We shared this video in tandem with these thoughts on seeds and resurrection at Round Rock this morning. Thought I’d share:

God’s chosen one, Jacob, grandson of Abraham, is starving. Because of a severe famine in his land, he and his sons have little hope of survival. He calls his boys, now men, and tells them to go to Egypt. He’s heard things are better there. The boys go twice and buy supplies. The third time, arriving in Egypt, the brothers confess that they have no money and nothing to exchange. They plead with the Egyptian officials, “Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Buy us and our land in exchange for food,… Give us seed so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.”

Give us seed so that we may live and not die.

 During His ministry, Jesus described the kingdom of God as a seed. He said faith was a seed, too. Paul says Jesus is the seed of Abraham.

The seed is living hope of something better to come. 

But it’s no good until you bury it.

Hold a seed in your hand and it seems little different from a small pebble—hard, cold, lifeless. Even shrouded in soil, under a blanket of darkness, life seems distant. Because the seed— motionless, quiet—looks dead.

But it’s not.

Down, deep in the dirt. In the black, black soil something grows. What once was alive in the plant is alive again in the seed—the life inside pushing, pushing, pushing through the hard, cold tomb of the seed coat.

Finally, the plant, an embryo, emerges, a single arm of green stretching into the dark. Like a worm it burrows its way through the soil, on a mission, drawn to something above. In just a few short days, the once-seed, emerges from the earth—green, risen, alive.

 I can’t help but think of the awakening seed when I think of Jesus in the tomb, of Him somehow sloughing off the old and, after three days in darkness, emerging into light.

 And I think of myself, too, because resurrection isn’t just for Jesus.

 Paul writes, “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed… So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable;  it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.’ Paul says a few verses later, that if Christ was raised, we will be too.

As you celebrate easter today  meditate on those three days in the tomb. But not from the above ground perspective. Watch what happened in the dark. See life take over and break through.

Know that Christ died to live.

And know that He died so you might live. So that you, too might wiggle free of death, out of the darkness and into new life.