John 3:1-10

Hey, everybody. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for closing out the week with us as we continue through the Gospel of John

here in the third chapter.

A well-known chapter in some ways

the best known chapter, at least in part.

We open with a story again, found only in John.

And this is a good in some ways, it is good for us

that this is a story found early because we're going to see in this

a lot of John's storytelling style, and we're going to see

what John kind of does as he introduces themes,

and then as he works them out through some of the stories that follow.

This is something that is going to come up again.

And so,

we'll start it here today.

This is also there's a lot here.

This is a historic story.

It's gotten a lot of attention from the church through the years.

So, I'm I'm going to read through verse ten,

and then we'll see where we get with that.

And and come back to this to some thoughts.

Now, there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.

He came to Jesus by night.

And he said to him, Rabbi, we know that you're a teacher who has come from God.

For no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.

Jesus answered, I tell you the truth,

no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

Nicodemus said, how could anyone be born after having grown old?

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

Jesus said, I tell you the truth, no one can come

to the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit.

What's born of flesh is flesh.

What's born of spirit is spirit.

Do not be astounded.

I said to you, you must be born from above.

The wind blows where it chooses.

You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

So it is with everyone born of the spirit.

Nicodemus said, how can these things be?

Jesus said, are you a teacher of Israel?

And yet you do not understand these things?

So, John introduces us

here to a character that is not well known,

but a man named Nicodemus tells us a few things about this.

He is a leader of the Jews, a Pharisee, and he comes by night.

And that's significant

in the Gospel of John, we'll see the interplay of light and dark.

Down the road a little ways, but it's important to know

that very important, given what

John will tell us late in the gospel.

And he says, we you do these things, you've shown us these signs.

It's clear that you're a teacher who has come from God.

Now, this is high praise from the mouth of the Pharisee.

And we are left to believe

that Nicodemus is genuine,

is trying to have this conversation with Jesus.

And kind of typical of John,

the Jesus in John.

Michael.

He just he takes a hard corner here.

He says, I tell you, no one can see

the kingdom of God without being born from above.

And this occasions a misunderstanding from Nicodemus.

And we've said this before, but John loves misunderstandings.

He loves to use them as a way for Jesus to tell information,

get somebody confused, and then give them a lesson in the aftermath.

And that's what happens here.

One of the things I have discovered teaching Gospel John,

especially when you've got youth clean, is, you know, stories

about being born again are tough to people to keep kids along with you.

Right?

Because, just the literal

imagining of that is ridiculous.

And yet the idea of being born from above,

it is it is a head scratcher.

And I think that what John likes to do towards

that point that you're making, Clint, is he likes to keep us on our

the back of our feet, just like Jesus is doing in his teaching.

And I think actually the the gospel is written to affect

the same kind of spiritual stance as what may have been heard the first time.

And and so when Jesus offers a teaching like this,

without being born from above, we too, if we're going to take this passage

seriously, we're going to take Jesus's words seriously.

We're going to have to wonder to ourselves for what is being born from above.

What does that mean?

And a lot of our modern Christian traditions will will hook into

and use that language.

Being born again is a is a phrase that gets used often and that becomes sort

of, short code for us of,

of the things that a born again life looks like.

But if you can set that stuff aside for just a moment,

if you consider what Jesus is doing here,

he he's inviting Nicodemus

to reconsider that

birth is the entry point into God's providential plan

that that, in other words, being a Jew, in fact, being a teacher

of the Jews, that that while it may not be a negative,

it it's not fundamentally the only way into God's kingdom that

that the revelation of God is much broader than what Nicodemus may have thought.

And I think that here what we see Jesus doing is he's using this thing

that Nicodemus would have at first taken for granted, and he's now spinning it

into a teaching which is, on its surface, hard to understand.

But when we allow John to offer us some pastoral insight into it,

we begin to see that what Jesus is doing is inviting John.

Sorry.

Inviting Nicodemus to see that the gospel is far bigger and that Jesus's

revelation is far more powerful than what Nicodemus came to ask Jesus about.

I think one of the struggles of

the Bible in

general, but certainly a text like this that has become rich ground

in the theology of the church and the vocabulary of Christian life,

the idea of born again or born of the spirit,

we have unfortunately taken that as

a kind of litmus test or a kind of

we've argued about these things rather than letting them be mysterious.

We've tried to define what it means and then apply those definitions

to others, as if we could evaluate it in the church or in the world.

Who was and who wasn't born of the spirit?

Who was or wasn't baptized by water in spirit?

Born of water and spirit?

And I think

there's a sense in which that history hurts us

and to whatever extent we can, if we can put that on the shelf

when we approach the text and ask the core question,

what is Jesus trying to tell this man?

And it has something to do

with a new experience of life, to what is it to be born?

To be born is to be introduced to the world, to be given life.

Well, what is it to be born from above.

It's to be given a new life.

And rather than argue the details of what that means

and what the parameters of it have to be, and what does and doesn't constitute

that, I think

it make those arguments make it harder to enter the mystery of this tax.

And Nicodemus is a character that helps us get there.

What are you talking about?

A person can't be born again.

And Jesus says, well, if they're not, they're not of the kingdom.

That if if they're not born again, if they're not reborn,

then they don't yet

know the spiritual truth of a new life in in me, in Christ.

And then he says, it's like the wind.

You hear it, you know something of it,

but you don't control it and you don't contain it.

And so it is with the spirit and with the spiritual life.

And I think, again, if you can back up from some of the reservations

about what this text has meant or how it's been used,

and you can just read it here, it as Jesus

proclaims it, as John shares it with us.

