“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” John 12:24 (NKJV)
God characteristically approaches His relationship with us as a business endeavor. Doing business means providing necessary inputs with the expectation of profitable outputs. To God, our fruitfulness is the profit He anticipates whenever He sows His seed into us. His expectations are clear—that we bear fruit and that our fruit shall abide.
John 15:16: Any tree that does not bear fruit, He prunes in the hope of encouraging fruitfulness; if it fails, He uproots it to make way for a tree that will produce to His expectations. John 15:2: The very first thing He did to mankind after creating him was to bless him by saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” Genesis 1:28: Hence, God is in the business of fruitfulness, and He hasn’t changed since the beginning of time.
Just as He did at creation, God still expects us to be fruitful and to multiply the seed He has sown into us. That is the basis by which He will judge us.
God’s Provisions for Our Fruitfulness
Having established that God wants us to be fruitful, what exactly has He done to ensure our fruitfulness? Exodus 23:25-27 says it all: “So you shall serve the Lord your God, and He will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days. I will send My fear before you, cause confusion among all the people to whom you come, and make all your enemies turn their backs to you.”
The above represents the covenant commitments God has made to ensure and guarantee the fruitfulness of all who serve Him.
To begin, God understands that if you sow nothing, you will get nothing in return, as stated by the Law of Harvest. Therefore, what does He do to guarantee us a harvest? He provides us with the seed—bread and water.
2 Corinthians 9:10-11: “Now may He who supplies seed to the sower, and bread for food, supply and multiply the seed you have sown and increase the fruits of your righteousness, while you are enriched in everything for all liberality, which causes thanksgiving through us to God.”
Where there is seed and water, all that remains is for you to sow in expectation of a harvest. By sowing, you initiate the principle and process that ultimately produces a harvest.
Sowing Despite Lack
But what if you don’t have any seed to sow? What can you do when you have nothing?
My answer is to ask another question: who told you that you have no seed to sow? Granted, you may not have the seed you ‘want’ to or think you need to sow, but that simply means that in order to have what you want, you must sow what you need. So, what can you sow when the challenge is that you have nothing to sow?
It is the one seed that you can never lack because all you need to qualify to sow this seed is your life. If you have the gift of life, you are qualified to praise God as a seed.
The seed of praise is universal and common to all. Praise is the seed that produces the seed you want to sow. As you praise God in your lack, praise becomes the pre-seed that moves the hand of God to provide the real seed you desire, thus enabling you to sow and begin the cycle of virtue that is seed and harvest until your joy is full.
Psalm 50:23: “Whoever offers praise glorifies Me; and to him who orders his conduct aright I will show the salvation of God.”
Whenever you need God to show you the way to fruitfulness, and you lack the original seed to kickstart your harvest, determine to sow the one seed you can never lack—praise—as a prelude to obtaining the seed that God will provide to enable you to sow and receive your harvest.
God will always respond to your praise in His capacity as the Provider of seed to the sower and bread for the eater. After all, He is Jehovah Jireh!
God’s Commitment to Your Health
To guarantee your harvest, God said, “And I will take sickness away from the midst of you.” Sickness is the enemy of fruitfulness, and disease guarantees that you will either never be fruitful or as fruitful as you can be. Satan’s goal is the former, and God’s goal for your life is the latter. Satan wants to afflict you with sickness to preclude your fruitfulness; God wants to take sickness away from you to maximize your fruitfulness.
His promise and commitment to you are that if you serve Him, He will deal with all kinds of sicknesses that would seek to impact your fruitfulness, leaving the way clear for you to produce to the maximum.
Furthermore, in case you either do not know or have forgotten that the reason God placed you on this earth is to be fruitful and multiply, God reiterates His commitment that “No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land.” Repetition denotes emphasis. So, when God repeats Himself, He wants you to know that He means business. You shall not be barren, suffer miscarriage, or bury your young is His unflinching commitment to you that you shall be fruitful and your fruit shall abide and outlive you.
God’s Promise of Longevity
It is God’s commitment to you that your eyes shall not behold the corpses of your children, neither shall you bury them with the same hand with which you carried them. God will watch over your seed/fruit and guarantee His word to you by keeping your children perfectly safe in a dangerous world. His guarantee is that your children will bury you and not the other way round, after living a fruitful life—that is true fruitfulness.
God’s solemn commitment to you that “I will fulfill the number of your days” constitutes His personal guarantee that you shall not die before your time and that you will enjoy a good quality of life.
Psalm 92:12-15 captures this undertaking well by stating: “The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing, to declare that the Lord is upright; He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”
When God promises to fulfill the number of your days, it means that He intends for you to grow old with dignity and not to become a burden. Regardless of your age, you will always be an asset and never a liability to those around you. He will fill you with life to enable you to enjoy living and not merely endure it. That is the reward of serving God.
God’s Protection Against Enemies
Finally, God said, “I will send My fear before you, cause confusion among all the people to whom you come, and make all your enemies turn their backs to you.” This means that He recognizes the fact that life means war, for Job wrote, “Man who is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.” Job 14:1: You can ask yourself, who is making the trouble? It is none other than our adversary, the devil, whose evil mandate is to steal, kill, and destroy. John 10:10:
Just as God is determined to make us fruitful and give us a full life, Satan is also hell-bent on making us unfruitful. He will steal our bread, drain our water, afflict us with diseases, attack our children, and even try to kill them as a way of getting at us. He will try his very best to cut short our lives or lower our standard of living. The good news for us is that God is determined that Satan will not have his way in our lives. So, He fights him on our behalf and subjects Satan to His will. In Christ, we have all of these provisions and more, and when we serve Him, we qualify to enjoy His goodness in the land of the living.
Conclusion
Before the foundations of the world were ever laid, fruitfulness was on God’s mind. He created you to be fruitful and has given you all that pertains to life and godliness. 2 Peter 1:3: Hence, barrenness, in whatever shape or form, is not your portion. If the Lord is indeed your portion in the land of the living, Isaiah 38:11, it means that you are fruitfulness personified. In His name, go, be fruitful, and multiply, for the God of fruitfulness is with you.
Prayer
Father, in your name, I cancel every power of unfruitfulness operating against my life. As I praise you, provide me with seed to sow and ultimately bread to eat. Rebuke the devourer for my sake, so that my joy shall indeed be full. You made me to be fruitful. By your grace, I shall not disappoint. Amen.