ENCOUNTERS // Jesus Encounters The Religious

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Jump into the word today.

So what we're doing, if you were with us last week, we're starting this new summer teaching series.

And what we're doing is every week, we're going to be highlighting an encounter of Jesus with an individual in the Gospel of John.

And one of the things I love about Jesus, he didn't just preach sermons to masses.

He found, you know, he Jesus found ways to meet every single person exactly where they're at.

And he knew how, he knew what the moment needed every single time.

And it wasn't just one kind of person.

He would minister to the seekers, he would minister to the religious, he would minister to the poor, the abused, those in power.

He would minister to ever whoever God brought his way.

Sometimes he would challenge them, but often he would invite them to see from a new perspective.

He invite them in a way that they needed to be invited.

And how many of you guys know that he does that with us today?

He did that with you.

He does that with all of us.

He wants to meet us and encounter us, not just generally, but specifically.

He knows your name, he knows your pain points, he knows your desires, he knows your experience.

And it's important for us to remember that Jesus is a personal, he's a personal God.

He's a personal man, and that's why we love him, right?

And as we see these stories and open up these stories, it helps us not only connect with Jesus, but as we live lives, we're paying attention to who God has sent us, God has sent our way.

It opens up an imagination for how we ought to live.

Amen.

So last week we talked about how Jesus encountered the seeker as the disciples were coming towards him to see, what do you have?

How should we follow you?

And Jesus met Peter and Andrew and some of these early fishermen and called them into this new reality.

But this week we see how Jesus encounters the religious, who are the well-informed, the devout, the ones who know enough, right?

And uh and I think that what we'll find as we're we're jumping into this is that we'll find ourselves in this story as well, because that's a lot of us in the room, including me.

Okay?

So John chapter 3, here's what we'll pick up, starting in verse 1.

John 3 · chapter mention

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher.

Uh we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.

And Jesus answered him, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old?

Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born?

Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

Do you not marvel that I said to you, You must be born again?

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.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Come on, this is the word of the Lord.

This is a good word for us today.

See, this scene starts off, it was late, the city was quiet, it was nighttime, and but there is a man who couldn't sleep.

He was laying in bed at night, he was restless.

There's something stirring in him he couldn't quite shake.

This man had power and prestige, he's well respected, he had a reputation that most envied, and yet something inside of him was unsettled.

And so while he was laying in bed at night, he we can we we can imagine that as he laid in bed at night, he's thinking, I have got to go have this conversation.

I have to figure out what is going on here.

So he slipped out into the night and he didn't go rally his posse, he didn't go rally his crowds, he didn't go, he didn't come with a bunch of demands, he just had a few questions and questions, the type of questions that couldn't be asked in daylight, because he knew what that meant for his particular tribe to have that kind of conversation.

So he wasn't even sure he was allowed to ask these questions, and that's where Jesus meets Nicodemus.

It wasn't in a synagogue, it wasn't in a public square, it was in the shadows of night.

And this is what I love that that the that the writer John, this is where he takes us next in this story.

Um He takes us next, not to somebody who's far from the faith, but someone who uh but to someone who deep inside knows the system.

He knows how things work.

And how many of you guys know sometimes the hardest people to reach with the gospels are the one with the gospel are the ones who are closest to home.

Sometimes the ones that are hardest to reach with the gospel are not the ones that are farthest away.

It's the ones who are closest to home.

And this is something that we get to enter into today.

We know that Nicodemus, this guy, he's a Pharisee, a teacher of the law, a ruler of the Jews.

And you know, when we hear the word Pharisee, I don't know if you've if you've been around church world a little bit, what happens is when preachers talk about Pharisees, we're pretty hard on Pharisees, right?

Pharisees, we read in the scripture and we automatically know, okay, that's the bad guy of the story, right?

That's the villain of the story.

Don't be like the Pharisees, all right?

Now there is a lot of that in there, by the way.

But we but but we gotta remember the Pharisees, the motivation of the Pharisees wasn't all bad.

The motivation of the Pharisees was to live a life of zeal and devotion to God.

