You Must Be Born Again

Well, good morning, Sacred Mission.

My name is uh Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here, and it's my joy and privilege to be able to bring God's word to you this morning.

I've taken a couple weeks off after Easter.

Uh praise God for our elder team uh to be able to bring uh uh the scriptures to you, continue this series.

I think both Pastor Jared and Pastor Tim did an amazing job uh for us serving you by the preaching of God's word.

But but I'm excited.

And usually when I take some time off, that means I go longer.

Uh I don't know that that's the case today, but uh buckle up, right?

Uh we're in we're in we're in a pretty thick passage of scripture.

There's a lot of theological uh uh things that we are working to understand and wrap our minds around that John is bringing us into.

And if we can kind of summarize what theological topic we're gonna engage with this morning, it would be known as the doctrine of regeneration.

The doctrine of regeneration.

That's what we're gonna be kind of talking about, and that's what John is going to use this Nicodemus discourse in 3.1 through 15 to help us understand what it means to be made alive in Christ.

But as John does, he he's prefacing this 3.1 through 15 with the verses of 23 through 25.

And in this preface, he's using it as a way to set up what he's about to communicate next.

We've been talking through this series how intentional and particular John was in what he recorded for his gospel.

And so he's going to set us up in 23 through 25 to bring home the point in 3, 1 through 15.

So as we dive into the text, we try to work through what he's seeking to communicate to us, we see in verses 23 through 25 this.

The people trust, but Jesus doesn't entrust.

The people trust, but Jesus doesn't entrust.

So before we dive in, let's linger here for a moment.

Let's think about what John's intent was in recording this aspect of his gospel.

You see, Jesus knew what was in the heart of man.

And because he knew what was in the heart of man, he would not entrust himself to them.

This is a major statement about the nature of man.

Right?

John's making a very major statement here about the sin and death that reign in the heart of man by nature.

Who are we by nature?

We are people of sin and death.

Jesus able to see with inside man, it causes him to not entrust himself to them.

It's not just, though, a major statement about us in our nature, it's a major statement about our relationship with God.

And here's what he's saying: we cannot have a relationship with God as we are.

Hear that this morning.

That same word believe can be you understood as trust.

Many trusted, believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.

So when did they kind of foster a trust in the name of Jesus?

It's as they were seeing the signs that he was doing.

Now, arguably, John's gospel is one of the most rigid chronological gospels written.

But there's vast portions of the life and ministry of Jesus that John doesn't put in there because he was curating every story for the sole purpose that as we would read it and engage with it, we would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

But he has given us two signs, right?

Two signs so far.

Pastor Jared preached on the wedding feast of Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine.

That was one sign John gives us.

Then Pastor Tim last week talked about the cleansing of the temple.

There was a sign of his authority.

Someone with authority would have to come in and be able to handle the temple court in the way that Jesus did.

But I think we can confidently assume that there were other signs that Jesus had performed and did throughout his public ministry that was giving people the ability to trust in his name.

The trust in his name, the belief in his name speaks to Jesus' growing popularity.

They were trusting, though, that he was either a prophet, a healer, a teacher, or even as Nicodemus says, one come from God.

Many people trusted in his name.

But notice the response of Jesus to those who are trusting.

He does not entrust himself to them.

Verse 24.

But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.

You see, what was in man caused Jesus to not entrust himself to them.

It was the sin and death that reigned in man that affected every aspect of their being.

And so the following of Jesus was growing, along with trust and faith in his name, but Jesus was not entrusting himself to them.

For Jesus to have relationship with man, there would need to be a radical transformation that had to take place.

And here's what I want us to try to get off the bat.

The transformation wasn't a change in their behavior.

The transformation wasn't a change in the way that they thought.

So let that set the scene for where John's going to take us in this discourse between Jesus and Nicodemus.

In verses one through eight of chapter three, we see this flesh produces flesh, spirit produces spirit.

We read in verse one.

We'll pause there real quick.

Who is Nicodemus?

Well, first the scriptures help us understand that he's a Pharisee.

They were very rigid.

They were very exact about their observance of the Hebrew law and the scriptures.

They were well known to be teachers of the law, but they were also well known for the ways that they added to Scripture and the ways that they saw it insufficient through oral and written tradition.

So where they would talk about having to do certain cleansing ceremonies, right?

