Tuesday

Related Verses
John 1:1,14
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
14 And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only Begotten from the Father), full of grace and reality.

Luke 12:50
50 But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how I am pressed until it is accomplished!

John 7:6,10
6 Jesus therefore said to them, My time has not yet come, but your time is always ready.
10 But when His brothers had gone up to the feast, then He Himself also went up, not openly, but as it were in secret.

Phil. 4:11-13
11 Not that I speak according to lack, for I have learned, in whatever circumstances I am, to be content.
12 I know also how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in everything and in all things I have learned the secret both to be filled and to hunger, both to abound and to lack.
13 I am able to do all things in Him who empowers me.

Related Reading
The Lord was constrained in His flesh, which He put upon Himself in His incarnation. He needed to undergo physical death, to be baptized, that His unlimited and infinite divine being with His divine life might be released from His flesh. His divine life, after being released through His physical death, became the impulse of His believers’ spiritual life in resurrection. (Luke 12:50, footnote 2)

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In John 12:24 the Lord Jesus indicated clearly that He was a grain of wheat…Wheat signifies Christ in His incarnation and crucifixion…Although in eternity Christ was the unlimited God, unlimited both in space and in time, one day He was incarnated and became limited. Oh, the unlimited God was limited in Jesus, a little carpenter from Nazareth! Although the Lord is the eternal, infinite, unlimited God, He lived as a man, limited even in the matter of time. When His brothers in the flesh encouraged Him to go into Judea, Jesus said, “My time has not yet come, but your time is always ready” (7:6)…The Lord Jesus was not only limited in time but also in space. It is difficult to believe that the unlimited God lived in the house of a carpenter for thirty years. This is Jesus as our life, the One by whom we may live. Thus, wheat signifies the limited Jesus.

We all know what it means to be limited. Married life, for example, is a limitation and a restriction…Although you may be as free as a bird today, you will find yourself in a cage after you get married. Every wife is a cage to her husband, and every husband is a cage to his wife. Before I was married, I kept my bedroom window open at night because I enjoyed the fresh air. But my wife would close all the windows and turn the bedroom into a cage…For us Christians there is no divorce or separation. We cannot flee the cage of married life. After a period of time, some little birds are born into this cage. What a further restriction this is! As the years went by and children were born, I experienced many more limitations. I cried out to the Lord and said, “O Lord Jesus! What should I do?” The Lord seemed to say, “Simply be limited and restricted. Look at Me. Although I am the unlimited God, I was incarnated and limited for thirty years. I can promise you that after thirty years you will be released.”

One day, thirty years later, I said to the Lord, “Lord, You told me that I would be released after thirty years, but now I am more limited than ever. I have not only sons and daughters but daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. I also have the limitation of so many churches and elders. Lord, what shall I do now?” Then the Lord said, “Look at Me again. Although I was released after thirty years, don’t you know that I am still being limited by you and all the other believers?” Eventually, I saw the vision of Christ as the wheat. The very Christ who indwells me is the incarnated One. In a sense, He is still incarnated today, for the indwelling Christ is willing to be limited, caged, in us. When I saw this vision of the limited Christ, I began to worship Him, saying, “O Lord, thank You for my wife, for all my children, for all the churches, and for all the elders. How I thank You, Lord, for my cage.” Such a prayer causes wheat to begin to grow immediately. I can testify that I have a wheat field in my Christian life. How I thank the Lord for my wife, my children, my in-laws, my grandchildren, the churches, and the elders. All of these produce the environment that enables me to grow wheat…This wheat is the incarnated Jesus growing in the midst of our limitations. (CWWL, 1977, vol. 1, “The Kernel of the Bible,” pp. 218-220)

Further Reading: CWWL, 1977, vol. 1, “The Kernel of the Bible,” ch. 6