John #34 A Kernal Of Wheat

That you may Believe and have Life #34

John 12:20-35

Well, I hope you are having a good day celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

It has been a great day already being able to celebrate Resurrection through Worship and Baptism already this morning

We have been studying the Gospel of John now for 33 weeks and as we continue this study, we are today, NOT at the story of the crucifixion or resurrection, per se, but in Chapter 12 where Jesus speaks of his coming sacrifice and victory.

Remember with me, what we have recently studied, Lazarus, a friend of Jesus, became sick and died. He was buried. Jesus came and resurrected him from the dead. He was not caught off guard by his death. The Death of Lazarus served a purpose of Glorifying Jesus and drawing people to the power of Jesus to transform their lives.

Then Jesus comes to Jerusalem as the Passover draws near.

People wave palm branches

People lay their coats down in a sign of respect and worship

And so we continue working our way through the book of John today …

READ 12:20-35

So … Looking at the words of Jesus … Jesus … “The HOUR HAS COME” …

What hour? For a Kernel of Wheat to die

1. A Kernel of Wheat must Die to Feed the World

The irony of the crucifixion of Christ is that …

A. In Death Life Came

1. unless a kernel falls to the ground … aren’t you glad that Jesus came to this ground

a. we sing “he came from Heaven to earth”

b. John 1:1; 14 – the WORD BECAME FLESH and DWELT AMONG us

c. he became as we are … that we might have life

d. he emptied himself of Heaven, so that we might have an opportunity to achieve Heaven

2. it had to go INTO the ground – unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and DIES …

a. oh the things that our Lord submitted himself to because he loved us … have you ever thought about it?

b. a limitless God, who measures the universe with the span of his hand limited himself to

c. the one who created the oceans with a word, became himself 125 pounds of water surrounded by 40 pounds of tissue and hair

d. Jesus Christ became a carpenter by trade, and Tom, he got splinters, and I wonder if he thought “how dare you, I made you”

e. but Jesus Christ, God the Son, the Author of life, became subject to death. JESUS, died … THINK ABOUT THAT … Jesus DIED …

f. Now, contrary to the opinion of sum, God is NOT dead, but God the Son, DID die!

g. Paul taught us that it was through one man, Adam death entered … Because of Adam’s death, Jesus came and the giver of life became subject to death … death on the cross …

that through one man, Jesus we might have life … that he might be the firstborn of the dead …

How many seeds are in this apple?

How many apples are in this seed?

If you can tell me how many apples there are in this seed then I might be able to tell you how many can come to the life of God because of the death of Jesus Christ.

<<pick two things from this table>>

The only thing on this table that will sustain life is the bread and the seeds

Jesus said he who loves his life will lose it while the man who hates his life will keep it

He said a similar thing when he said “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul

B. Gain Lose … Lose Gain

1. what good is it if you get all you want

2. what good is it if you have control but lose in the end?

When I look at the cross of Christ … I realize that …

2. Jesus was Unafraid to Die

Jesus was not afraid of Pilate, he was not afraid of the High Priest, of Herod, of the People shouting “crucify him”!

Why?

A. His Death was His Purpose

V27 –

1. it was not what his humanness wanted … Father if this cup can pass from me …

2. now my heart is troubled …

3. what Christ did for us was not EASY, it was NOT simple, it was NOT painless, it was even TROUBLING … but Jesus said “what shall I say?” …

4. Can the President say … “I don’t want to make decisions”? Should the soldier say “I don’t want to fight”? Can the Firefighter say “I don’t like heat?” … No … we would say “it’s your job”

5. Jesus said NO … it is FOR this REASON that I CAME to this HOUR … Does the Football players stop on the one yard line and say … “that was hard work, good game, but I’m not taking it into the endzone?”

6. His Death was his Purpose – 1 John 3:16 – Jesus showed us the Father and the scripture says God is Love and that this is how we know what Love is, Jesus laid down his life for us …

7. “Father glorify your name” – what brings glory to the Father? Saved, Glorified, Forgiven, Saints! Bless the Lord – His Death was his Purpose

B. His Death Defeated Satan

1 john 3:8,9

… the reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. 9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot go on sinning, because he has been born of God.

