I can guarantee this truth: A single grain of wheat doesn’t produce anything unless it is planted in the ground and dies. If it dies, it will produce a lot of grain. – John 12:24
If you want a yield, you have to yield.
Let me say that again.
If you want a yield (profit, harvest, return on investment, force required for an equivalent explosion), then you have to yield (surrender, capitulate, submit, admit defeat, give up the struggle, give in, hand over, relinquish possession, cease to argue, allow another the right to speak).
Whatever yield you’re seeking, there are fundamental principles and laws that you have to surrender to in order to get the harvest you desire.
Want to write a best selling novel, script a movie, get out of debt, get married, have a baby, run the Boston marathon etc? Then all you have to do is find those who have done what you hope to do, and yield to the same principles that they yielded to as well.
In John 12:24, Jesus uses the picture of a grain of wheat to illustrate the powerful dynamics of yielding.
The grain of wheat has to surrender to the principle that in order for it to grow…it has to die.
It has to die to its identity as a ‘single’ entity and allow itself to be subsumed by a marriage with the ground…understanding that the moment it is planted, it will begin a process of dying so that the great harvest it contains can live.
All the grain of wheat has to do is surrender itself to death, and by virtue of the nature it carries, a great harvest will be resurrected from it.
The grain of wheat is not responsible for producing the great harvest. All it has to focus on is surrendering to its burial in the ground…and the rest will just happen effortlessly.
Now we understand from Luke 8:11 that the seed is the Word of God. We also understand that Jesus is the Word of God. And so He is the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies…in order to rise as the firstborn of many brothers and sisters (Romans 8:29).
But the grain of wheat isn’t the only character in the story.
In the same way that the grain of wheat had to go on a journey from being a thought in the mind of God, released into the world through a spoken Word, encapsulated within a physical form called “grain”, and then allow for that physical form to be buried…the ground also has its own journey of transformation to go on.
It has to receive this grain of wheat within itself, protect it, nurture it, encircle it, expend nutrients on it at its own cost, allow itself to be dug into by the root system springing out of it…and accept that this strange “thing” that started out as a single grain of wheat is now a permanent fixture in the life of the ground.
That’s how you’re to receive the Word.
Because when you yield to the Word, then it produces the yield of “all these things coming to you as a matter of course” (Matthew 6:33, JB Phillips).
Remember:
If you want to yield, you have to yield.