“BORN FROM ABOVE”
January 15, 2012 ~ The Rev. David Moore
Scripture: John 3:1-8 | PDF print version

When I was a teenager my sister and I used to occasionally work at a Christian camp off the coast of California, on an island called Catalina. The camp is still there, although I haven’t been there for years. My sister got the best job in camp, as one of the hostesses at the dining area. I, on the other hand, carried rocks all day. They had had a huge storm a few years earlier, which washed out a lot of the camp, and they were determined that another storm not do the same thing. So we wired together these huge wire cages, and filled them with rocks all day long, in order to channel the water if a storm like that ever hit again. So my sister got to tell people where to sit, and I carried huge rocks all day. I’m still a little bitter. I don’t know if you can tell.

Anyway, one week I left the camp to go home, because it was time, and I went on the same ship as the campers who had just been there. Now I was in between my junior and senior years in high school -- so, almost as old as some of the kids that had been at the college camp. And I noticed on several campers’ nametags that they attended a community college quite close to where I lived. So on the boat ride home I tried to introduce myself to one of them, a nice looking young lady, who said to me, “Are you born again?” And I thought, “That’s an odd response to, ‘Hi, I was working at Campus By the Sea this past week and noticed you go to Moorpark College, which is near my home.’” Her response didn’t seem to fit the introduction I had made. I had made it clear I had just been working at the Christian camp she had attended, and yet, somehow she wanted to not speak to me and use being born again as a way to derail the conversation, which it did. I wasn’t interested in talking to her anymore, even though I absolutely was convinced I was a Christian. And I was a Christian. But it felt like there was some sort of a dividing line put up dividing who was in and who was out over the question about being born again.

So that’s what we’re going to take a look at today.

John 3:1-8

1Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

3In reply, Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

4“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!”

5Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Let’s pray.

I think we’ll be in the Gospel of John for a bit now. So allow me to give you some background. John was a disciple of Jesus, and he was a young man during Jesus’ time on earth, younger than the other disciples. He also lived the longest. Most of the other disciples died for their faith in Christ, proclaiming Jesus and His love, even doubting Thomas was killed for proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. John survived, but he was exiled to a Greek island that is actually closer to Turkey than Greece, an island called Patmos. It was from Patmos that John wrote the Gospel of John, 1, 2 and 3 John and Revelations. We think these were written much later than the rest of the New Testament. John knew about the other Gospels, so he didn’t need to retell the same story, but John wanted people to know the deeper stories, the ones not in Luke and Matthew and Mark. John tells the story of a blind man, his healing by Jesus, and the controversy surrounding the healing, none of which is found in the other gospels.

So John tells us different stories about Jesus, and Jesus’ teaching seems to be deeper as well. In John we find Jesus tell the disciples “I am” over and over…I am the vine, I am the bread of life, I am the way, the truth and the life. So John is different than the others, not better, not worse, but different.

It is in John that we learn that Jesus comes to Jerusalem several times, not just the last and final time. It is during this first visit to Jerusalem that Jesus is visited by a Pharisee. The Pharisees were in charge of the religious life of Israel. They were the ones making the rules that all people had to follow. They were religious people, but not necessarily merciful people, or people who were really following God. Many of them were simply rule followers, but not Nicodemus. He seems to have been a genuine seeker of God, and when Jesus comes to Jerusalem, and does miraculous signs, Nicodemus is not trapped into the Pharisee mindset of thinking everything he does is right, and God must only work through the Pharisees. Nicodemus wants to meet Jesus, wants to chat with Him earnestly.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

Pharisees: very concerned about separating from the non-Jews, very concerned with rule breaking. They tried to be the most pious, taking piousness to extremes, and eventually they became more powerful than the priests, as they pointed out to everyone, they were more pious. I understand the Pharisees’ trying to keep all the other Jews pure and holy. Because the Jews had not followed the covenant with God, the Jews had been taken into captivity and the whole of Israel and Judah had been sacked by the Babylonians. They didn’t want that to happen again. But it seems to me that we are not supposed to live in fear, which is really what the Pharisees promoted and lived. But this is who the Pharisees were, the religious professionals, somewhat elitist and very pious, making sure the country of Israel wasn’t invaded again due to a lack of religious fervor.

