John 3:1-16 – The Gospel of John

John chapter three.

We're doing a series in John.

It just so happens that we we land this week at probably the most famous verse in the Bible.

But I want to draw us at our attention to something else that Jesus says before we get there.

In verse 8, he says, the wind blows where it wishes.

You hear it sign, but do not know where it comes from or where it is going.

So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

The road to becoming a follower of Jesus is rarely straight.

It's often complicated and messy.

There's no formula, no ritual, no rite.

It's different for everyone.

That's what makes it so wonderful.

Let me give you some stories of the wind of the spirit blowing where it will.

I'm going to tell you, first of all, about a young man.

By this point, he's 32 years of age, but since he was 16, he was after one thing: pleasure.

Wine and women and song, particularly women.

And at the age of 32, he writes this.

He says, There is a small garden attached to the house where I lodged.

And I find myself driven by the anxiety in my chest to take refuge in this garden where no one could interrupt that fierce struggle in which I was my own contestant.

I was beside myself almost with madness, with a madness that would bring me to sanity.

I was dying a death that would bring me to life.

I was frantic, overcome by violent anger with myself for not accepting your will and entering into your promises.

I tore my hair, I hammered my forehead with my fists, I locked my fingers together and hugged my knees.

I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to tears that now streamed from my eyes.

All at once I heard the song voice of a child in a nearby house.

Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl, I cannot say, but again and again the repeated refrain, take it and read it, take it and read it.

So I hurried back to the place where my friend Olympius was sitting, and I seized the book of Paul's letters.

I opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes fell.

It was this not reveling in drunkenness, not in lust or in wantonness, in quarrels or rivalries.

Rather, arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Spend no more thought on nature and nature's desires.

Romans 13, 13 and 14.

I had no wish to read more, and no need to do so, for in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart, and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.

That is the conversion story of Saint Augustine.

Let me give you another.

And when we had reached our destination, I did.

And yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought, nor in great emotion.

Emotional is perhaps the last word that we could apply to some of the most important events.

It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in his bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

That was C.S.

Lewis.

The final story I'm going to give you, you're not going to know the person, I don't think.

Some of you may.

Her name is uh Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

If anybody's in the market for a middle name, uh Champagne's a good one.

Don't do Prosecco.

Don't, it's not a good middle name, but Champagne's a good one.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

She was a professor of English literature and queer theory at Syracuse University in New York, and she writes this.

How can I tell you about my conversion to Christ without it making it sound like an alien abduction or a train wreck?

Truth be told, it was a little of both.

The language normally used to describe this odd miracle simply did not work for me.

I did not read one of those tacky self-help books with a thin coating of Christian themes, examining my life against the tenets of the Bible in the way that one might hold up one car insurance policy against all the others, and cleanly and logically make a decision for Christ?

While I did make choices along the way, they never felt logical, risk-free, or even sane.

Neither did I feel the victim of some emotional earthquake and collapse gracefully into the arms of my Savior like some holy and sanctified scarlet O'Hara.

That's just not my style.

Having been claimed by Christ's irresistible grace, heretical as it might seem, Christ and Christianity seemed imminently resistible.

My Christian life unfolded as I was living my normal life.

In the normal course of my life, questions emerged that simply exceeded my secular feminist worldview.

Those questions sat dormant until I met the most unlikely friend, a Christian pastor.

Had this Christian pastor not shared and but also lived out the gospel with me as his neighbor and friend over years and years, over and over again, not in some used car salesman way, but in an organic, spontaneous, and compassionate way, those questions might still be lodged in the crevices of my mind, and I might, at least not yet, have met the most unlikely of friends, Jesus Christ himself.

Jesus in our passage uses the term born again.

That has different resonances, I think, today than it used to.

When I spent a summer in Rwanda in Africa, born again was how they distinguish you from the local Catholics.

Oh, you're one of the born agains.

In Ireland, and at least maybe this is true of my family, that if you describe, oh, I'm a born-again Christian, you're you're one of the ones that takes it a little bit too seriously.

It's like everybody else is a Christian, but I'm a born-again one.

I'm a kind of slightly fanatical sect or subset.

You know, I might be kind of happy clappy when you know you enjoy singing.

You might have heard some of your family members use that term.

But when Jesus talks about to Nicodemus, about being born again, he's not talking about a special group within Christianity, a particularly zealous sect.

No, to be born again is to experience the new birth.

And that is the only way one can be a Christian at all.

