If He Hands You an Acorn

01The question we started with

If we asked God for an oak tree and he handed us an acorn, would we feel like he gave us less than we asked for — or more? It depends entirely on how you see a seed. Whether an acorn is a smaller thing than an oak tree, or whether an acorn is an entire forest.

Michael’s hope on Sunday was simple: that we would see God as a seed grower. That he is in the business of seeds — and that he hides entire worlds inside a single one.

Think about your favorite fantasy world — Middle Earth, Narnia, Star Wars, Kung Fu Panda. The scenery, the depth of the characters, the wisdom and morality still shaking people alive today. Now remember there was a day that world did not exist. There was a moment when the first seed of an idea met its architect — Tolkien, Lewis, Lucas. The architect nurtured it, and that seed produced another seed, and that acorn dropped an acorn that became a tree, and before you knew it you had Legolas. One seed multiplied into a world.

God does the same thing, only literally. When he made everything, there was an idea. A single word. And it multiplied into the actual ground you are standing on. A seed birthed an entire world.

02The smallest of all the seeds

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

Matthew 13:31–32

What starts as something almost too small to see ends up as shelter and provision for many. The smallest seed becomes a tree — a structure in a community, in a space, in a person.

03Three things a seed still proves

Seeds are fascinating because they’re one of the places in ordinary life where the reality of God is still plainly visible.

His reality. What actually makes a seed grow? We can adjust the variables — the soil, the water, the light — but nobody pulls the shoot out of the seed. God is the only one who does that. So we find ourselves dependent on him to do the one thing only he can do.

His abundance. In a world that feels scarce, a seed is where abundance becomes obvious.

You can count the seeds in a single apple. You cannot count the apples in a single seed.

His commitment. Most of us can’t keep a plant alive in a terracotta pot. God grows trees out of rocks. His commitment to the things he’s growing is written all over creation.

04The prescription: bury it, then wait

Here’s the strange part. To get the results of a seed, God has bound us to one very specific method. The conversation goes something like this.

God, I have this seed. How do I get the goods? — All right, get this: you’re going to take it, and you’re going to get rid of it. Put it in the dirt and bury it where you can’t see it. It’s very important that it’s unseen; it doesn’t work well if you can see it. — So you just want me to believe? To have faith that if I get rid of this thing, something’s coming back? — Bingo. — That’s not good math. — Is your math producing an abundant world, or a scarce world? — Fine. I’ll do your math. And then what? — Then you wait. — How long? — We’ll see. — And just hope something shows up. — Yes. Put it in the ground in faith, and then wait in hope. — And there’s no other way? — If you can think of one. But no.

“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

That’s Jesus describing his own death — his plan for multiplying oaks of righteousness out of a handful of acorn-holders. I’m going to die, and I’m going to be in the ground a while. And to the disciples it wasn’t a tidy three days. It was a very long twelve hours. A very long twenty-four. A very long two days. We never know when the shoot will break the surface. We wait in hope.

Notice that everywhere we experience real abundance, it works exactly like this. Pregnancy: how long does it take to actually believe there’s a child in there? Even with the kicks and the sickness — convincing as those are — you still wonder whether it’s all going to work. Something is buried, and you wait for it to break the surface.

Relationships too. Ecclesiastes says two are better than one, that together people are worth more than their separate labor. So you invest yourself in a person in faith that they’ll invest back, and you hope that in the unseen place inside them they want the same thing you want. You can always cut it short — dig the seed up, leave — but then you’ll never find out whether you could have become more than you were alone.

05The shoot

Staring at the dirt doesn’t speed anything up. Sometimes patience is waiting, and sometimes patience is figuring out what to do in the meantime. So life moves on, and we get distracted by all the other seeds.

But God never got distracted. The whole time we were worried about everything else, the shoot was still working its way up. And then one day, almost in passing, you notice a little green thing. A shoot. A kid. And we celebrate.

