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Well, Drew and I would often joke with each other that there are many situations in pastoral ministry that there’s not a seminary class for. One of those classes that doesn’t exist is filling the pulpit right after your pastor and mentor passes into glory.

So with that in mind this morning, I’d like us to take a look at John chapter 3, a passage that’s probably familiar to most of you. You’ve probably heard it before. I felt like it’s a good time, whenever we have big shifts in our lives—big shifts in the life of our church, big shifts individually—to go back to basics a little bit. It doesn’t really get back to basics more than John 3.

In this passage, Jesus has an interaction with Nicodemus, who’s a Pharisee, part of the ruling class of the Jews. The phrase that sticks in our minds from this passage is, “You must be born again.” You undoubtedly have probably heard that at some point—”born-again Christians,” that sort of phrase. The great evangelist George Whitefield, as he did his evangelistic journeys throughout the New World in the First Great Awakening, would have that as his resounding cry: “You must be born again.” That’s a message that’s at the heart of the gospel, and so that’s what we’re going to focus on this morning.

So, let’s give ourselves to the reading of God’s word, starting there in John 3, verse 1.

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

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born.”

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

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

This is the word of God.

Father, thank you for your grace to us, that this morning you are here. And this morning, you remind us by the power of your Spirit that we must be born again. We must come to life not through any effort of our own, but through the working of your Spirit. May you give us eyes to see this morning. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

This passage, as we start, the focus of the sermon this morning is that I can have new life in Jesus. Having a new life in Jesus starts in different places for everybody. Everybody has a different story. You know, when I was a newborn, Drew baptized me almost 30 years ago, and I grew up in the church and that was my experience. There are other folks that maybe you know or have heard of that had a very difficult childhood and life, and struggled with all manner of things before they came to Christ later. The road to Jesus, the road to new life, is different for each of us.

But I think what is true of each of us is that we all come with questions. That’s where Nicodemus starts. As Nicodemus comes to Jesus, he makes more of a statement than a question, but he’s coming uncertain about who Jesus is. He’s coming with a desire to know more about Jesus, his life, and his ministry.

Notice how Nicodemus goes to Jesus. Usually, if we’re asking questions to somebody we know, or we want to get an answer from somebody in an expedient way, we go and we ask the question in the middle of the day, in the middle of the business hours, 9:00 to 5:00. We have the phone call, we have the coffee conversation, we go to lunch. I don’t think we usually go and ask people we know questions at 2:00 AM. But that’s essentially what Nicodemus does. He goes at night to Jesus.

There’s probably a lot going on there. Nicodemus is probably concerned about his reputation, about what the other Pharisees and ruling folks in the Jewish system would think of him interacting with Jesus in this way. Maybe for some of us, we fear that if we go to Jesus with a double standard, or with a doubt in our mind, or a concern for how it looks, that Jesus will reject us. We worry that because we’re not coming with pure resolve, Jesus will slam the door and not have anything to do with us.

But is that how Jesus interacts with Nicodemus? No. Though Nicodemus is coming to him at night, he engages with Nicodemus. He has this extended dialogue with him about the new birth and the new life in him.

I think that’s instructive for us because, oftentimes, we’re embarrassed to ask people questions. Partially because we don’t want to reveal our own lack of knowledge, or we’re insecure in some ways, or maybe we don’t want to have our reputation messed up in some way. We often hesitate to ask questions. But what Jesus does with Nicodemus, and what he does for us, is that he welcomes us to ask questions as little children ask questions.

If you have a good relationship with any child in your life—whether it’s a niece or nephew, a grandchild, or if you’re a teacher or a coach—once a kid is familiar with you, what starts to happen? All the questions start bubbling up, and they start asking you questions. I was talking to Matt Schwarzkopf yesterday, and we were talking about fatherhood. We were talking about how amazing it is that once you have kids, suddenly things as small as ants become really interesting. Because your kid walks up to you and is like, “Oh dad, look at these ants! They’re amazing. Where are they going? Where are they coming from?” Ordinarily, we’re just walking, stepping over the ants, maybe we’re just trying to kill the ants and get rid of them. But our kids are getting down on the ground, looking close, and asking questions out of curiosity, out of just a desire to know.

