, whatever, it tends to have a lot less resveratrol than what it would have had a couple thousand years ago before antifungal sprays.
So you see how today's pesticides and herbicides and fungicides, these make our food weaker and they actually steal nutrition out of our food.
The strongest plants are the plants that survive being attacked by fungi or bacteria, or in some cases other plants.
And that's why those plants produce powerful molecules that then become nutraceuticals, medicine for us.
And this is one of the reasons why permaculture or organic farming practices produce food that is so much healthier, because in organic agriculture, You know, you're not spraying all these synthetic pesticides and chemicals on the plants.
You're letting the plants generate their own defenses as much as possible.
They allow the plants to build their own defenses as much as possible.
Now, when I just mentioned sunscreen, in ancient times, obviously, they did not have sunscreen.
So why didn't they all die from skin cancer?
Well, like I said, it's the nutrients.
But here's a study that even mentions that.
There's a study called Recent Advances in Uses of Grape Flavonoids as Nutraceuticals.
This is published in the journal Nutrients in January of 2014.
And here it says in the introduction, it says, flavonoids, sometimes pronounced flavonoids, represent a widespread and common group of natural polyphenols produced by the phenylpropanoid pathway.
They confer UV protection.
See?
That's what I'm talking about.
UV protection.
This is like a built-in nutritional sunscreen.
They confer UV protection, determine flower coloration, attract pollinators, and act as tissue protectors in case of pathogen attack or oxidative damage.
You see, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
that the plants build their own molecules to protect themselves either from sunlight or, you know, excessive sunlight, UV light, or against attacking insects or attacking fungi and so on.
And yet, you know, we live in a world today where the FDA and the food regulators and the USDA, they, they think the only safe food is sterilized food.
Everything has to be dead, kill it, bomb it with, with, with chemicals and synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides.
And then pasteurize it and homogenize it and microwave it and radiate it.
That's good for you.
Now it's safe.
They've got it all backwards.
That's why I call it shadow food.
They've got it all backwards.
All they're doing is creating dead food and dead food leads to dead people.
If you keep eating dead food, you're going to be a dead person.
So God's food is living.
Where the food is actively defending itself against these things, the food is responding to its environment as it's growing, and it is generating or synthesizing the molecules that it needs to survive.
And then when you consume those molecules, they help you survive.
And by the way, in this study here, it says flavonoids In red wine, which come from red grapes, of course, are the most feasible phytochemicals responsible for the phenomenon of the so-called French paradox, which explains why French people who drink a lot of red wine are so healthy, even though they consume a lot of saturated fats.
I got news for you, folks.
There's nothing wrong with saturated fat.
You've been lied to by the entire food industry that wants you to eat their seed oils, which are toxic.
Seed oils are bad for you.
Saturated fats from butter and eggs and real beef, real meat, it's not bad for you.
It's actually critical for human health and survival.
But since the medical industry can't figure out, how can these French people eat all this saturated fat and still be healthy?
So they say, well, it must be the red wine.
It must be the resveratrol.
And they call that the French paradox.
But even in this study, it says, flavonoids have cardioprotective, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer, and antimicrobial properties, and are one of the most potent nutraceuticals in food and phytopharmaceutical products.
See, this is widely recognized in the medical literature.
And this article even talks about wine, which is, of course, fermented grape juice, and the fermentation alters some of the chemicals and makes some of them more bioavailable, including the resveratrol.
So it says here that the earliest evidence for wine production was found in the Middle East in well-preserved ancient jars dated as old as 5400 BC.
5,400 BC.
Yeah, we're talking 7,000 plus years ago, people were making wine and getting tipsy.
Okay?
But as a result, they were drinking superfoods.
Think about it.
7,000 years ago, ancient people were drinking superfood and fast forward to today and most of the population has forgotten.
what superfood is, and instead they're eating junk fast food and processed garbage, and they're calling that food.
See, humanity has not really progressed, has it?
Not in terms of food.
We went from real food 7,000 years ago to shadow food today.
Except, of course, for those of you who know what real food is, which is God's food, and perhaps that's why you're listening to this, the beauty of living in our modern world is that you can access God's food anytime you want, it's just that most people have no knowledge of God's food and so they're still eating, they're eating shadow food.
The study says the multitude of ancient and historical images of vines and grapes found as decorative elements on ancient coins, temples, ritual potteries, and mosaic sculptures clearly demonstrated the importance of grape and its products in ancient societies across the globe.
The grape contains over 500 compounds, including 160 esters.
Yeah, not the book of ester, but ester molecules, which we'll talk about.
Grapes also contain phenolics, flavonoids, anthocyanins, which are incredibly powerful, still beans, proanthocyanidins, and vitamin E, among other things.
Now, what's amazing to me is that on my ranch in Central Texas, the Native American grapes called muscadine or muscadinia rotundifolia is the Latin version.