They would get down to the nitty-gritty details of what kind of towel and motion and how this would actually take place.

In a modern day reality, we would see this in the way of principle versus practice.

The Pharisees felt or believed that the principle of Scripture was insufficient.

And so they inserted certain practices to supplement what they felt was lacking.

You've maybe experienced this in what we would call legalism, and you see it's a lot in different churches that are maybe hyper-conservative, unnecessary.

Like we're conservative biblically.

We're theologically extremely conservative, but we're not weird.

That's one thing, right?

Here's what I mean by that.

There's a biblical principle of modesty, right?

That's a biblical principle.

There's a lot of churches who feel like that biblical principle is insufficient.

They believe the scriptures themselves are insufficient.

So what do they do?

They supplement the scriptures with legalism by saying, well, your hair has to look this way, your clothing has to look this way, your jewelry, your bubble, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What are they doing?

At the core, they're saying the scriptures are insufficient, and we have to add to them to sub.

What do we create in that?

We create legalism.

And this is what the Pharisees were very well known for.

But he wasn't just a Pharisee, he was a member of the Sanhedrin.

So if we understand the cultural context of where Nicodemus and Jesus are, is that they are uh uh there in Jerusalem for the Passover feast, but Jerusalem was being ruled by the Roman Empire.

But what they allowed for the people of Israel to do was to actually practice their own judicial system underneath Roman rule.

And so the Sanhedrin were those who actually executed the law and the judicial system of Israel, even though they were under Roman rule.

And so Nicodemus wasn't just a Pharisee, he was also a part of the Sanhedrin.

Then this man knew, what does this help us understand?

This man knew the law.

This man knew the scriptures.

In fact, it's it's understood that a Jewish boy who was going through Pharisaic school would be able to actually quote the Pentateuch by age 12.

That's the first five books of the Bible.

Quote it.

I got John 3.16, that's about it, right?

So this man knew the word, but this man came to Jesus by night.

He possibly wanted to conceal his seeking out Jesus, desired to be covered by the darkness of night.

Or maybe his coming by night spoke to this custom and tradition that the Pharisees had that they would actually study into the evening hours to show themselves approved.

Either way, here's what we can trust in is that John will typically use specific circumstances to be able to communicate spiritual truths.

And so with him saying Nicodemus is coming by night, we want to take that literally, but we also want to try to understand the authorial intent that John's trying to communicate to us.

That Nicodemus's coming to Jesus in the darkness of night would speak to his spiritual state more than the setting of this discourse.

Nicodemus greets Jesus with a very complimentary remark, Rabbi, we know.

Now, rabbi was typically addressed as someone who not just knew the word and the scriptures, but they were gifted in their ability to teach the scriptures.

And those are two different things, right?

Our ability to know and comprehend versus our ability to transfer that information over to another person.

Rabbi was typically used for someone who would have that gift set.

But it was more than just your good teacher.

The actual root meaning of the word rabbi would mean my great one or my lord or my master.

It is this um the remark of honor.

And we know that Nicodemus seems to speak for a group because he says, Rabbi, we plural know.

Possibly there's others in the Pharisaic community that have kind of sent Nicodemus out to question Jesus, or maybe he's a kind of tribute representative of the crowd who's now following Jesus because they've seen the signs that he's performed.

But then we have to ask ourselves, but but what do they know?

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

You see, they're willing to recognize something unique about Jesus.

There's something that sets Jesus apart.

He's not like any other teacher or prophet or miracle worker that they had experienced before.

They connect the dots about the particular nature of Jesus, that he has come from God and that God is with him, but the darkness of their nature has arrested their ability to see that Jesus is God Himself, God the Son, God incarnate, come in flesh.

Reminds me of the psalmist who wrote in Psalm 82, verse 5 They have neither knowledge nor understanding.

Psalms 82:5

They walk about in darkness.

You see, Nicodemus claims we know, or better understood as we see.

But his blinded eyes have failed him, and Jesus is going to help him understand that here in verse 3.

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

Jesus responds to Nicodemus with the first of three truly, truly statements that he uses in this discourse.

And what Jesus is trying to communicate to us is I tell you the truth.

He is going to speak emphatically, he's going to speak with boldness, and he's going to speak with objective truth what he is about to communicate to Nicodemus.

Truly, truly, no one, unless one is born again, can see the kingdom of God.