Jesus would like us to come in that same way. But even when we don’t come in that same way, he still says, “Come, ask your questions. I’ll answer them.” Now, the way he answers them might be in ways that we’re not comfortable with and that we don’t understand quite yet, but he still engages. He still draws near to us in the reality of our questions. So this morning, as you’re questioning Jesus—maybe because of the reality of the last few weeks, or because of another issue in your life, or maybe you’re coming to Jesus for the first time and you’re wondering, Who are you, Jesus? What’s up with you? What is all this stuff?—he says, “Come, ask, explore.” He doesn’t push us away, but he draws us in and he welcomes those things.

So the first step towards new life in Jesus is we can go to Jesus with questions. This is a place that is question-safe, so to speak. Questions are good.

As we look at Nicodemus’s statement/question there: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.” That seems fairly straightforward. But then look at Jesus’s reply there in verse 3: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” That seems like a bit of an odd response. Not much of that has anything to do with what Nicodemus said. So if you’re Nicodemus, you’re probably like, What is going on right now? And that’s basically what he says: “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus said. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born.” Nicodemus might be standing there wondering, Who is this guy that I just wandered up to? Like, this is insane that he’s saying this to us right now. But Jesus doubles down, right? And he responds yet again: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

I think the reason that Jesus’s response catches Nicodemus off guard is because Nicodemus is coming and he’s saying, “You know, this is who we’ve seen you to be in your public ministry. We see that you’re doing these miracles. We’re recognizing that there’s a relationship between you and the Father, that you are coming with God’s power to do these things.” But he hasn’t quite made the connection to Jesus’s true identity, and he hasn’t really even made a clear connection in himself in terms of what his real need was, and the real reason why he was coming to Jesus.

Jesus, in typical Jesus fashion, doesn’t often answer the question that’s asked, but he goes to the root of the real reason why somebody’s interacting with him. The real reason Nicodemus is coming is not just to establish that Jesus is from God, not just to establish that he’s doing miracles, but there’s a sense that Jesus is going to the real need—that Nicodemus needs to be born again.

So Jesus lasers in on that reality. The issue here is not just knowledge of Jesus, not just knowledge of how his miracles are working, not just knowledge about what’s going on with his ministry. The real issue at stake here for Nicodemus is to know God, and to be born again through the power of the Spirit, through the power of Jesus’s sacrifice and his resurrection.

Nicodemus is struggling with this. He’s not quite catching on. He’s not quite coming to Jesus with a full understanding of faith and what it means to be born again. I think if you’ve been a Christian for any amount of time, you recognize that that’s how each of us comes to Jesus. Especially if you grew up in the church, sometimes, you know, we know the Bible well, we know the Sunday school Bible stories really well, we know the liturgy, we know corporate confession of sin, we’ve memorized scripture, we’ve been to VBS, we’ve done the things. And we confuse the head knowledge of being a Christian with a transformed life—that we’ve been actually made alive, that we’ve been given the new birth through the power of the Spirit and the working of Christ.

That might be where Nicodemus is because he’s a Pharisee, right? So he’s of the highest level of religious education in the ancient world, and he’s a leader of the Jewish ruling council there. He’s a guy who has serious religious cred, so to speak. He’s been to seminary, he’s ordained, so to speak, in that time period. But he’s missing the point. He’s not seeing the reality that his biggest issue is that he’s spiritually dead and that he needs spiritual life.

Sometimes when we talk about Jesus and as we look through the scriptures, what really draws our attention is the miracles that he does: the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the 5,000, turning the water into wine. Those things captivate our imaginations. But those signs—and those are maybe the things that are capturing Nicodemus’s attention, right?—those signs are never enough, and they were never meant to be enough. Because those signs are always meant to point back to Jesus, showing that the power he displays in those areas reveals that he has the power to bring spiritual life to those who are spiritually dead.