And they would memorize the Torah, they would memorize the scriptures, they would memorize the prophetic words of old, they would give themselves to try to do their best to hold a life of righteousness before God.

Now, where the pendulum swing is, they did all of that, but they they lost their heart in the process.

But some of us actually could use a little more devotion and intentionality, just the the ability, the deliberate life before God, of actually designing our life around God.

And here we have Nicodemus, who was kind of an outlier among the Pharisees, because he's one that is both well respected, but there's something stirring in him that he is beginning to see something come awake inside of him.

And he's caught between two realities, okay?

So he was trained into a way of seeing the world in which now Jesus was a threat because he was trained into a way of life.

This is how you live life before God.

You do this on these days, you keep these laws, and they they created all these laws, and Jesus came and said, I want to show you a different way.

And so as Jesus was now coming along and announcing this new kingdom of God and breaking certain rules, just to make a point, it was threatening to men like Nicodemus and the Pharisees, because they didn't know what to do with it, but he couldn't shake it because he couldn't deny that Jesus' life was marked by the power of God.

So in John chapter 2, we didn't go through this, but but we we just came out of a scene where Jesus was at a party.

John 2 · chapter mention

Hello, Jesus is at a party, the wine runs out, Jesus says, We can take care of that, we're gonna make this a great party, all right?

And so he gets some water, he says, he has the servants fill him up, they turn, he turns water into wine.

It was significant, it was a significant miracle because it had to do with him inaugurating a new season of ministry, of life and ministry.

And it was the beginning in the Gospel of John of him being able to say, uh, uh, I am the one that you've been waiting for.

And so as Nicodemus and the Pharisees see these kinds of things, they he is ruffling their feathers, but they cannot deny that his life is marked by the power of God.

And so this is where Nicodemus comes in.

And he shows up to Jesus, and it's not quite a question, he's just more of a confession.

And he says, Teacher, he says, I know I know that you are a teacher come from God.

I know that the power of God is with you.

And this is where immediately Jesus he both affirms what Nicodemus is saying, but he he starts to reverse the language of the conversation.

Immediately Jesus takes the conversation from the language of the mind to the language of the heart.

Okay, I want you to, I want you to catch this for a second.

Nicodemus, and the way he's he's taught, is to to find reasons and proof, and we're gonna build our lives systematically about around what makes sense.

So he's coming, so Jesus, I have, I can see that this is real, I can see that this is the way to go, but immediately Jesus moves from small talk to a poetic interruption.

No longer are we talking about if he's the guy, now we're talking about being born again.

Okay, so Jesus moves to towards Nicodemus.

He says, Nicodemus, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

So this whole concept of born again is this Greek word that means either born again or born from above.

It can mean either way, born from above.

You're born from a different realm.

Both meanings are likely in play here.

And so what he's meaning here is like that to be born again is to begin again radically, not just morally, not just we're gonna add something new to your life, but we're gonna, it's almost like a starting over.

It's a receiving a new life altogether from above, a spiritual rebirth that comes not from our effort, but from the spirit of God.

Now, if you can imagine Nicodemus, a guy who's just wanting to kind of know what's right, what's wrong, black and white.

Let's kind of have an ordered life.

And Jesus comes in and subverts that and says, It's okay, Nicodemus.

All you have to do is be reborn.

You can imagine for Nicodemus, it's like, okay, that's that's that's cute, but that's not particularly helpful.

Um, do you have three steps for me for how I might go about being reborn?

And of course, Jesus doesn't have three steps.

He very rarely has three steps.

He just gives them another metaphor, which is about wind here in a second.

And so he just he doesn't answer the questions, but what he's doing, he's pointing to another reality.

He takes the language out of rationality into the language of heaven, the language of a heart.

Being born again is a really interesting metaphor that Jesus is using for what we must do to enter into his life.

Because how many of you guys actually participated in your birth?

None of you participated in your birth, right?

You participated, but it's not like you consciously decided, I guess today's the day, right?

I guess this is it.

Here, let me let me help you out here.

There was nothing, you it was a gift that was received.

You think about it.

Birth is not something, there's nothing you can do about it.

It's a reality that you enter into.

You're responding to something that is being born from within.