Jesus was going to do for Nicodemus what he had come to earth to do for all of mankind, to dispel their darkness through the proclamation of truth-filled light.

And I love what Jesus does here.

He actually brings into question the qualification that Nicodemus is able to see anything at all.

Right?

He said, Rabbi, we know.

Or Rabbi, we have seen.

And Jesus says, Have you?

He makes the truthful claim unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Jesus confronts Nicodemus with the utter despair of mankind.

We cannot unless.

We have to wrestle with that.

Who we are as mankind, we are unable.

We cannot unless.

You see, we are utterly able, or we are utterly unable to see, to understand, to comprehend, to know anything about the kingdom of God in our natural state.

What is in man at birth is not even a measure of goodness that it might enable us to see, if only we might exercise it.

No, it's not a measure of goodness, it's utter darkness that forbids us to see it all.

You see, if Nicodemus was able to see the kingdom of God, would he have not fixed his eyes upon the king himself standing before him?

Nicodemus responds to the words of Jesus with a rather ludicrous statement.

How can a man be born when he is old?

Is he to climb back up into his mother's womb to be born again?

This is a surely ridiculous and hyperbolic statement.

But John is inviting us into a deeper spiritual understanding here.

To believe that man could change their sinful nature by their own strength and efforts should be as ridiculous to us as the sarcastic scenario Nicodemus presents.

In fact, Nicodemus, you, I would do well to understand that to be physically born again by such outlandish imagery is more feasible and likely of an outcome than for us to do anything to change our spiritual state.

Verse 5, Jesus answers Nicodemus with his second truly, truly statement.

Without even a pause to allow for reflection, he says, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

So Jesus says, First you cannot see.

Now he's saying you cannot enter unless, unless something beyond ourselves happens within ourselves.

We can neither see nor enter the kingdom of God.

Jesus is going to begin here clarifying what he means by being born again.

He's going to convey the means that produce the outcome.

And he says it's born of water and the spirit.

If we are to be born again, if we are to see and enter the kingdom of God, it will be by means of water and the spirit.

Jesus is quoting the words of Ezekiel here.

And this is some of the mastery of Jesus' uh dialogue with those of whom he would engage with in his public ministry.

He's talking to a Pharisee, someone who would be so intimately familiar with the scriptures, and he draws from a prophecy of Ezekiel about how men would be made new.

In Ezekiel 36, 25 through 27, he's the Lord speaks to the prophet Ezekiel, 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.

What the Lord is speaking to the prophet Ezekiel here in chapter 36 precedes just momentarily the vision of the valley of dry bones that we see in Ezekiel 37.

Where Ezekiel sees throughout this wasteland valley all of these dry bones, and God says to Ezekiel, speak to these dry bones that they may live.

God is setting up in Ezekiel 36 exactly how he would raise those dry bones to new life.

And what we're trying to grasp and understand in this moment is that we are the dry bones lying in the valley.

We are the ones that are encapsulated by death, decay, hopelessness, despair.

Jesus says in verse 6, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

You see, Paul helps us understand something.

The Apostle Paul, as he's writing to the church at Ephesus, he tries to give us this kind of anthropology of man and who we are in our nature before Christ.

And he writes these words in chapter 2, verses 1 through 3.

He says, And you, man, were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

Let me put this before you.

Because flesh can only produce flesh.

Death can only beget death.

Our sinful flesh will never be able to produce spiritual life.

This is why we so desperately need the supernatural intervention of the Spirit of God.

We need the Spirit.

To make us alive, to cause us to be born again.

It is the Spirit alone that is able to produce the spiritual life that we need to both be able to see and enter into the kingdom of God.

Church, we don't need behavior modification.

We don't need to change the way we think.

We need a new nature.

We need to be born again.

We need to be brought from death to life.

Verse 70 says, Do 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.

Jesus is speaking to the nature of the Spirit working in mankind to cause them to be born again.

And Jesus uses the analogy of something natural to help us understand and comprehend the supernatural working of the spirit in the life and heart of men.

And he uses kind of three parts of this analogy to help us understand the spirit's moving.

The first thing he says is that the wind blows where it wishes.

He's speaking to the sovereignty of the Spirit, to blow life into man unprovoked by anything within us.

It is the free will of God, the Spirit, to blow where it wishes.

Unprovoked by anything in us, to merit or earn his moving in our life.

The Spirit of God is sovereign.