The three stories that I read are stories of new birth, all different, all messy in their own way, but all describing what it means to be born again.

Let us examine this passage as to what it teaches us about that new birth.

Let's begin, first of all, by asking ourselves, who's it for?

Who's the new birth for?

Well, we begin at the start of the passage and we get some important information about the guy that's talking to Jesus.

We learn that his name is Nicodemus, but perhaps more importantly, that he is a Pharisee.

That is, he was part of the well-respected, strict religious sect.

Now, we here Pharisee, and if you've got kind of any uh any interaction with the Bible in your past, Pharisees kind of like the pantomime word, you kind of go boo hiss.

Uh you can think that the Pharisees are that, but they were well-respected, upstanding, very moral uh parts of uh of Jewish society.

He was well liked.

More than that, he was part of the Jewish ruling council.

Uh where it says in verse 1, a ruler of the Jews.

He was part of what's called the Sanhedrin.

That's a collection of 70 guys who ruled the Jews.

So he was politically connected, a member of the Jewish ruling council.

Later on in verse 10, Jesus calls him or says to him, Are you not the teacher of Israel?

Notice the use of the word the.

He doesn't say, ah, teacher of Israel.

He says, Are you not the teacher of Israel?

Really, what Jesus is saying, are you not the dean of the divinity school?

Are you not the Regis professor of theology?

Like the grand high poobah of all things God?

And you do not understand these things?

So he was a well-learned guy.

He was the dean of divinity.

And he comes to Jesus respectfully, calling him Rabbi, even though Jesus had no formal training, and claims to know something about Jesus.

He claims that he can perceive that the things that Jesus is doing are because he has come from God.

Verse 2, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher, come from God, for no one can do these signs, that is, the miracles, that you do unless God is with him.

Jesus' response in verse 3 can sound a little bit like a left turn.

Have a look at it.

Verse 3.

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

What is going what is going on here?

Jesus is saying, Nicodemus, you might have seen the miracles, but you cannot see what the miracles point to without the new birth.

Without God making you born again.

And what's more shocking is that Jesus is saying this to Nicodemus, a highly respected, politically connected, theologically astute, moral person.

He's saying to Nicodemus, you need the new birth.

You need to be born again, because without it, you cannot see the kingdom of God.

And so what does that teach us about the new birth?

Well, the new birth is not about making religious people.

You might think that the Christianity is all about making you a little bit more moral, tidying yourself up, ethically speaking, in terms of your lifestyle choices.

But that's not primarily what Christianity is about.

Christianity is not about making religious people.

Otherwise, Nicodemus would have no need of the new birth because he was an uber religious person.

Do you see?

Jesus is saying that your religious observance cannot make you see the kingdom of God.

And if the super religious need the new birth, what does that mean for me?

What does that mean for the rest of us?

It means that the new birth that Jesus is talking about here doesn't come by our merit.

It doesn't come by our morality.

It doesn't come by our religious fervor.

Who needs the new birth?

Everyone.

Everyone.

Your moral uprightness cannot gain you access to it.

Nor can your moral brokenness keep you from it.

Everyone needs the new birth.

But why?

Why is it necessary?

We've just seen that everybody needs it, but why do we need it?

Why did Nicodemus need it?

This question hangs over the passage as a whole, but let me just make one observation from the very top of the passage.

Have a look again at verse 1.

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 come from God.

We're told that Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night.

It's good that, isn't it?

Why?

Some have suggested that the reason why Nicodemus comes at night is because he's a bit embarrassed.

He doesn't really want to be seen with Jesus.

This hic teacher, controversialist from Galilee.

Nicodemus is coming from the metropolis of Jerusalem, and he he's a little bit embarrassed to be seen with him, and so he comes under cover of darkness.

I don't buy that.

Because when Nicodemus surfaces again, he surfaces twice in the in John's Gospel.

He doesn't seem to really give a rip what people think about him.

He's happy at the end after the crucifixion to be identified with Jesus.

He goes and asks for his body to bury it.

He's not bothered about what people think of him.

So I don't think that that's what's going on here.

No, in order to understand what John is driving at, I think we need to understand what John means when he talks about light and darkness, or day and night, because that's a theme in the gospel.

Remember, John chapter 1, what does the prologue say?

John 1 · chapter mention

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

That prologue, which is part of that kind of overture, setting up the themes of the gospel, will set up this day, night, light, darkness contrast.

Let me tell you where a climax is.

The climax is at the end of the gospel, which we'll get to in about a year's time.

