No one likes limitations. We all want something more, something different, something better, even if God says no.
And sometimes He does.
Through factual, hard reality.
Through prohibitions of Scripture.
Through moral and ethical boundaries.
Through decisions we’ve made that have irreversible trajectories.
The effort to overthrow these limitations has often been touted as a quest for freedom. Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau penned his now famous observation, “Man was born free, and is everywhere in chains.” He and many thinkers like him have sought to shake off restraints in every area of life—moral, economic, social, biological, legal, and religious—to find liberation in the desires of the self. Accordingly, any limitations encountered along the way are treated as mere glass ceilings to be crashed through.
Yes, even if such actions call for extremes, bloodshed, bizarre behavior, and delusional attitudes. However, superficial observations (from those with a modicum of objectivity) will demonstrate that an unqualified approach of this sort yields further and more painful complications. Pulling the knot loose to get free, so to speak, only cinches it down tighter.
While the world can be remarkably flexible, it is layered with God-imposed limitations. For the most part, we live within them, making the best of things, but once we pretend they are negotiable, the results are punishing. The philosophical craft we use to bypass simple, mature acceptance “of the way things are,” only yields a weirder world.
Yet, it still doesn’t stop many of us (Christians especially included) from seeking loopholes and welcoming shortcuts.
Consider the disciples, that often rejected band who followed Jesus from city to city. Though their Master frequently drew large crowds, the number of committed core members never grew much larger than 120. And, of course, on the international front, it was an infinitesimally tiny, unknown group. For the ambitious religious mind, it was probably a hard reality to labor under.
But then a turning point seemed to present itself.
“Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, sir, we wish to see Jesus. Philip went and told Andrew, and Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, the hour has come for the son of man to be glorified” (John 12:20-23).
Had I been a disciple standing there, I would probably have gotten excited. Oh boy, it’s time for glory! The crowds are going to increase. The nations are going to start lining up to seek Jesus. This is the breakthrough moment, beginning with these Greeks.
If the disciples were thinking this way—of breakthrough and enlargement—they were right to do so, but they were leaving out a crucial part of the process. Their omission was every bit as serious as leaving out the “H” from “H²O.”
And what was that? Jesus supplies the missing part in verse 24 when he says, “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.”
Take a look at the details here. Jesus compared himself to a grain of wheat. The life inside the grain is the secret to its explosive fruitfulness, but it is a life enclosed, trapped, and bound by a restrictive husk. In fact, the experience of limitation was central to His incarnation. According to Philippians chapter 2, Christ emptied Himself of the unlimited, unbounded form of God and constrained Himself to the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of a lowly man. That’s unprecedented limitation.
For the first time ever, this infinite, eternal Son of God was limited by time itself. When He said the hour had come for His glorification, what could this have meant except that He had waited thirty-three years for it to arrive? And if glory had not arrived until that time, what else can be implied except that He had lived in an unglorified state for all those years, at least externally?
He had been born into a family of humble means, in a tiny town, and was rather unattractive, to boot (Isa. 53:2). He had to travel like everyone else because he couldn’t be in all places at once. He had to eat. When He was hungry, He wouldn’t call a buffet into existence, as the devil had tempted him to do. He felt pain like everyone else. He had to rest, and once needed it so badly that he fell asleep in a boat during a thunderstorm. His earthly mission, with little exception, was limited in scope to a sliver of land in the Middle East—”the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
He had entered a painfully restrictive world, but rather than fight it, accepted it from the Father’s hand that, “This is the way things are.”
The greatest indignity of His limitations was death, and worse, the death of a cross—something He saw as a grain of wheat falling into the Earth and dying. Yet that same awful crucifixion was the very way in which He was to be glorified.
Calvary was His breakthrough moment, not a sudden viral popularity among the Greeks.
In John 12:25, He further portrayed this life of limitation unto enlargement as a principal of our union with Him, saying, “Whoever, loves his life loses it.” God will inevitably limit you or allow limitation upon you in some way. Whoever loves his life will react by insisting upon and keeping his comforts, distractions, and preferences. Yet he will lose those things eventually, sometimes even before leaving this world. For instance, the person who lives for fishing—he can’t be in church because he’s on the lake, can’t tithe because he’s making payments on a bass boat, can’t read his Bible because he’s taking care of tackle—but discovers one day he’s too old and weak to do it anymore. Thus, he loses it. Or the person who is reluctant to follow Christ because her family won’t approve. But she loses them, anyway, one by one to the cemetery.
Conversely, Jesus says, “Whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” That is, whoever deprioritizes this current transient life in favor of the will of God will, in a counter-intuitive twist, keep it for eternal life.
Ultimate enlargement.
In Verse 26, Jesus continues, “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also.” Real servants follow Him into the experience of limitation, falling into the ground and dying for the sake of God and His kingdom.
We think in order to arrive at spiritual enlargement, we need to get our limitations out of the way. If only I could escape these kids. If only my spouse was more spiritual. If only I didn’t have to deal with this ungodly work environment. If only I didn’t live in this neighborhood. If only I were in another church. If only people could appreciate me the way they ought. If only the Bible didn’t prohibit, prescribe, or define certain things.
The question is not how we can escape our various limitations, but will we be a grain of wheat, falling into the earth, dying, and coming up in the glory of resurrection? Spiritual immaturity is everywhere in churches, partly because we believe limitation is evil and shouldn’t be tolerated.
But if we fight it, there’s no falling into the ground, no breaking, and no fruit. We don’t see the 30, 60, or 100-fold enlargement like in Matthew 13:8, where the good ground bears bushels of increase. This shows we not only dislike limitation, we actually don’t care much for enlargement, either.
When I was a young ministry intern, one of my mentors tasked me with planning a high school conference. The prospect sounded confining because I was used to doing a lot of itinerant ministry work on college campuses. You could drop in, lead a quick Bible study, and then disappear; hop in the car, take a twelve-minute ride to another campus, where you’d hand out leaflets. And so on.
But this conference thingy was going to clip my wings. It was a month-long commitment at least and involved more than inspirational talks. Besides, I didn’t know how to make practical arrangements—setting schedules, planning content, marketing, ordering soft drinks and snacks, completing sign-ups, fand iguring costs. I didn’t have time for it. I wasn’t gifted for it.
I reluctantly accepted the assignment, anyway.
These days when I think back on that little event (as well as others), and of my small, selfish heart always inclining toward escape, I want to laugh. I was always craving a larger life without knowing what it was and how it would come about. Instead of instant success, I received limitations that pinned me, forced my focus, and demanded I learn things.
Somewhere deep down, I draw upon those lessons even now, every time I set out to launch a new faith initiative or handle the latest life crisis.
Regardless of where you are in the perceived limitations of life, don’t run from them, or try to undo them.
We have, after all, entered a life union with One who submitted to the hand of His Father and found enlargement beyond all imagination.
Purchase John’s new book here!
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Comments are closed.