He will move in who he desires.

Number two is he says, you hear its sound.

This is the sound of faith.

A confessed faith is the evidence that the wind has blown.

When out of the mouth of an image-bearer that Jesus is the Christ raised from the dead, we can have confidence that the wind has blown within them.

You see, this is the story of all those born of the Spirit.

According to His sovereign power, he has made us alive.

In his book, Finally Alive, author, Pastor John Piper makes this statement about John 3.8.

You see, out of our spiritual death, we will never be able to produce the spiritual life we need to see and enter the kingdom of God.

Flesh produces flesh.

Only the spirit can produce spirit.

Verses 9 through 15, we see earthly truths and heavenly promises.

Earthly truths and heavenly promises.

Nicodemus said to him, How can this be?

How can these things be?

Jesus answered him, Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

Jesus off the cuff seems perplexed about Nicodemus's failure to comprehend what he's saying.

But more likely, Jesus is posing a contrast to Nicodemus about his lofty status of being a teacher of the scriptures, yet he's unable to grasp even the most simplest of truths.

You see, we have to realize Jesus is presenting the teaching of the new birth as simplistic, rudimentary, foundational.

Yet we, you and I, like Nicodemus, still feel to understand it.

And so to help him and help us, he gives his last and final truly, truly statement in this discourse.

He says, We speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.

If I have told you earthly things and you don't believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

You see, earthly things is not representing like carnal or flesh.

That's tend to where our mind might go as we've studied the Bible.

What it means is lowly, simplistic, foundational.

Nicodemus, you can't you can't even grasp this rudimentary thing.

How am I supposed to give you these heavenly things?

And he says, he says, no one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.

You see, it's through him, through Jesus, who has descended from heaven, that he descends with him heavenly knowledge.

Jesus can speak of heavenly things, not because he ascended to heaven from a home on earth and then descended to tell others of his witnesses and experiences, but because heaven was his home.

And therefore he was inherently the fullness of heavenly knowledge.

He would reveal the kingdom, he would bring truth from on high, he would shine a light into our darkness.

Jesus' remarks to Nicodemus remind me of what Paul the Apostle wrote to the church at Corinth.

He said in chapter 3, verse 1 and 2, but but I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.

And even now you are not ready.

Nicodemus wasn't ready for the higher things because he could not even comprehend these earthly things.

He ends his discourse with Nicodemus in verse 14 through 15.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

He works to help Nicodemus understand the purpose of his coming.

And he helps him understand it through the story of Moses.

Again, Jesus, a masterful teacher and communicator, reaches back into the Old Testament to try and get Nicodemus to grasp the point.

And he uses the story of Moses in the wilderness and the bronze serpent from Numbers 21, 4 through 9.

And to summarize this passage, what we see is that Israel was frustrated with God, and they begin to blame God for their absence of water and food in the wilderness.

And God judges his people.

And he does so by sending serpents to bite them, and when they would be bitten, they would die.

And they saw this playing out and they begin to repent and they ask Moses to intercede on their behalf.

And God tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and put it on a scepter and hold it up, and that when anyone in Israel would look up to that bronze serpent, that they would be healed, that they would be saved.

You see, this teacher of the scripture would have been intimately familiar with this story, but something would be missing.

He'd failed to see that as a story, as a shadow, as a type of the Messiah to come.

Nicodemus was being challenged to turn to Jesus for new birth in the same way as the Israelites were commanded to turn to the bronze snake for new life.

Though Nicodemus was unable to fathom the earthly truth of the new birth, Jesus was inviting him to look to the heavenly promises that his death would secure for God's people.

That through the death of Jesus, you and I would be able to receive the life of Jesus.

Here's our main idea this morning.

We cannot enter the kingdom unless we are born again.

Seems like I'm the nose, doesn't it?

But this is what he wants us to understand.

We cannot enter the kingdom unless we are born again.

This, according to Jesus, is a fundamental and essential teaching.

The apostle John, who wrote this very gospel, would carry over this theme to conclude his first epistle.

In 1 John 5 4, he states this that for everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world.

And this is the victory that has overcome the world, our faith.

Look what John says there in the conclusion of his first epistle.

Same man who wrote this gospel.

Everyone who has been what?

Born of God overcomes the world.

And this is the victory that has overcome the world.

It's our faith.

What is the means of our overcoming?