So stick with us.

At the night of the Last Supper, where Judas, we're told, goes out, Jesus says to him, What you are about to do, do quickly.

And we read in John's Gospel.

And Judas went out from among them, and it was night.

And it was night.

Night or darkness in John's Gospel is the darkness of sin, of ignorance, of an inability to see who Jesus truly is.

Judas went out into that utter darkness.

And Nicodemus, here in our passage, emerges from that same darkness.

And what does he emerge from that darkness saying?

He's claiming to see something.

Do you see the irony that John's picking up?

He's in the darkness claiming to see.

We perceive, he says.

A little he kind of uses this royal we know, kind of slightly, slightly pompous, slightly arrogant.

We see something about you.

And Jesus' response to Nicodemus is, no, Nicodemus, you don't see.

You're still in the darkness.

You cannot see unless you are born again.

So why is the new birth necessary?

Reason number one, right at the top of the passage?

Because without it, we cannot truly see who Jesus is.

We are by nature blinded by the darkness.

That leads us on to ask another question of what does the new birth do?

What does it do for us?

What does it do for you who have been born again, who have had that experience of coming to know and to love and to trust the Lord Jesus?

What does the new birth do?

Let me give you three things from this passage that the new birth does.

First, linking back with what we've just seen, it gives you a new perception.

It gives you a new perception.

It's no accident that Jesus talks about seeing the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saw the miracles, that is the signs, but he couldn't figure out what they meant.

And so he he comes in essentially, that's what his question is.

His question is a kind of proud way of saying, I don't really get why you're doing what you're doing.

Can you help me to understand?

Maybe that's where you are.

You see, before you become a Christian, Christianity can seem very strange, even off-putting, irrelevant, boring.

The Bible can be dull, the songs can be tedious, the preacher can be coma-inducing.

But when we experience the new birth, all of those things take on new life.

You see them differently.

You see the Bible as it as it truly is, as something that is living and active, as the very words of God, that his voice is heard as you read it and it nourishes your soul.

The songs that you sing have new meaning and resonance.

They swell your emotions, they cause you to laugh with gladness or to weep with delight at what he has done for you.

And even some of the sermons aren't quite so intolerable.

Imagine for a second that you're watching something and listening to something else at the same time.

You've got the TV on and you've got something in your ears.

The visual always wins.

The visual will always capture your attention over what you're listening to.

One of the reasons why I think we struggle to get Christianity is because even though we might be hearing the gospel, hearing it Sunday by Sunday, Lord willing, here singing it, hearing it prayed, talking about it over coffee.

What might be happening is actually our eyes are focusing on something else.

Something that's drowning out all of the words.

Maybe your eyes are focusing on your desires or your career or your relationships or your fears or sex or money or power or comfort.

And all of that is filling the field of your vision and drowning out everything that you're hearing.

When the new birth comes, by God, it's like he switches the visuals.

He matches up the audio with what you're seeing.

So you see everything differently.

That's the first thing that the new birth does.

The second thing that the new birth does is that it gives you a new heart.

New perceptions.

Secondly, new heart.

This is so good.

Verse four.

So Jesus has just said, you have to be born again, uh, or else you cannot see the kingdom of God.

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

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

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

Jesus or Nicodemus' response is strange, is it not?

Ah, could I shrink myself down and and enter back into my mother?

She would hate that, and so would I.

I you know, it well, is Nicodemus an idiot?

No.

Remember, Nicodemus is a clever guy.

Nicodemus is actually being quite profound.

Let me explain.

Do you have anything in your past that you wish you would do over?

Decisions that you would make differently.

Things that you would do differently.

Things that you would say differently.

English poet John Clare said, if life had a second edition, oh how I would correct the proofs.

Every single one of us here has regrets.

We have bells that we wish we could unring.

But we can't.

And that's what Nicodemus is getting at.

He's saying But you can't start again, Jesus.

How can I get a new start?

Are you saying that I should climb back up into my mother's room and come out and relive it all again?

We can't do that.

Nicodemus is saying he can't go back.

He can't unring that bell.

And so Jesus responds to that in verse 5.

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

What does it mean to be born of water and the spirit?

People have suggested different things.

One of the suggestions is that it's physical birth and spiritual birth, not to kind of go too much into detail.

You can talk to Fiona, who's our OBGYN here.

But some people think, well, it's the water of the amnionic fluid, born of water, natural birth, born of the spirit.

But that's what Jesus is talking about.

Physical birth and then spiritual birth.

