A Necessary Death – Part 1

“Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24

Death. That’s not a subject we like thinking about. In fact, much of our culture is designed to avoid the topic as much as possible. We use terms like “passed away” or “departed” to cushion the blow. Some people are so averse to the idea of death that they trivialize it by referring to it as “kicking the bucket.” Whatever the case may be, we know that death is coming regardless of how we describe it.

When we do think of death, we usually limit it to the death of our physical body. But there’s another death that’s just as real. It’s a death that takes place in the soul. It’s a necessary death that must happen if we are to experience the life God has for us. At first glance that may sound a bit odd. You have to die in order to live. But that is the way of the Kingdom.

Jesus talked about this in John 12:24. There He said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This wasn’t a command. Rather it’s a statement of what is. As any gardener knows, a seed must be planted in the ground and yield its present form in order for a plant to find life. If the seed is retained as a seed, it remains but a seed. It has no life.

Spiritually, it is the same. In order to experience the fullness of eternal life, which is designed to begin in the here and now, there must first be a death – a death of self. Jesus talked about this in the next verse. “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.” The word hate is obviously strong and a bit provocative. But it’s an apt description of the attitude we need to have.

Jesus isn’t suggesting that we need to hate ourselves. Rather we are to hate our lives “in this world.” This phrase refers to the life that is dominated by our old, fallen spiritual nature which is what the late Robert Mulholland called our false self. We must come to hate this life, this false self, in order for it to be put to death in us. Only then do we begin to experience the greatest dimensions of the life Jesus has for us.

One of our problems is that we don’t often see our false self as keeping us from life. We think that as long as we’ve made a profession of faith in Christ, we can continue to love our life in this world (our false self) and experience the fullness of eternal life at the same time. But it doesn’t work that way.

Furthermore, sometimes we’re more interested in managing our false self than we are in putting it to death. We believe that as long as we keep our fallen nature from being too obvious to others, we’re fine. But we’re not fine, certainly not inwardly. For that matter we’re not fine outwardly either in ways that we sometimes don’t even realize.

So Jesus is correct when He tells us that there is a necessary death that must take place. For it is this death that opens the way to life.