These grow wild and they are acidic, let me tell you.
But they grow wild, like crazy, all over the place.
And I pluck them fresh off the vine and chew them with their seeds.
They contain Very high gallic acid content.
Up to 10 times higher gallic acid than regular grapes.
And gallic acid, according to the study here, has been shown to possess various therapeutic properties, including antioxidant properties, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, and anti-viral activities.
So yes, you can grow your own anti-cancer medicine.
It's been happening for over 7,000 years.
Now, drinking just grape juice does not give you hardly any of these nutrients.
But drinking grape wine, now, that frees up through fermentation.
It makes those nutrients highly bioavailable.
For example, up to 70% of the nutrients in grapes can be available in in the pomace that makes the wine, whereas grape juice is mostly just sugar, you know, fruit sugar.
So don't think of this as a reason to drink grape juice, you know, processed, pasteurized grape juice.
I don't recommend that at all.
But to put fresh grapes in your smoothies and blend them in and get the full grape, yeah, or to ferment those grapes and to have red wine as a nutritional supplement Actually makes a lot of sense.
Now, personally, I don't drink wine.
I don't drink alcohol.
I wouldn't know which wine is a $5 bottle versus a $5,000 bottle.
I have no idea.
So to me, I just want the nutrition, however I get it.
And so I just take resveratrol supplements, and then I eat wild foods, wild grapes seasonally whenever I can, and I don't worry about it.
But for those of you who want an excuse to drink red wine, well, Here it is.
You're going to get outstanding nutrition.
And by the way, in the COVID years, we've all heard about something called myocarditis, right?
This is essentially inflammation of the heart.
The presence of the spike protein from the satanic jabs, this causes extensive damage in the body that has to be detoxed and repaired.
So here's a study, also from Nutrients, the journal, in 2019.
Here's the title.
Red wine grape pomace, and the pomace is the bulk material left over from the grape matter that's used, that's fermented to make red wine.
But red wine grape pomace attenuates atherosclerosis and myocardial damage.
So atherosclerosis is the buildup and the hardening of the arteries with plaque.
Inside the arteries, the arteries get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And myocardial damage is, you know, heart damage, inflammation of the heart that we've talked about.
And the study talks about how this red wine grape pomace increases survival, improved plasma antioxidant activity, and it even talks about how Essentially grapes, but in the form of fermented red wine materials, might be used to replace statin drugs in many people, because statin drugs are so toxic and cause so many horrible side effects.
Whereas the resveratrol and the other polyphenols, there are natural antioxidants, catechins, epicatechins, proanthocyanidins, and so on.
These are incredibly potent and cardioprotective.
So I want you to think about grapes as being the heart fruit.
The heart fruit.
Improving cardiovascular health, resiliency, preventing buildup in the arteries, boosting your protection against oxidative stress, all of these things, supporting the heart, resveratrol and grapes, and the paranthocyanidins that are found in grapes and grape seeds, also help in this manner.
Now, when you're shopping for grapes, by the way, don't buy seedless grapes.
Why?
Because of course, you knew I was going to say this, many of the most potent nutrients are found in the grape seeds.
So, shadow food, think about it, shadow food is food that lacks the nutrition of God's food.
Seedless grapes are shadow foods.
They've taken the seeds out.
What's in the seeds?
Proanthocyanidins.
What's in the skin?
Resveratrol.
The grape juice doesn't use the seeds or the skin.
Grape juice, like I said earlier, is just mostly sugars.
But if you want the full benefits of the grape, as God intended, as the first fruit in Genesis, you need to eat red grapes with seeds and chew the seeds and chew the skin.
And if you want the best effects, then ferment them.
And make red wine and consume the wine moderately.
Now, the issue of alcohol, of course, comes up in any kind of teaching from Scripture.
My view on the matter is very simple.
Drink responsibly.
But red wine is, if I were to drink any alcohol at all, but again, I don't, it's not something that I do or would enjoy doing, but if I were to, I would drink red wine.
For the reasons we've talked about here.
So get yourself some good quality red wine and enjoy it responsibly.
Don't go to what it said, what, four drinks for a woman?
She solicits even an ass in the streets.
Don't go there!
Don't go there!
Because there are plenty of asses in the streets.
As you know, especially hanging outside of a bar or a drinking establishment.
So don't overdo it.
Drink responsibly and enjoy the health benefits.
Now back to the book by Dr. James Duke.
Resveratrol, a stress metabolite present in grape leaves and grape skins, see just what I said, has been shown to inhibit the formation of fatty deposits in the livers of rats.
It's also been studied in humans, of course.
Resveratrol, along with the antifungal veniferins, may work together to protect the heart and the cardiovascular system.