Ro 16:20 the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you

C. His Death Defeated Hunger

Ps. 107:9 … he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things

John 6:33-35 “for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” 34 “sir” they said “from now on give us this bread” 35 then Jesus declared “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty

Oh Jesus’ death defeated hunger … Hunger has no power when we have food that satisfies

Bread has been provided … but you know the proverb

You can Lead a Horse to Water … but you can’t make him drink …

3. Some Refuse to Eat

Jesus has died …

The seed has gone into the ground

Great wheat has been provided

A. Bread Provided … Some Refuse to Eat

1. The Bread of Life has been offered … but you have to choose to eat

2. In the desert God provided daily manna to feed his people, but they still had to collect it

B. Blinded Eyes = Deadened Hearts

The phrase again … you can lead a horse to water … but you can’t make him drink … but you know what?

You can put SALT in the Horses Oats … why? To make the Horse Thirsty …

Jesus said that WE are the Salt of the Earth … hmmmm

You know part of my job as Pastor is to put Salt in your Oats

My Job is to make you thirsty

The Holy Spirit gives the Words

The Holy Spirit gives Power

God draws … I am just a vehicle that delivers the Salt from God into your Oats

I’m just a wagon carrying it out to your field …

But I must warn you as Jesus did …

Trust the Light while you HAVE the Light

Eat the Bread, while the Bread is Available

Drink from the well while the water is offered

Because if you not walk in the light

The Darkness will overtake you

I’m not scaring just being honest

The opportunity is still here … but the more you embrace darkness, the darker you will be …

The more you starve yourself, the more hunger will seem like being full until you have no hunger any more just emptiness

CONCLUSION

Last week, I took you to the Cross …

This week, Jesus has died, as a kernel of Wheat … but he didn’t stay dead

This was NOT a tragic figure who died for his beliefs

This is a Triumphant Lord who died for your SINS …

He victoriously ROSE from the Grave on the 3rd Day …

The Tomb is Empty

And the Empty Tomb is

A Line in the Sand

It is a call for a decision

The Empty Tomb is an Expression of Love from your Creator and Savior

The Empty Tomb is a Promise of Life

The Empty Tomb is a Line in the Sand

It is a choice of Life and Blessing or Death and Destruction …

Except a Kernel of Wheat Dies it remains a single seed

The man who loves his life will lose it …

Jesus died to offer you life

Will you die to self to receive it?

As I have prepared for this message I have been reading about seeds. I have heard stories but as I read them I found many reports from multiple sources of people who have found wheat seeds, flower seeds, date seeds, and others. They have been found hundreds, sometimes thousands of years old and when planted and cared for, surprisingly life came out of thousands of years of death.

National Geographic reported that a sapling germinated in 2005 from a 2,000-year-old date palm seed and thrived. according to Israeli researchers who are cultivating the historic plant.

"It's 80 centimeters [3 feet] high with nine leaves, and it looks great," said Sarah Sallon, director of the Hadassah Medical Organization's Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center (NMRC) in Jerusalem.

Sallon's program is dedicated to the study of complementary and alternative medicines. The center is also interested in conserving the heritage of Middle Eastern plants that have been used for thousands of years.

Sallon wants to see if the ancient tree, nicknamed Methuselah after the oldest person named in the Old Testament of the Bible, has any unique medicinal properties no longer found in today's date palm varieties.

"Dates were famous in antiquity for medicinal value," she said. "They were widely used for different kinds of diseases—cancers, TB [tuberculosis]—all kinds of problems."

She and her colleagues are currently comparing the structure of the sapling to modern date palms and examining DNA from one of the sapling's leaves. The team plans to publish preliminary results in a peer-reviewed journal early next year.

Ancient Seed

Several ancient date seeds were taken from an excavation at Masada, a historic mountainside fortress, in 1973. In A.D. 73 Jewish Zealots took their own lives at the fortress rather than surrender to the Romans at the end of a two-year siege.

Carbon dating indicates the seeds are about 2,000 years old.

Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer found the seeds and gave them to botanical archaeologist Mordechai Kislev at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

The seeds sat untouched in a drawer in Kislev's office until last November, when Sallon asked if she could have a few to pass on to desert agriculture expert Elaine Solowey.

"I said, Thank you. What do you want me to do?" Solowey recalls. Told to germinate them, she said, "You want me to do what?"

Solowey, director of the experimental orchard and the NMRC cultivation site at Kibbutz Ketura in Israel, focuses primarily on finding new crops that grow well in the arid Middle East climate.

By January Solowey had done enough research on revitalizing the seeds to get the project off the ground.

First she soaked the seeds in hot water to make them once again able to absorb liquids. Then she soaked them in a solution of nutrients followed by an enzymatic fertilizer made from seaweed.

"I assumed the food in the seed would be no good after all that time. How could it be?" she said.

Tu B'shevat, a Jewish holiday known as the New Year for Trees, fell this year on January 25. Solowey chose that day to plant the seeds in new potting soil, hook them up to a drip irrigation system, and leave them locked up.

She occasionally checked on the plants for a few months, and in March she noticed cracked soil in one of the pots—a sure sign of sprouts.

"I couldn't believe it," she said. "I did everything to avoid contamination, so it had to be that seed. And by March 18 I could see it was a date shoot."

The first leaves were almost white with gray lines. They looked like corduroy but felt totally flat, Solowey said. She thought the plant would never survive. But by June healthier-looking leaves were growing on the young sapling.

As time progresses, she said, the leaves continue to look even healthier.

The researchers are now repeating the experiment with another batch of the ancient seeds to see if their success was a "one in a million" stroke of luck or if their technique can more readily bring ancient seeds to life, Sallon said.

Slow Grow

Date palms are either male or female. The sex of the sapling is unknown, but the researchers are hoping for a female, which would bear fruit.

If a modern date with similar DNA is found, the researchers may be able to tell the sex of their sapling soon. Otherwise they'll have to wait about four years, when female dates usually begin to bear fruit.

In ancient times the Judean date palm was a staple source of food, shelter, and shade. References to it are made in the Bible, the Koran, and other ancient literature. Judean date palms were wiped out by about A.D. 500.

Today's date trees in Israel were imported during the 1950s and '60s from modern cultivated Iraqi, Moroccan, and Egyptian varieties, Sallon said.

Solowey, who also works for Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, said it already appears the ancient plant has some interesting differences from modern dates.

If Methuselah bears fruit, Sallon and her colleagues will study its medicinal properties in hopes of better understanding what made the Judean date so famous in antiquity.

If funds can be found, the researchers hope to apply any novel properties to modern medicines.

"Maybe there are genes there that have actually died out or become extinct [in modern dates], in which case [the sapling] has very exciting possibilities for date cultivation as well," Sallon said.

What is my point?

As long as it is still Today, there is time for you.

You might think you missed your chance

You might think that your heart is too hard …

You might know someone you’ve given up on

What did that botanist do in that story?

She soaked the seeds in hot water, fertilized them, planted them in new soil, and they sprouted

The Word of God is described as “washing as with the water of the Word”

A little soak in the Word

A little nurture by the Spirit

The drawing of the Father

Die to self

Go into the ground

Because Jesus Christ went into the ground

Because Jesus Christ came forth in life with Resurrection power …

There is still hope for you …

Let’s do a little dying

Let’s do a little living

Can I paraphrase from Jesus’ words

What good is it if you live your whole life and never die to self?

The one who dies to self will LIVE to God Forever

Attributed to Phillips Brooks (A.D. 1835–1893), American Episcopal minister

He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty. Then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family or owned a house. He never went to college. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but himself. He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. His friends ran away. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. When he was dead, he was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and today he is the central figure of the human race, and the leader of the column of progress. I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man on earth as has that One Solitary Life.[1]

One Solitary Seed

Because he went into the ground … so that you may live if you die self and enter HIM

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[1]Morgan, R. J. (2000). Nelson's complete book of stories, illustrations, and quotes (electronic ed.) (478). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.