Celebrate what, though? There’s no fruit yet. We’re celebrating progress — but underneath that we’re celebrating something deeper: the realization that God has been growing this thing. The evidence proves our hope was worthy and our faith was placed in someone faithful. And it exposes something a little humbling — that he may have been more committed to this seed than we were, because we got distracted and he never did.

Not a single seed goes void of God’s attention. He is aware of every seed he has planted in our lives, and aware of us as seeds planted in other people’s lives. He never loses track of one that’s under the surface.

06Our God has dirty hands

Once the shoot breaks through, though, the real work begins. God isn’t a punk, and seeds don’t grow in laboratories. He grows them in a competitive arena, where things compete for the life of the plant — plague, infection, animals that want to eat it, and us, who also want the fruit. And the competition is part of what makes the plant strong.

So God tends the plant in love — and he invites us to tend, in love, the very thing we prayed for. His hands are loving, but they are not soft. They’re rough, because they are in the soil doing the work. And we still feel loved by rough hands, precisely because we know why they’re rough.

Our God has dirty hands.

(An aside Michael offered with a grin, admitting it isn’t great exegesis: when Mary Magdalene turned around outside the empty tomb, she assumed she was looking at the gardener. He likes to think Jesus looks like a gardener in his resurrected state.)

His commitment was never just to get a shoot above the surface. It’s full maturity — fruit we can actually eat, and seeds we can put back into the ground.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”

John 15:1–2

“He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 1:6

07Eat it — and re-sow it

Two things can happen from here. Sometimes, in the competitive arena, sin we walk into ourselves spoils the fruit and it never reaches the maturity it was meant for. Most of us know that feeling — something going sour. But God is in the seed-growing business, so it’s okay: that tainted fruit can fall, land in the ground through repentance and confession and surrender, and there is still an entire forest waiting inside a seed somebody would have written off as bad. Where we see a loss, he sees an opportunity.

Or it goes well. We’re faithful, God gives a little extra juice, and we get fruit and eat it exactly as he intended. But we don’t keep it to ourselves — we share the testimony. Our faith grows, so we can tend more seeds, notice more seeds, sow faithfully and wait hopefully for God to grow more. We eat the juicy tree-of-life apple in public, and people get to see the goodness of God.

Seeds are where you genuinely get to have your cake and eat it too. Eat the apple and generously put it back into the world. The only real failure is eating the apple and keeping the seed out of the soil.

08He is making a forest

Michael and Lex have two big oak trees in their yard — the best shade in a Chattanooga backyard, and they were thrilled about them. What they didn’t know is how much God loves dropping acorns. There are oak trees coming up all over that yard now, remarkably hard to get out. And there are more about to show up that nobody can see yet.

God is in the business of making forests. He is not in the business of losing.

He has planted many seeds in us at once — as Michael’s mom says, he’s a multitasker — and he intends for us to eat that fruit. He wants us living an abundant life with him. And at the same time he is looking at two futures through the same seed: us eating what he grows, and the people around us eating from what we re-sow.

Which is why the kingdom coming is inevitable. Kill his people, and the kingdom expands. Don’t, and it expands. That’s what happens when you have oaks of righteousness and a whole lot of acorns. You thought you got them all, and they are just about to break the surface.

09What about the droughts?

“I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.”

1 Corinthians 3:6–7

People plant, people water, and God grows. He lets us participate in the watering — which also means that sometimes people don’t participate, and we go without water. So when we’re thirsty for something and ask God to water it, and he leaves us in a drought, is he being a bad father?

Or has he handed us an opportunity for our roots to go deeper? There is never a time when a tree is not getting stronger, as long as God’s attention is on it. When things are hard, the roots are reaching further down for strength. He hasn’t forgotten us. He’s being a better father than we would have been to ourselves.

10The response

We didn’t rush out. Michael asked us to simply lay our eyes on the seeds God is planting, and Lex played while we did.

If we asked for an oak tree and he handed us an acorn, he did not give us less than we asked for. He gave us a forest. Lord, let us lay our eyes on the seeds you are planting — and give us the faith to bury them and the hope to wait.

Sunday’s invitation