This Nicodemus, even though a Pharisee, seems to really have a heart for God, and being a Pharisee has not gone to his head, as it seems to have been for others. This Nicodemus is still a seeker of God, still wants to see what God is doing, and is open to seeing how God is using Jesus. Look, he even addresses Jesus as “Rabbi”. No one just does that. It was a term of respect and honor. Nicodemus was not playing to Jesus’ pride or ego, but really saw Jesus as having something he didn’t. And Nicodemus was absolutely right about that. But at the same time, Nicodemus came to Jesus at night. He didn’t want all of Jerusalem seeing that he came to ask Jesus questions. Nicodemus seems to be confused. Clearly Jesus was doing miracles, and the ability to do them must come from God. But Jesus wasn’t on good terms with all the Pharisees, so Nicodemus comes when no one will see him.

Nicodemus turns out to be a really good guy. At the end of John 19 Joseph of Arimathea claims Jesus’ body, and with him is our Nicodemus. Nicodemus brought spices and prepared Jesus’ body, an act, which would have made Nicodemus ritually impure until he went through the lengthy purification process. I believe Nicodemus eventually came to the conclusion that Jesus was God, and honored him in death as such.

In reply, Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!”

Born again isn’t a great translation. Literally Jesus is saying no one can see the kingdom unless they are born “from above”. I’m not really sure that girl I tried to speak with actually knew what she was talking about. In fact, I doubt it. Being “born again” has become a kind of code word for many different ideas. Quite simply, being born from above is more accurate, because it refers to the Holy Spirit. When we become Christians, when we finally acknowledge that we are not the lords of our own lives, but in fact, we belong to Someone else, who has purchased our eternity with His blood on the cross, that is a movement of the Holy Spirit within us. Now you might like to think that of your own accord, in our own mental acuity you came to that conclusion, that God exists, that He sent His Son Jesus Christ to humanity, which nailed Him to the tree, which had to happen so He could be our atoning sacrifice before God, so that His perfection might be given to us when we acknowledge Him to be our Lord. All that, Scripture tells us, happens at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. Now people can say it is about our choice, and if you want to think that, I don’t really want to argue about that. I’m not interested. I’m more interested in how we live out our calling to follow Christ. I think it is the Holy Spirit helping people make the leap of faith.

All that to say that the most important part of becoming a Christian is the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit’s coming into our hearts that convinces us of the truth of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit’s baptism that is more important than any baptism that I do in a swimming pool or up here from the baptismal font. At some point we became convinced that Jesus spoke the truth about Himself; that He alone is the way, the truth and the life. That He died and lived again, and invites us into His resurrection. This is what it means to be born again, to be convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, is the Lord, and that we will be with Him in eternity because the grace given us through faith. It is not saying certain words. It is not a specific ritual, although if you are convinced Jesus is Lord and you have not been baptized, we need to do that. But anyone can get baptized without changing his or her heart. God is not looking for empty ritual, but for people really willing to follow Him, to be discipled by Him, to be His hands and arms reaching out to our broken world.

Jesus answered, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

When I baptize kids the church gives them a little Bible, and I get to write in their new little baby Bibles a note to them. Most often I tell them that they were baptized here by us, but that we hoped they would someday experience another baptism, a baptism of the Holy Spirit that would convince them of the truth of God’s Word and help them to walk in His ways. It’s probably a little advanced for the kids, but my hope is that someday they find their old children’s Bible, open it up, and read the inscription, and think about where they are with Christ.