It's a it's a recognition that something new is happening.

You don't orchestrate your own birth, you receive it.

And that's why Jesus kind of goes to this thing of like, listen, I gotta I gotta take you out of this operating system where it's all on you to figure everything out and to map this thing out.

I need to invite you into this new reality where I am I am waking you up from the inside.

There's a birth that is coming if you're willing to receive it.

You guys with me?

And so this is a gift that we receive.

We can't control it, you can't earn it.

It's a reality that we wake up into if you want to, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Okay, so let's hold that for a second.

So Jesus, or uh so Nicodemus, of course, has a couple clarifying questions.

So, how can a man be born when he's old?

Can he enter a second time in his mother's womb and be born?

So as you can, as you can see, Nicodemus is still up here.

He's still up.

All right, I need to kind of I need to picture this.

He's still up here in his mind.

Like, walk me through the mechanics of this, Jesus, right?

Um, I'm having a hard time.

Can you slow down?

I need to see your slide deck.

I need your PowerPoint presentation here.

And so Jesus responds to Nicodemus and he says, Not only must you be born of water, but you must be born of the Spirit.

You need to be born of water and born of the Spirit.

No, what is he talking about here?

There's it's likely that he's talking about born of water, meaning baptism of water, baptism of repentance.

You need to turn towards the Lord, but there's also something on your turning towards the Lord that he wants to do, and he wants to birth a new breath, a new wind, a new something, an unction, something to come out of your spirit that he's wanting to do.

Likely he was referring to Ezekiel 36, 25, and and years, hundreds of years before Ezekiel prophesied that there was a day coming where God said this, I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean, and I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you.

I will put my spirit within you.

So Ezekiel, he's prophesying there's coming a day where God will sprinkle clean.

He's gonna wash away your sins, the worst parts of your life, the parts of your life that you're not proud of, the parts of your life you can't get rid of, the parts of the life that feel tainted.

I'm gonna sprinkle that clean, and and I'm gonna put my very spirit within you.

You need a new spirit within you.

And so he says that's that which is born of the flesh is just flesh, but that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

How many of you guys know that you have a spirit with you're not just a body, you have a spirit within you.

It's a spirit given to you by God, right?

It's the most eternal part about you.

Your body will be, you know, when we come to meet Jesus, our bodies will be transformed, but our spirit is like the very essence of who God has made us to be.

We can either live according to the flesh or we can live according to the spirit, right?

So the second birth that we experience, we experience birth of the flesh, but the second birth is spiritual.

It's God's own life implanted within us, the interior, invisible, and eternal reality.

And this is why Jesus kind of doubles down on the poetic language.

He's like, Nicodemus, let me clarify this rebirth thing for you.

It's kind of like wind.

And Nicodemus is like, that's not helping.

And he says, listen, the wind blows wherever it wishes, but nobody knows where it comes from.

Nobody knows where it's going to.

So it is with everybody born of the Spirit.

So wind is this other metaphor that we kind of introduced here, this other metaphor that is elusive.

It's not, you can't easily map that out.

You can't take the two or three steps and put it into a formula.

You can't control wind.

You can't take wind and bottle it up in a mason jar and save it for later, right?

You can't, you can't decide when it's coming.

All you can do is pay attention to it and understand where it's headed.

All we can do when a wind comes is learn to open the sail and turn ourselves towards the wind.

Being born of the Spirit means receiving the new breath, the fresh breath of God's living presence within us.

Now, just pause for a moment here.

This is important that Nicodemus knows this.

He God is redirecting Nicodemus because Nicodemus is the Pharisee of Pharisees, and sometimes those who are closest to home have the hardest time understanding how to enter into the good news.

All right.

So if we're just park there, we're just gonna kind of flip back to the left to the gospel of Luke just for a second.

There's a story where Jesus unpacks that reality.

And in Luke 15, some of you guys know the story, it's a story that we know as the prodigal son.

And it's a story of two brothers and a father.

And we know it as the story of the lost son of the prodigal son.

It's actually the story of the two lost sons and the father who does everything he can to find them.

And so the story of the prodigal son is about two sons who are living at home.

