Unless the Seed Falls
John 12:24 It is a fact that a grain of wheat must fall to the ground and die before it can grow and produce much more wheat. If it never dies, it will never be more than a single seed.
When I mention the word “sacrifice” – not someone else doing the sacrificing, but you doing the sacrificing for someone else – how does it make you feel? Is it something you warm to naturally, or not?
In a world dominated by the notion of success – where our natural desire is to make every post a winner, onward, upward, faster, better, richer – the idea of sacrificing our lives for someone or something … well, it’s becoming less and less attractive by the minute.
I look at the young men and women who fought for my country way back in WWI and compare them with the way we’ve brought up the young folk of today. The one thing that seems to be missing is the powerful idea that sacrifice is a virtuous thing.
And yet, in a very real sense there’s nothing new in any of that. Let’s wind the clock back two thousand years or so, to the time when Jesus said this:
John 12:24 It is a fact that a grain of wheat must fall to the ground and die before it can grow and produce much more wheat. If it never dies, it will never be more than a single seed.
A powerful picture indeed, this idea of dying in order to multiply. When that seed goes brown and in effect dies, when it falls to the ground, when it’s given up its old life there on the wheat stalk and it’s been buried in the dirt, all of a sudden it starts to spring forth a new life; a life of multiplication, a life where this single seed produces a hundred more – something that it could never have done in its old life.
In order to multiply, first we have to die to the old self.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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