I don't think that's what's going on.

So let's move on from that.

Other church traditions and other people have said actually what this is, is it's baptism.

Baptism and conversion.

That you're born of water at your baptism.

So what Roman Catholics believe in terms of the uh the washing away of original sin.

I also don't think that that's what's going on here because that that sort of rite of baptism didn't exist when when or uh when Jesus is talking.

And so it would be strange for him to talk in that way.

No, Jesus is talking to somebody who's an expert in the Old Testament.

He's talking to somebody who would have memorized his Bible, that is, the Old Testament.

And so he makes an Old Testament allusion.

Let me read to you from the prophet Ezekiel.

Ezekiel 36, verses 25 and 27.

Ezekiel 36:25

And here, if you can listen and see if you can pick up the language that Jesus is talking about.

This is God speaking through the prophet.

He says, I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all of your uncleanness, and from all of your idols, I will cleanse you, and I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you.

I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and be careful to obey my laws.

What does it mean to be born of water in the Spirit?

It means to be cleansed and given a new heart by God.

A heart that is cleansed from sin, cleansed from those sins of the past, that guilt and that shame that we carry.

Jesus is saying the day is going to come when God will wash you clean of that.

And going forward, he will give you a new heart.

He will take your heart of stone that is hard to him and to one another that seeks its own desires because it has no life in itself.

And give you a heart of flesh that is soft and made alive by the Spirit of God.

Jesus is saying, Nicodemus, you can start again.

You can have a new start.

It comes from God, from his cleansing and his transforming power.

And of the spirit.

That is the second thing that the new birth gives you.

Do you need that?

The third thing that the new birth gives you is a new identity.

Verse 7.

Sorry, verse 6.

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

If you grew up in the in an Eastern culture, your identity is often bound up with your family, with the responsibilities and duties that you have to your family, to your parents in particular.

There are obligations that you need to meet.

And I am told and can imagine that that can actually be quite stifling, quite crushing if you do not meet those expectations.

But that's what your identity is.

It is bound up with your family.

In the West, things are different.

In the West, your identity is something that you create.

You are self-creating, self-expressing, individual.

You achieve it through your education, through your career, through the adulation of others on TikTok.

But Jesus is saying that the new birth isn't like either of those.

Those fleshly identities, that's not what I'm talking about.

That's not what I'm going to give you.

But if you are born of the Spirit, then your identity, who you are, at the very core of your being, is bound up with the Spirit of God.

Remember again, John's prologue.

What does he say?

He says that all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, family, nor of the will of the flesh, society, and yourself, but of God.

But of God.

You have a new, stable core identity.

So for the Christian, your identity, it's not imposed by your family, it's not achieved by your effort.

It's received by a gracious God who becomes your father.

So many of us are filled with anxiety and stress because what we're trying to do is prove to everybody that we are someone.

We're trying to achieve our identity.

The gospel is you don't achieve it, you receive it, and you live into the implications of it for your life.

That's what Jesus is promising.

That's the new birth.

New sight, seeing things differently, a new transformed heart, and a new permanent identity.

That is what the new birth achieves.

Last two questions.

How does it come and what's God's motive?

How does it come?

How does this new birth come about?

Nicodemus in verse 9 is still struggling.

Have a look down at it with me.

Nicodemus said to him, How can these things be?

And so Jesus kind of gently rebukes him.

Verse 10, are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?

And then in verses 11 to 13, Jesus assures Nicodemus of the kind of authority that he has to speak about these things.

He says, Truly, truly I say to you, this is verse 11, we speak of what we know.

Just pause for a second.

I think he's maybe poking fun at Nicodemus slightly there, because Nicodemus has just showed up and said, We know that you are a teacher come from God.

And Jesus goes, We know.

We speak of what we know.

And we bear witness to what we have heard, but you do not receive our testimony.

If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

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

Not going to dwell too much on those verses.

Essentially what Jesus is saying is, Nicodemus, I can't go any higher.

Because you don't get it.

He's saying, Nicodemus, I could tell you, I could describe to you what the cherubim and seraphim sound like in the throne room of the universe.

But you couldn't get it.

We speak of what we know.

But Jesus is gracious to Nicodemus, and so he gives him another analogy, another way of talking about it.

And it's a remarkable claim about who Jesus is.

It comes in verse 14.

Jesus helps him again.

He says, 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.

This sounds odd to our ears, but Jesus again is referencing a time in Israel's history, this time in the book of Numbers, uh, one of the first books of the Bible.