One decides, I I'm I'm gonna rebel against my father, take everything that he has this inheritance.

I'm gonna take that early, I'm gonna run off, and I'm gonna figure out how to live without him, and with I'm just gonna take what he has and build a life on my own, right?

And he lives this recklessly, you know, uh um lavish life.

And it all kind of comes crashing down, and he realizes when he's squandered all his money, he's he's he's looking at some pigs on a farm and realizing, like, I wish I was eating what they were eating right now.

Like that's about the bottom of the barrel.

That's like lowest of the low.

And that's where he finds himself, and he wishes he could come back home.

So he does, he makes his way back home.

What does the father do?

He says, He says, I've been waiting for you, son.

My son who is lost is has now been found.

My son who is dead is alive, and he throws a party, right?

He throws a party for the dead or for the for the prodigal son.

But the other son is just as important a role in the story, and it's it's included in the story for a specific reason as for men like Nicodemus.

Because the older brother never left the home, but he for he forgot to know how to receive the gift of what it meant to be home.

And so he was home, but he was lost in and of itself.

How many know that you can be home in the house of God and still be lost?

You can be home in the house of God and still be lost.

And so the reason I point this out for some of so many of us, this is actually our story.

Your story is going to be two different ways.

See, there's two different ways to be lost, but there's only one way to be found.

There's two different ways to be lost.

Some of you have the story of man, you you you did it out.

You your life was off the rails, off the tracks, you were out, you were caught up in this and that, and there was a moment of realization, and and you had to come back to God.

God had to receive you back in in that rebellion and and make things right, make things clean, put his blessing and his robe upon you and call you son and daughter.

You are mine now forever.

Many of you, that's your story.

That's not my story.

Okay?

My story is the classic church kid story.

Do you guys know what I'm talking about?

I'm a church kid, dude.

I'm a card carrying member.

All right.

I have a certificate at home, just as church kid.

Church kid since 1983.

All right.

So I grew up in the church.

It's it's and I and I say that kind of tongue in cheek.

It's not a bad thing.

Um, I grew up in a home of faith.

I grew up on a home of worship and prayer.

I grew up in a home where I learned who God was from an early age.

In fact, it got so ingrained in me, just my faith in God.

It just, it was never, I have never actually questioned that.

It was never a thing for me to just like turn against God and question and just move out and do that whole thing, right?

So I made it all the way through junior high, high school, college, and like like God just knit me into his family, into his church, right?

To grow, to flourish.

And it's actually a really great story.

It's the story I want for my kids.

I want them to be able to walk with God with resilience and steadfastness, not feeling like they need to go chase all of the other attractions of this world, but knowing that they are everything they need is in Jesus, all right?

Any other parents with me?

That's what we want for our kids, right?

And yet, and yet, when that's your story, the danger is always being so close to home that you forget the joy of what it's like of just being with the Father and being at home and seeing what God is doing.

We can we can we can start to build our lives around this is what you do to be a good Christian.

This is, I go to church, I do the things, I say the prayers, I read the Bible, I serve, I give, I do the things, but then something can happen inside of us where I'm so close, but I feel so lost.

And just over the decades, this has all this has always been a part of my thing that I I I've been able to get so good on the outside of projecting an image, but within inside, feeling like God, but I don't want to forget.

Have I forgotten who you are?

Have I forgotten how good you are?

Have I forgotten what a gift it is to be at home with you?

Or do I see this as a religious duty?

Are you guys with me?

There's two ways to be lost.

But there's one way to be found.

And so the story ends in Luke 15, like this, where Jesus says to the older brother, come into the party.

He says to the younger brother, I'm throwing you a party.

Either way, the the the invitation is come into the party, come feast with me.

There is more going on here than you can see.

So Nicodemus, going back to John 3, Nicodemus, like the other Pharisees, he's struggling with the reality that he has been within the proximity his entire life.

He knows what to do.

He knows what to say.

He knows how to behave.

He knows what gets rewarded.

He knows what gets punished.

But there's something that is turning inside of him.

He knows there must be more than this.

And this is where Jesus indicates to Nicodemus.