To be baptized by the Spirit is not anything we can effect, or make happen. It something that just comes. Sometimes it is an immediate change, but in my life, change happens over the years, like water wearing away at a mountain. The water will win, the mountain will show signs of the water moving on it, but it just takes time.

On Kilimanjaro there used to be a glacier, huge amounts of snow and ice very near the equator, which was why Kilimanjaro was so stunning. But the ice is leaving, because of the wind sheer on the ice. The wind is changing the ice from a solid to a gas, a little at a time. Slowly the ice sheet on Kilimanjaro is disintegrating. That’s not a good thing for Kilimanjaro, or the tourist industry, but it is an example of how the wind changes things, and the Holy Spirit changes things in much the same way. Slowly, over time, the breath of God blows on us and shapes the way we think, our motivations, our desires and our actions.

A birth, you see, is a beginning. A birth is not the finished product, but the beginning of something new. You see this in yourselves, or in your children. They are much different now than when they were born. That is how it is supposed to work. When we come to Christ, and say to Him, please rule my life, the way I’ve been running my life is not the best way, Your way is the best way, I want to stop trying to run my life and let You take over, then God uses His word, He uses mature Christians in our lives to mentor us, He uses our prayer lives to bring up issues we need to give over to Him, and the things we need to confess that are stunting our growth as disciples. The Holy Spirit takes all that and begins to shape us into someone new. Sometimes it is a painful process that involves the giving up of maybe some things that we feel are at the core of who we are. Maybe we have come to define ourselves as aggressive, but everyone else, including God, knows we have anger issues. Maybe the Holy Spirit will begin to work on that anger that is within us, threatening our eternal destiny. Maybe we have other issues of fear or lust, of jealousy or bitterness, or whatever it might be in our lives that threatens to take us away from our place at Christ’s feet.

The commitment to follow Christ is not one we control. Just like we don’t control what we look like, our hair color or nose shape or eye color, we don’t control lots of things in our spiritual lives. We don’t control how we were brought up in faith; either in the faith or from parents who were not Christians at all or who were of another faith. We don’t control if we have musical talents or a talent for working with wood or cooking or administration. So spiritually speaking, there are some here with talents of hospitality, with the gift of administration or the gift of healing or of comforting or of building. The Holy Spirit brings out those talents and refines them, improves them, so that those spiritual gifts are used to the glory of God in building His kingdom.

There are some people who have wonderful spiritual gifts who use them to glorify themselves, rather than God. And that is truly tragic. The Holy Spirit wants to bring your gifts out, He wants to shape your life in new ways, but there is some part in this we play, and that is to allow the Holy Spirit to work, to respond to His promptings, to listen and learn and put into practice what we are given. That way we change from being spiritual infants and begin to grow, and then walk in Christ, and someday we learn to run, and learn to help others who are also learning how to walk.

Being born again means that we begin something new, with Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit. It is not as mysterious and complicated as some people would like to think it might be. It quite simply is the commitment to follow Christ, to learn from Him, to grow in Him into a useful tool in His belt, used to shape and change the world. Being born again means the willingness to be guided by the Holy Spirit, to learn from God’s Word how we should act and pray and think, to commit to putting into practice the things we know we are supposed to do and be as followers of Christ.

Being born again isn’t about the funny haircuts of the evangelists I see on television; it isn’t about whooping and hollering; it isn’t about a show to impress anyone. It is about Christ, and who He is to us. Once we figure out that Christ is the Lord, that He is to be worshipped, enthroned upon our lives, once we figure that out with the help of the Holy Spirit, then life begins again, we are new persons in Christ, and the old life is put behind us. That doesn’t mean some things don’t carry over. The consequences of a life’s worth of sin do not go away overnight, but they begin to be made right when we say yes to Jesus. If this is you, if you need to -- for the first time -- commit yourself to Christ, or need to recommit yourself, come up and pray with an elder or myself after the service. We’d love to talk with you about what all this means even more deeply.