Born-Again (1/21/18 The Book of John #14)

ATTN: In my 30 years of being a Christian, I’ve heard a lot of testimonies of how people got saved. Earlier in my life, I thought the greatest testimonies were those that were dramatic. Such as, “I came out of my mother’s womb cussing, and I sold drugs by the time I was 6, murdered a man when I was 12, got tried as an adult and went to jail, but there I met Christ, gave my life to Him, and now I’m a pastor….” Then, I would look at my life and thought, “Am I even a Christian? I don’t have a dramatic experience like that. The worst thing I’ve ever done growing up is being cruel to the frogs that I caught in the rice paddy field behind my house.”

Now, would you let me be silly for a little while? I don’t believe preachers should try to be funny or do anything that will detract from God by putting the focus on himself, but I thought this might help in introducing the passage we read today…. I was a poster child for “that boy that you want your daughter to marry one day.” Let me list my pedigree real quick – I never drank, never smoked, never even seen drugs, never missed a day of school – I was even there on Senior skip day making my teachers upset because I wouldn’t give them a break. I saved myself for marriage which happened at age 34. I was the perennial class hall-monitor and teacher’s pet in every class so much so that one teacher even gave me answers to tests because she favored me. My baseball coach, when I threw a ball right down the middle to the best hitter in the league and he hit for a double and won the game, he blamed the centerfielder for playing too shallow rather than me because he favored me! I can’t tell you how many of these little korean ladies came up to me when I was growing up and said, “I wish I had a daughter. Then I would want her to marry you!” And I thought, “I know, I know.. But there can only be one lucky girl…” And that happens to be Janet…! =). My point is that if there ever was a goodie to shoes, I was it!

Why am I saying such silly things to start this message? To let you know that it was purely by the grace of God that I am born-again. You see, If it weren’t for the grace of God, I would’ve thought that because of my goodness, I wouldn’t need God. I can do good all myself. I was better than most Christians, anyway. But God let me see the bankruptcy and vanity of pride and self-glory and my desperate need for a Savior from my self-centered ways…

TRANS: We come to John 3 today. It contains arguably the most famous verse in all of the Bible – John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” But most people do not know the context in which that took place. Jesus wasn’t preaching when He said those words. He was having a private conversation with a man who came to visit in the middle of the night and he may not have come with an open mind…. And this man, who name was Nicodemus, was a good man. He would easily put me to shame with how good he was as a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews. He was the best of the best. He’s not a sinner on the street, many of which, Jesus had to deal with. How does Jesus deal with this man? What does He say to Him?  Three questions this encounter of Jesus with Nicodemus deal with: 1) Who needs to be born again? 2) What is being born again? 3) How does one become born again?

 

1. Who needs to be born again?

Answer: A good and religious person. Not a drunkard, wife-beating, serial-killer type of sinner, but a good, respectable, and religious person needs to be born again. Well, to be perfectly accurate, everyone needs to be born again. But when the question is posed, “Who needs to be born again?”, we normally think of bad people, sinful people, that really need to shape up their lives before God can accept them. And if I were to do a survey of even the self-proclaimed “born-again” Christians, most of them would say that. That’s because most of us believe that the way to heaven is by being good and doing good.

ILL: I was watching a documentary on the early history of Christianity on PBS, and first, I was so pleasantly surprised how accurate and faithful to the Bible this documentary was, but as I expected, one of the New Testament professors being interviewed said how Christianity is about following the example of Jesus and doing good so that God will accept them in the end. And I thought, “No, no, no! How many times do we have to repeat that that is not the way to God? If that were true, then the conversation that Jesus had with Nicodemus should be very different.

It says, “a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the jews” came to visit Jesus. This man was a pharisee. Pharisees were the most strict keepers of the Mosaic law. And not only a pharisee, but he was also a ruler of the Jews. He was the best of the best as far as moral uprightness is concerned! No doubt he was at a synagogue – that’s like a modern day church – everytime the door was open. He knew the Bible like the back of his hand. He had 800 some rules that he memorized and kept to keep himself from doing wrong. Some of the things that the Pharisees did to keep themselves from doing wrong was, 1) bleeding pharisees – some would keep their eyes closed whenever they went outside b/c they were afraid they would see a woman and would sin in their heart. And many injured themselves walking into things. 2) painted Pharisees – some painted their bodies so that no one would touch him to make him unclean before God.

= These Pharisees were very highly regarded by the people of that time to be holy and righteous. I don’t know anyone today, including myself, who’s as strict on keeping God’s laws as those people.