What's happening inside of you and what needs to happen for everybody is there's something that needs to be born from the inside out.

I think he's declaring this over Nicodemus, and he's inviting us today.

If you want to see the kingdom of God, it doesn't matter how close you are, you must be born again.

Amen.

You must be born again.

So it's like a wind.

It's like receiving a fresh breath that wakes us up, right?

How many of you guys know that wind can do a lot of different things?

Wind can be refreshing.

And it can just really stir things up.

Right?

So it was kind of funny.

I was at a wedding a couple weeks ago, and uh it was a hot day, and everybody that day, it was an outdoor wedding, everybody was praying for wind.

Okay?

Everyone's praying for some cloud cover.

We're all sitting there, we're like, oh God, please don't let us bake out here.

You love us, please love us more than that, right?

Just let there be some cloud cover.

Just you know, a nice little weather prayer, right?

Tell me you guys do that, right?

A weather prayer.

It's okay, you can do weather prayers.

We prayed for, we prayed for cloud cover, and so we're out there and during the ceremony of this wedding, and and uh, and and the clouds came, and it's like, oh, this is this is fantastic.

This what a beautiful wedding.

The clouds came, and then uh, you know, uh, but then like, but then but then the clouds really came.

So we're kind of watching it at the ceremony.

We're starting to see in the distance some lightning strikes in the background, and we're like, oh dear, okay, God, let's reverse, chill out on that prayer.

You took it too far.

You took it.

I'm gonna dial that prayer back, let's let's course correct the prayer.

And so the pendulum started to swing from like a really nice, pleasant breeze with the cloud cover into something much different than that.

So here's here's a little backstory too.

Uh, that afternoon, my wife was the wedding coordinator, and so whenever my wife has a wedding coordinator, that I get to be the executive assistant, right?

That's my job.

So um I was with my wife for like three hours.

Um, we're there setting up these tables, uh, just the entire wedding reception, all the tables, all the decor.

Uh, the most uh uh meticulous, unbelievable design, the flowers, the placemats, the runners, the napkins, everything.

Just everything had to be perfect.

Three, three or four hours, just setting up this whole thing.

It was it was unbelievable.

And so what happens is right after the wedding, this really pleasant wedding, we start making our way over to the wedding reception.

And then all of a sudden, the wind decided it really wanted to be wind.

All right.

And we walk over there, I kid you not.

What took us three hours to set up was just wiped out in 30 seconds.

You get over there, just everything.

And so we're all just kind of looking around at this point.

I'm like, oh, well, that's a bummer, you know, number one.

But after kind of everything settled, you know, and it it's again, it's it's something you can't control.

It happens, you couldn't control.

After that happened, it was almost like a reset happened where everything was about the decorations, everything was about the setting and the design.

But once everything got wiped out and all you had was six foot-long white plastic tables, all of a sudden there was nothing else to look at but looking into each other's eyes.

It was the people now we were looking at and not the decorations.

Sometimes a wind is good because it resets the setting.

So what we were once looking at, now it gets redirected to something completely new.

Are you guys with me?

So wind can do a lot of things in the scripture, wind does a lot of things.

And I just believe this morning there's an invitation for us here today.

Some of you guys, um uh some of us, we've been journeying with Jesus long enough that things have started to get a little familiar.

And come on, I'm not the only one, I know that.

I'm not the only one.

Some of us, you just kind of know things of what you do in your faith, but sometimes the routines can turn into a rut.

Anybody?

Sometimes a routine can turn into what?

What what what do we mean?

What do we need when that happens?

What we need is the wind of God to come.

What we need is a rebirth from the inside out of God, I'm close to you, but I need something to be reborn from within.

And that's a prayer, and it's not just a one-time prayer.

Sometimes we read this passage, it's like, all right, I was born again 25 years ago.

Listen, we get to be reborn all the time into the kingdom of God.

We must be born again and again and again and again and again and again.

You can never be born again enough.

Because every time we step into the life of the kingdom, something else changes.

We get to see that this is so much more expansive than we ever thought it was.

The possibilities are endless.

Who God is is so much more than we think.

And some of us have become so familiar with a God that we barely know.