French researchers report that red wine significantly lowered LDL cholesterol and raised the beneficial HDL cholesterol, possibly cleansing the arteries of fatty deposits.
Among 30 wines tested, yes in the name of science they sat there and drank wine, Red Bordeaux was highest and White Bordeaux was among the lowest in resveratrol.
Red wine's elagic acid may help prevent cancer.
Resveratrol is reported to interfere with cancer, not at one phase, but at all three developmental phases.
Part of this anti-cancer activity is attributed to cyclooxygenase inhibition by resveratrol.
That's interesting.
Cyclooxygenase inhibitors have been praised also for their anti-arthritic activity.
And it is the grape leaves that are much richer in this anti-arthritic, anti-cancer, and anti-cardiac compound.
The grape leaves, yes.
These properties recommend the classical Middle Eastern stuffed grape leaves, heavily spiced with pepper and turmeric, and containing rice, one of the resveratrol-rich cereals.
So in terms of folklore, it says that raisins stimulate the appetite and relieve constipation.
You know, dried grapes, right?
Recent headlines in the United States proclaim that red wine shows some antiviral activity against herpes.
The sap of young vine branches has been used as a remedy for skin disease.
Okay.
Grape vines are famous among survivalists for providing drinking water.
You cut the vine and drink the water and then it heals your heart too.
The Lebanese have a grape cure for fever, liver disorders, nervousness, smallpox, and tuberculosis.
They feed small, young grape leaves and tendrils to infants to prevent scurvy and iron deficiency.
They grind the grape seeds and roots for an anemia treatment.
The expressed grape leaf juice is applied to various skin conditions.
And wine, or its distillate, is used by the Lebanese for cramps, stomach aches, toothaches, or pretty much any pain.
No matter what ails you, drink some wine.
Okay.
Grape seeds contain an edible oil also used in soaps and as a substitute for linseed or flax oil.
That's very interesting.
So the bottom line in all this, folks, is grapes are, well, when consumed in these forms that we've talked about here, fermented in particular, but also the whole grape.
I mean, the grape leaves have some of the highest levels of resveratrol.
The grape seeds are really important and the grape skins are important.
So if you're consuming the whole grape, Then you're getting amazing nutrition.
You're getting God's medicine and God's food all together.
And it's a super delicious way to get great nutrition into your body.
I would just urge you only eat organic grapes.
Why?
Because, of course, the toxic herbicides and pesticides are shadow molecules, satanic molecules, molecules of death and destruction.
And you don't want to take God's amazing food, grapes, and then spray them with Satan's molecules.
It doesn't work.
And, you know, grapes and strawberries are two of the most heavily sprayed crops in terms of pesticides.
And many of them are even, there are herbicides used nearby.
Such as glyphosate can end up in grapes, even if the plants themselves are not sprayed, but often the weeds nearby are sprayed and then glyphosate can end up in the grape plant.
And in the grapefruit or the grape seeds itself.
So, you know, buy organic or grow your own.
That's my advice.
Now, I understand that growing grapes is no small feat.
It takes a lot of care.
And that's sort of what God is talking about when he says, you'll know them by their fruits.
Because somebody who can go through all those steps and all the patience of growing grapes and producing the grape crop is probably quite a remarkable person.
So if that's something that you can do, go for it.
and grow red grapes with seeds in them.
And hopefully you'll find people who can recognize the value of that and who don't want seedless grapes.
People who want seedless grapes, they just want shadow sweet food.
They want candy in the shape of a grape.
I mean, think about the green grapes without seeds.
Do they contain any resveratrol?
No, not really.
They almost don't count as grapes.
That's why I call them shadow food or shadow fruits.
You gotta have the red grapes with the seeds and hopefully some of the grape leaves as well.
That's God's food.
That's what grapes, that's what it's supposed to mean.
The green seedless grapes that are sprayed with toxic pesticides, you might as well not eat those at all.
That's not real food.
That's not good nutrition.
Certainly not God's food.
So it comes back to exercising discernment.
Have good discernment.
When we talk about figs or grapes or pomegranates or whatever the case may be, always go for the God version, not the shadow version.
And if you want to learn about more foods and more scripture out of the Bible, of course, feel free to check out my other sermons at abundance.church.
I'm posting 100 sermons in 100 days, and I think this one is number 49 or close to that.
So we're about halfway there, about 50 more to go.
And you will learn something in every sermon, and I think you'll be inspired.
I think you'll discover things that you did not know, things that can help you dramatically in your own life.
So take advantage of that, and thank you for joining me today.
God bless you, and eat these foods to get closer to God, to purify your blood, cleanse your body, cleanse your spirit by purifying your blood.
And this will help bring you closer to God.
Literally, it's stated in the Bible.
We've talked about the various verses in Leviticus and Ephesians 6, the armor of God, and the 23rd Psalm and so on.