I think there's really powerful stuff here.

What Clinton one of the other things we lose in that temptation

to go down that road, to think about what are the boundaries of what,

what's the definition of the born again life as opposed to the not.

But when we make that our prime interpretive frame, we miss?

Well, I think is a very helpful part of this text.

And that is the nature of what a believer coming to Christ or

or a, a seeker coming to Christ should look like.

And I think we see this here in verse two

when Nicodemus comes and tells Jesus, Rabbi, which is a title of distinct

and respect, we know that you're a teacher who has come from God.

This is a remarkable statement when we've already said, Clint,

that in this gospel the Jews are often referred to very actively.

And here we have a Pharisee who's chief among the Jews

as it relates to the keeping of the law, the the remembering of the law.

And here the man who is literally called leader of the Jews

comes to Jesus with a title of respect and with a question that that, you know.

But Bible scholars say we have all reason to believe

is is a legitimate, heartfelt, wholehearted question.

And I think that kind of spirit of humility

helps temper some of the vindictive language

that Jesus has against the Jews throughout the Book of John,

because here we have an example of one who comes to Jesus, a leader of the Jews,

who's asking a question and receiving an answer.

Now to be clear, the answer he's receiving is a difficult one.

It's not easily understandable.

And yet we're going to see Nicodemus more than just here.

And actually we're going to see some ways in which

he may be changing as his encounters with Jesus progress.

And I just think this does have something to teach us about what it means,

not just to hear these teachings and inquire what they mean,

but also to have the humility to come to Jesus with a legitimate question.

And even if the answer goes over our head,

there's something to learn from the Nicodemus who shows up in this scene.

Yeah.

And instead of pigeonholing the characters,

I think if we can think through the nature of the conversation,

hey, Jesus, we see

God, or I see God in what you do.

And Jesus says, well, to truly see God, you need to be born from above.

And Nicodemus says, I don't understand what that means.

How could that happen?

And Jesus says, unless it happens,

you actually can't see the kingdom.

You can't enter the kingdom.

You you can't be part of the kingdom because that experience of new life

is the way in which one encounters the living God.

It's mysterious.

And then Nicodemus says, how can these things be?

And and yes, you can read this as

as a story about Jesus stumping a religious leader

and that's a fair reading that may be in the text.

It will certainly be in other texts.

And it's a paradigm for the way John tells a story.

And it might be what's happening here, but I think alongside

that leave a little room for the possibility

that Nicodemus is encountering

a mystery he doesn't yet understand.

And as would be the case for all of us,

we would say, how can these things be I,

I don't, the human mind doesn't

comprehend the spiritual truth of Jesus Christ.

How can this be?

What does it mean?

Those are the right questions. Now

what they mean to

Nicodemus we'll have chance to speculate about in the future.

But I think don't treat this story

just as as Jesus arguing with religious leaders.

It may be that, but in this particular case,

I also think it's likely that it may be more than that.

I particularly light your comment about how

the core of Jesus's teaching here is that you can't rightly

see the kingdom in until, in some way, the kingdom lives inside you.

And to make that very, very simple, I think that this is

a little reductionistic, but it helps to illustrate the point.

It's a little bit

like when you say, you know, it's like learning to ride a bike, right?

Once you've learned to ride the bike, then there's an intuitive knowledge

of how to do it.

But if you're going to just explain to a child who's never done it

and you try to describe, well, you got to get up some speed

and then you have to keep your balance at the center, right,

so that if it's dark shifting, you'll shift your light.

The kingdom of God, as Jesus is presenting it here is something like that.

It's experiential.

You don't fully understand it until you've experienced it.

You can't speak of the kingdom until you've been in the kingdom.

You can't write a poem about this beautiful, beautiful place

if you've never been to it.

And it's just an idea to you until it's lived inside you.

I think that some of the interesting

juxtapositions of this text is we have an expert, a teacher, some

someone who knows the words of Scripture and even the moral applications of it.

But yet he doesn't fully understand the reality of the kingdom

because he's not yet

lived within the revelation, the full revelation of that reality.

And though he's come to Jesus now at night,

he has come with an openness to hearing the teaching of Jesus.

And now, you know,

as we continue on through this text, we're going to see how this deepens that.

Of course, we're going to approach

one of the most well known passages of all the scriptures.

But I think the fact that we have this juxtaposition of the expert

coming to Jesus,

the one who's asking this question about what is but who can't understand

it because he's not experienced the reality of the one who is revealing it

right in front of him.

That John setting all this up for us both to show us sort of this character

and the transformation that might come, but also as an invitation for ourselves.

This is a model of how a person might come to Jesus

and and at first might be more confused than compelled.

And we'll see where that goes.

I think we'll get more of it Monday in the next passage.

But it also is an example for us, or at least beginning

to give an example of some of how John tells stories.

When when Jesus says things in John, they seem to me at least,

to be almost simultaneously directed toward the character of the story,

directed toward the reader, directed toward the early church, directed

toward the enemies of the early church, or the the adversaries of the community,

and all of that's being unpacked at once.

And these there's just layers upon layers to some of the way

that John weaves this together and that makes it,

that can make it tricky to know which

part of the story that you're dealing with or what layer you're on.

And so,

we'll, we'll have a chance to unpack a little bit

more of that in the next part of the passage.

But there's a lot in here. Yeah, absolutely.

I hope that a small part of this conversation has been interesting to you.

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We will continue next week with the live study, and we look forward

to continuing on, deeper into this book and of course, closer to John 316.

So we can't wait to see you then. Thanks, everybody.