And yet, when Jesus sees this man, the first thing He says is, “You must be born again!” What we expected was, “Ah, Nick, you’ve been a good man. You’ve done much good for the synagogue and the Jewish people. God is pleased with you and all that you’ve done and how you’ve lived in discipline is good enough to get you to heaven. Now, continue to live in it.” But no. The first thing he says is, “Nick, you fall short. How far? Not even close. As a matter of fact, you are so far off that you have to be uprooted and need to be made completely new. It won’t do good to just change a few things around in your life to be acceptable to God. You have to be a different person altogether – like be recreated or “born again”

That is harsh. But that’s the assessment directly from God Himself – the only Judge there is…. So, who needs to be born again? Even the best of us needs to be born again. All our good works are like filthy rags, the Bible says….

 

2. What is being born again?

Jesus tells this “good” man to be born again. But what is being born again? Being born again is being born of water and the spirit – v. 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” Well, what does it mean to be born of water and the Spirit? John Piper helped me with this when he quoted Ezekiel 36:24-28:

“I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

So, 1) water is what cleanses us of our sins. Jeremiah 33:8, “I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me.” Just like water cleanses away mud and blood from us when we injure ourselves, a person born-again is a person whose sins and guilt are washed away. And also, 2) this person is given a new heart as Ezekiel says. A heart is the deepest part of our being that drives us and motivates us. Another word for heart would be “desire”, “passion,” “reason for being.” So, being born again, we are given a new heart, a new desire, a new passion, a new reason for being! You’ve heard me say, “God changes not only what we do but he changes what we want to do.” That’s because He comes in and replaces a dead, physical heart that only delighted in physical things to a spiritual heart that now delights in God, in spiritual things. So, if you are born again, what you used to find boring – the spiritual things – now you find you can’t live without. The Bible, prayer, preaching, missions, Sunday School lessons used to bore you to tears. Watching endless Youtube video is more fun. You can check someone’s Instagram for hours. But if the pastor went over 30 minutes on his sermon, then you are checking out. But you are given a spiritual heart. You are born-again. You are given a new desire. You have a new reason for being. You are given a new desire, a new heart. You are born again! So, that is what it means to be born again. Our delights, desires, value system, and goals all change because now God is in the center of our being rather than ourselves.  

 

3. How do we become born again?

I phrased the question like this on purpose. I could’ve asked, “What can we do to be born again?” Because if that is the question, the answer is nothing. There is nothing you can do to be born again. Any more than a dead person can make himself live again, you cannot make yourself born again. That was Jesus’ whole point, and Nicodemus correctly understood what Jesus was saying. He asked Jesus, “how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” It’s a rhetorical question to which the answer is an obvious “no.” A person cannot make himself be born again. The very reason why Jesus used this kind of language is to convey the impossibility of making ourselves be acceptable to God by our own effort.

Then, how do we become born again? If we can’t do it, then who does it? God. Only God can do it. Jesus in vv. 6-7, “6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Why does Jesus mention the wind? Because we don’t control the wind. It comes and goes as it desires. So is the Spirit of God. The Spirit – Ruah – in Greek means the wind. So, literally, Jesus is saying that it is up to the Holy Spirit to decide who will be born again and who will not. It is not up to us. It is up to God. And it is not even that God looks around the world and picks those who made just a little bit of effort towards Him. I used to think that maybe God selects those who took the first step toward Him, and then looking at that tiny effort towards Him, His compassion is aroused and He saves him and enables him to walk the whole way. But that is not biblical. We have no part in it whatsoever. “While we are still sinners, Christ died for us.” “For ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” “there is none righteous, no, not even one.” “And they did evil all the time.”

It is God-alone who decides who will be born-again and who will not. But “Pastor, I have felt that maybe there is a god and maybe I should change my way to took a step toward him. Isn’t that me making an effort.” No. God has put that desire in you. It was initiated by God and that’s why you responded. “A pursuer finds out that he’s been pursued,” is often how it is. We thought we looked for God and found God, but that’s because God was looking for us first, and found us.

So then, if everything depends on God and none on us, then we do nothing? No. We do something. And that is responding to God’s initiating. When I said that there is nothing we can do to be born-again, I meant that there is nothing we can do to initiate or to cause our salvation. But once God initiates, we have the responsibility of responding to that call. And Jesus gets into what that looks like with Nicodemus in the next paragraph which we will cover next time,  God willing.

CONCLUSION: Being born again is not just for bad people. It’s for “good” people as well. And It is like a seed that God plants in us that will inevitably grow into something wonderful that will change the whole course of life for the better. It will not affect one or two areas of our lives like the latest diet or fad, but will change the whole trajectory of our lives and ultimately our eternal destination. But if we can’t bring it about ourselves, then what is the point? If we can’t make ourselves born again, what is the point? You can respond. Perhaps your hearing this message today is God’s initiating that process with you. You are here listening to this message because God has pursued you and wants you to be born again. Would you respond in your heart to this call?