It's being born of God.

It's being born again.

The new birth by the power of the Spirit causes us to overcome the world because it transfers us from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the glorious light of His Son.

And what does that victory look like?

It looks like faith.

It looks like faith, genuine and sincere faith, is the way that we experience being born of God.

The new birth always brings about authentic faith with it.

The life given in the new birth is a life of faith fundamentally.

These two are inseparable realities.

You must be born of the Spirit and believing you may have life.

You see, according to Jesus, the new birth enables us to see and enter into his kingdom.

It causes us to stop repressing the truth of the glory and majesty of God.

It causes us to stop pushing down his lordship and sovereign rule of creation.

Therefore, the new birth comes before the gift of faith.

Before faith is ever a thing to even exercise or express.

We are made new by the Spirit.

Because without the new birth, by the power of the Spirit, we would continue to blindly stumble through the darkness without any ability to apply faith to truth at all.

By the power of the Spirit, then, when we walk in new creation, we walk in new birth.

It's just like in creation of all things.

God created what we call ex nihilio, meaning out of nothing, God made all that is.

He's not like you and I.

He doesn't have to, if we're going to construct a home, well, we've got to have wood and we've got to have wiring and we've got to have cement for the foundation.

We cannot create out of nothing.

We are only able to create out of something, though God is beyond us.

And in his ability to create ex nihilio out of nothing, he does the same thing in us in the new creation.

Out of the nothingness, the void, the absence of anything within us, out of our death and despair, he resurrects new life and new creation in us.

In new creation, he makes eternal life, an abundant life out of the void and nothingness of our spiritual death.

Nothing can't produce anything.

Death can't produce life.

Only God can.

You see, but many of us reject this truth.

We reject the truth that we must be born again, that we need a new nature to be able to enter into the kingdom of God.

We believe that there's something within us that if only expressed or exercised, we would be able to ascend to the kingdom in our own merit.

It's not about a new nature, we say, it's about a new lifestyle, or it's about a new way of thinking.

The belief that there is anything good within us to leverage and secure our salvation utterly rejects the teachings of Jesus in the rest of scriptures about the nature of man.

We are depraved.

What is within us causes Jesus our res our Savior to refuse to trust Himself in relationship with us.

Yet many of us, we try to exalt ourselves to the kingdom through intellect.

We believe that if we just change the way that we think, if we just believe the right things, we'll be able to ascend to the kingdom of God.

This is what you're being pressed with every single moment of your life.

In the cultural moment we find ourselves in, every side is trying to convince you that if you think like they think, there's salvation on the other side of it.

If you just change the way you think about politics, if you just change the way you think about economics, if you just think uh change the way you think about minority people groups, if you just change the way you think uh about the ways that we should engage with social justice, if you just change the way you think about sexual orientation and gender, if you just change the way you think, on the other side of that is all the redemption that you've longed for, all the guilt that you hold because you have sinned against one another will be absolved if you just change the way you think.

They're promising salvation, and they're unable to deliver on any of it.

But it's not just confined to some cultural worldview.

We do this in the church.

If you just have theological precision, you'll be saved.

And we pride ourselves on being right.

We pride ourselves on having the right answers for the right questions, and in that we can find salvation.

I want to share a story about a pastor here in this city.

I started engaging with this brother several years ago, and he was from a very, he had a theological education from a very reputable seminary, one I like jealous I didn't get to go to.

He was being planted through an amazing network.

As we would talk to this brother, he had every answer nailed down to such precision, such beauty.

It didn't matter what question you answered him, he could give you the truth.

But there was something off with this brother.

And I remember sitting there across the coffee table pleading with him not to plant a church.

He wasn't ready.

Not too long after that meeting, he left his wife and children to chase after his own sexual perversions.

And if you look at him now, he's speaking completely different answers than he did three years ago.

He had theological precision.

He could give you the right answers.

But everything that's coming out of his mouth, the sound I hear, tells me the wind did not blow within his chest.

We should be terrified of that.

As a church who loves great theology, as a church who loves to feed you the answers to life's questions, regurgitating what you hear does not make you born again.

But some of us, we don't try to do it through intellect, we try to exalt ourselves to the kingdom through achievement.

You see, if we're just able to modify our behavior, if we're just able to start doing the right thing, we'll be able to ascend to the kingdom in our own strength.

What are we saying when we believe that, when we function in that way?

