“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,” taught Jesus, “it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)

Few ideas are as provocative and widely applicable as this one. To live in a fallen world is to live with the reality that all of our time, resources, abilities, health, and vigor are limited resources constantly dropping like grains of sand in an hourglass. There will come a point for each of us when those resources are fully spent, and we will pass from this life to the life to come. Everything we do, then, is a calculation for how we want to use these limited resources. Jesus calls us to use them in a way that will leave life behind. Our dying can be fruitful.

More than fruitful, in fact. As you recall, this teaching of Jesus was motivated by His announcement that the hour had come for His glorification. The “hour” fast approaching was the hour of His suffering at the hands of wicked men, His crushing under the wrath of the Father, and His death and resurrection. Glory came from suffering. Glory came from dying.

The insight that I think we can miss, however, is that glory not only resulted from these things, but was produced by them. Glory was not merely the medal of recognition awarded at the end of Jesus’ hour, but it was in fact part of the fruit forged in His dying.

Paul picks up this theme in 2 Corinthians 4:6-18. He reminds the Corinthians of the incredible glory of the Gospel of Jesus that we have the great honor of proclaiming to others (6-7). He then describes the real-world dying that accompanies this honor: affliction, perplexity, persecution, downfalls. In short, we are, “constantly being delivered over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested.” It is a fruitful dying.

There’s more. Listen to the encouragement that Paul leaves us with in verses 16-18:

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.

That really jumped out to me. Our suffering, our dying, is producing an eternal weight of glory. It is not earning it, it is producing it.

We can all take encouragement from this. Whatever form of dying we find ourselves in as the children of God, there is an invisible process taking place producing, by the grace of God, the raw ore of glory. We may not see its splendor and be able to appreciate what God has accomplished in our lives until we reach heaven, but we can know it is there and slowly accumulating as we labor and give ourselves for those things which are not seen. In the end, dying is temporary, and glory is eternal.

Praise be to God who works miracles of fruitfulness and causes eternal glory to come from such unworthy vessels as we are. Ultimately, all the glory – even that produced in our lives – will be His.