And in the book of Numbers, the uh the people of God, the children of Israel, were in the were in the wilderness and they were doing what the people of uh Israel did in the wilderness.

They grumbled.

It's not us sitting in judgment over us.

When was the last time you complained?

Well, 35 minutes ago, right?

We're grumbly people.

They were grumbling and so and they turned their hearts away from God.

Saw this God, he's not brought us out of here to die.

I hate following him.

I'm gonna go my own way.

And God, in order to discipline them and bring them back, he sends these snakes into the camp where they are.

And the snakes bite the people, and they are dying.

The venom is killing their bodies.

But the venom that was killing their bodies was only a symbol of what was killing their soul in turning from God.

And so God made a provision, he made a way of rescue for them to be saved and to not die from the venom that was in their system.

He told Moses to go to the forge and to make a serpent out of bronze and to put it up on a pole.

And he made this promise.

He says, anybody who looks at the bronze serpent will be healed.

They won't die.

And so Moses makes this bronze serpent and he holds it up and he encourages, he bids, he pleads, everyone look and be saved.

The people were sick and were dying, they couldn't do anything, they couldn't make their way crawling over the dust, you know, to rub it or to pray to whatever.

They just had to look and believe in God's promise that they would be healed, and they were.

Moses made an image of the thing that was cursing the Israelites.

And in the same way, when Jesus is lifted up on that wretched cross, he was made to look like the curse.

He was made to look like sin.

And we looked up and we saw the curse of death that should have been ours.

But for everyone who looks with the eyes of faith and trusts in the promises of God, that Jesus is God's provision, that as he is lifted up on the cross and you look with the eyes of faith, you are rescued from the curse.

That's how the new birth comes about.

You're rescued from the curse.

I'm in a bit of a Christmas carol fix.

You've noticed over the last couple of weeks, I've quoted Hark the Herald Angel sing the last little while.

It's because we're getting into that season.

We're thinking about carol services and things like that.

Remember Joy to the world?

You will.

We'll sing it a lot.

He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

Far as the curse is found.

Far as far as the curse is found.

Jesus' death makes the new birth possible.

Finally then.

What's God's motive in it all?

Here we come to the heart of the Bible.

John 3 16.

For God so loved the world that is God thus loved the world.

God loved the world in this way that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

The new birth, being born again, coming into the kingdom of God, being given that new sight, that new heart, that new identity.

It's all begun and grounded in the love of God for you.

Normally, when we say we love someone or something, it means that there is something in that person that we find lovely.

But that's not what's going on here.

Here we are told in verse 16 that God loved the world.

We noted when we were looking at the prologue that the world in John's Gospel has a very particular meaning.

The world in John's Gospel is not describing the big spinning ball in space.

That's not what the world is.

The world in John's Gospel is a moral term.

It has an ethical component to it, and it means this.

The world in John's Gospel is all of us, all of humanity in hostility to God.

It's all of us set in opposition to the God who made us.

That's what the world is.

And what do we read?

God loves it.

What's so amazing about the love of God in John 3.16?

It's not that the world is so big.

It's that the world is so bad.

And God loves it.

And how did he demonstrate that love?

By sending his son.

The son whom he loved in eternity past, the son who enjoyed the father's pleasure and delight in that perfect Trinitarian relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit that is marked by love outpouring from person to person, a community of joy and of love and perfect delight.

The Father and the Son and the Spirit existed in this perfect, boundless, and unmeasurable love.

And it is out of that heart of love that Jesus comes to earth and is lifted up on a cross so that when we look at him bearing our curse, we enter into the kingdom of God, we receive the new birth.

We are born again.

He dies that he might remove from our souls the venom of that edenic snake.

Satan.

That infernal serpent.

God does not love Mark Smith because I'm funny.

Or because I'm cute.

Don't laugh.

Or because I'm brave.

Or because I'm a good dad.

I'm rarely any of those things.

God loves Mark Smith because he loved his son.

He loves Mark Smith in all of his worldness.

In all of his selfishness, in all of his grumpiness and bad fathering.

He loves him so much in spite of all of those things that he gave that which was most precious to him, his one and only son, that I might be born again and know everlasting life.

That is how we get to see the kingdom of God.

That is what it means to be born of water in the Spirit, to be cleansed and transformed with a new identity as a child of God.

We look to Jesus, lifted up on a cross bearing the curse for us.

And we marvel with the eyes of faith at the love of God, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free, that sought me from eternity.