Seeds

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1 Corinthians 15:35-50 (NIV)

There is someone that is near and dear to me that is approaching her final days in her mortality. When I visited with her recently, I was reading 1 Corinthians and when I got to the above passage, the words it spoke rang out to me so clearly.

This body is only a dying shell, the hull for something the Lord is doing inside of us while we are yet here. It is the outer chrysalis that the caterpillar is being transformed into something different, away from fleshy eyes, that can only be viewed with “the eyes of the spirit” (those who have eyes to see). I often forget that, and place so much importance on the things that are dust and vanishing away.

Verse 37: When you sow (a seed) you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as He has determined, and to each kind of seed He gives its own body.

Just like a butterfly looks nothing like the caterpillar that was before that miraculous transformation, so we too will be nothing like our former selves, which will have died literally and completely. The resurrection body will be a complete redo, not just a makeover. The whole thing will be torn down, and something new will be made with all new materials. The Spirit seed that was planted inside this dying hull will be what causes the transformation.

Verse 58: Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

I remember being very young, looking at a Dutch magazine. There were 9 pictures (very nicely done artworks) of a little girl planting a seed into a terracotta pot filled with rich black earth in the first picture. The next 7 pictures show the child intently gazing at the pot for any sign of growth, and with each succeeding picture she seems to grow more frustrated and impatient, until in the final picture she has dug up the seed, dirt is all over the counter, and the young lady is holding the seed between her dirty thumb and forefinger, examining it for any sign of growth.

That's me.

I am so impatient in regards to my own and other people's spiritual condition, and have an unnecessary impulse to look for any sign of growth or change. God is doing something, He promised He would. It is something that defies our earthly understanding and impulses. It is miraculous and wonderful. It is something I want to see right now, but “digging up the seed” only retards the process. I have to trust, and rest, and rely on Jesus, and know that He will keep all of His promises IN HIS TIME, and all my trying to see how and why and when only causes me to take my gaze off of the WHO.

 Jesus.

He is sufficient, and the rest He has promised to already have taken care of, and will be revealed in His time.

(The verses in this post have all been from the NIV version. It isn't my favorite version, but it is the version of my study Bible that I got when I worked at a Bible bookstore.... and I'll emphasize again that although it isn't my favorite version, this passage seems to come alive for me much more in the NIV than the KJV does.)