Quiet Fire Devotional Series | The Paradoxes of God

Series Introduction: The Paradoxes of God — Navigating the Narrow Way through God’s Wisdom

The narrow way was never meant to feel like the main road.

Jesus warned that “the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:14, ESV). That hardness isn’t just about persecution or external resistance. Often, it is the jarring way God’s truth feels when it collides with our natural instincts.

The Kingdom is not arranged according to human sense-making. It is patterned by the eternal mind of God — where death births life, surrender breeds victory, and emptiness becomes fullness. Paul called this “the foolishness of God” which is still “wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25, ESV).

These paradoxes are not riddles to solve. They are signposts. Markers along the road that tell you — yes, you are still on the path even when the path feels upside down.

The world will call you a fool for following them. And maybe you will feel foolish at first. But if the Spirit is leading, that foolishness is a doorway to wisdom, and that wisdom is life.

Over the next weeks, we will walk through fourteen paradoxes straight from Scripture. We will see them in creation. We will trace them in the life of Jesus. And we will learn how they shape the soul that is determined to make it home.

We begin with the first: To Live, You Must Die.

Paradox 1 — To Live, You Must Die

Luke 9:23–24; John 12:24

A seed in your hand is potential. A seed buried in the ground is a death.

Jesus did not soften His language about this. “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it” (Luke 9:23–24, ESV).

To our survival instincts, this makes no sense. We spend so much of life trying to preserve — health, comfort, reputation, security. The idea that life is found only in letting those things die feels like stepping into the dark without a lantern.

But that is exactly what Jesus did. John tells us His own words: “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, ESV).

When a seed dies, it is not destroyed. It is transformed. In the hidden dark, the life within it pushes out of the shell, breaks through the soil, and grows into something it could never have become if it had stayed intact.

This is the shape of Christian life. Death to self is not the tragic loss of “who I am.” It is the releasing of the false self — the one built on pride, fear, or self-rule — so that the truer self in Christ can live.

Paul understood this personally: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20, ESV). Notice — he speaks of crucifixion in the past tense, but life in the present tense. Death came first, then life.

The danger is that we want resurrection life without the cross. We want to skip burial and still expect fruit. But the soil of God’s Kingdom only produces through surrender.

So here is the hard question: What in you still resists dying?Is it control over your future? The right to be vindicated? The private comfort you don’t want touched?

Until it is surrendered — truly buried — it will remain in seed form. And seeds are not meant to be stored in pockets.