We're saying, Jesus, we don't need you.

Jesus, we don't need you to stand in our place as our substitute on the cross.

We've got this.

I can work in my own strength, I can do the right things, I can pull myself up by my bootstraps, I can make it into the kingdom.

But the Bible has a very strong posture against self-righteousness.

Self-righteousness, the belief that we can earn the favor of God through our own works, never draws us intimately near to the Father.

It always banishes us from his presence.

Because we can't earn that.

We can't do it in our own strength.

We cannot ascend to the kingdom through right behavior.

There was a term coined in 2005 called moralistic therapeutic deism.

I'll say that again.

Moralistic therapeutic deism.

It was coined in 2005 by Christian Smith and Melina Denton in their 2005 book, Soul Searching the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

And what they did is they tried to, they did an extensive research project to try and identify the beliefs of American teenagers, many of whom would call themselves Christians.

And they came up with five core beliefs.

I want to read them to you here.

Number one, a God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.

Number two, God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

That's number three.

Number four, God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.

Number five, good people go to heaven when they die.

We believe that, don't we?

In some way, we convince ourselves.

I think in some way we use this as a means to sedate our conscience, to not have to wrestle with the truth of the scripture that there aren't good people.

There's born-again people, and there are those who are spiritually dead.

We don't go to heaven because we're good.

We go to heaven because we're born again.

We don't go to heaven because we did all the right things.

We go to heaven because his righteousness is given to us by grace through faith.

You see, whether we believe we can ascend through intellect or we believe we can ascend through our own strivings, we have to realize, church, our efforts are vanity.

They're vanity.

At best, they are narcissistic sentiments that we use to convince ourselves deep down we really are good people.

And Jesus owes it to us to welcome us into his kingdom.

The effort man expresses to exalt himself would be the means by which Jesus himself would be exalted on the cross.

You see, Jesus was exalted on the cross to display our true nature.

Do you want to see what's inside man?

Do you want a window into the soul of man?

Look at the brutality and gore of the cross.

If God desired to put on display what was within us, if God desired to make an exact portrait of why Jesus would not entrust himself to man, it's seen fully and evidently in his cross, in a pierced, bruised, torn apart, shredded fleshed Messiah.

The nature of man is not rainbows and butterflies, it's not some blue eyed, hippie, docile, effeminate Jesus just stroking a sheep in a pasture.

The nature of man is a pierced Messiah hung on a cross to die.

That's the nature of man.

That's why we need a new nature.

That's why you and I need born again.

Flesh produces flesh.

Or as most truly seen in the cross, death produces death.

Sin comes forth from our nature, and the cross is the fullness of the nature of man on display.

But thanks be to God, Christ didn't stay dead.

In his burial and glorious resurrection, he ushers into us life.

We can have life because Jesus is alive.

We can be born again because, as the scriptures reveal to us, that he is the firstborn among many brothers, that he leads this triumphant march of those who have been born again by the power of the Spirit and whose inheritance is the fullness of glory and reconciliation with the Father, that we might live with him forever.

That's where our hope is in a resurrected Messiah that gives us a new nature by the power of his spirit, not because we've earned it or because we deserve it, but because he's merciful and gracious and he loves us.

So my hope for us sacred mission is that we would be a people of the new birth who live by faith.

Let us not be a people who just talk to one another about behavior modification or right thinking, but let us be a people who preach the new birth and let us be a people who live by faith.

I actually think Nicodemus is such a beautiful portrait of this reality.

I believe Nicodemus experienced the new birth.

I have hope in that.

Maybe not that night, maybe not through that discourse, but I believe God was merciful to Nicodemus.

And here's why I believe that.

Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about 75 pounds in weight.

Where do we find Nicodemus here?

He's at the foot of the cross.

Jesus challenged Nicodemus to gaze his eyes upward, to find life.

And where do we see Nicodemus in 19?

Fixing his eyes upward at the crucified Messiah, standing at the foot of his cross.

Is that not powerful?

Does that not give us and fill us with hope?

Nicodemus had been challenged to turn to Jesus for new birth, and he did.

You see, I believe Nicodemus was able to come out from under the cover of night to see the Messiah exalted on the cross, to see Jesus exalted to his rightful place of glory.

Sacred mission, may we be a people who see and enter the glorious kingdom of Jesus by the power of his life giving spirit.