So while the knowledge of Jesus, the knowledge of his power, the knowledge of his activity in his ministry, and knowledge of scripture is wonderful and necessary and good, it’s only half the picture. All of our deepest need is to recognize the reality that we’re dead in our trespasses and sins, and that we need new life in Jesus—a new life that only he can provide.

So you must be born again. And it’s okay to be halfway there. It’s okay to have a small kernel of faith that hasn’t quite sprouted yet, because that’s where we all start. It’s the power of the Spirit that draws us and brings us to new life, gives us all that we need, and produces the growth in us. So though your faith might be half-baked like Nicodemus, still come. Jesus doesn’t reject you. He says, “Come and live.”

So a question that arises after that, maybe perhaps for believers but I think for everybody too, is this question of: Have I been born again? Now, that can come across as a “check yourself and make sure you’ve done enough to be born again,” right? That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s the Spirit that makes us alive.

But there is a good reality of asking yourself that question: Do I think I’m a Christian just because I grew up going to Sunday school and VBS? Do I think I’m a Christian because I’m a member of a church? Do I think I’m a Christian because I go to church on Sundays and read my Bible throughout the week? Because all those things are great and helpful, but they don’t make a Christian. It’s the power of the Spirit bringing you from death to life that makes you a believer.

That’s part of what Nicodemus is struggling with because he is trying to approach faith as something that he can accomplish on his own, so to speak. We see that in Jesus’s response: flesh leads to flesh, it’s the Spirit that leads to spiritual understanding. That goes back to what Augustine would say in various parts of his writings hundreds of years ago. He would say faith precedes understanding. In order to understand the gospel, in order to understand the person and work of Jesus, faith must be there. There’s a lot of intellectual knowledge that we can get right. There are a lot of great scholars with no faith that have a really good grasp of the content of the scriptures, but they don’t have a good grasp of the point of the scriptures. The point of the scriptures is the Lord Jesus Christ—that he came, he lived, he died, and he rose again in order to bring sinners to salvation, sinners back into relationship with God.

So right understanding of the gospel, right understanding of the work of God in our lives, begins with faith. And that’s a faith that is given to us by the Spirit of God.

So the question of, well, how do you know where you’re at? How do you know where things are working? There we go to Jesus’s response in verse 5: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

The reality of being someone who has been brought from spiritual death to spiritual life is that we’ll start to see the reality of the Spirit’s work in our lives. Think of the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. If you’re seeing the reality of those things in your life—and they might be small, right? You might still really be struggling with the opposite of the fruit of the Spirit—but as you see the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control), as you see those things bubbling up in your life, hey, that’s happening. That’s what Peter tells us: if these things are yours and increasing, then you can be confident of the reality that Christ has brought you from spiritual death to spiritual life.

That’s not to say you should be fruit detectives. Have you heard that phrase before? What I don’t want you to do is walk around with a magnifying glass observing whether or not you have spiritual fruit enough in your life. That’s not the point of this. The point of this is to recognize if the Spirit is at work and growing, and you recognize, “You know, I used to be a really angry person, but I’ve noticed over the last six months, over the last couple of years, I’m way less angry than I used to be. I used to really struggle with fear and anxiety, and I still do, but it’s getting less and less, and I’m learning to trust Jesus more and more. I used to be really impatient about life and where I’m going and what God’s doing, but I’m finding that I’m becoming more and more trusting in the work of God around me.”

Because the reality of sanctification, which is God’s work to grow us into Jesus, more like Jesus, it’s progressive. On this side of heaven, sanctification never stops. It’s always going. You can always be better. So we’re going to drive ourselves insane if we’re hanging out with our magnifying glasses trying to figure out where our fruit’s at, and how much we have, and how big it’s growing.

So it’s encouraging to us, in my mind, that if we see these marks, these fingerprints of God in our life, that there’s growth. There’s been change, that the Spirit is at work. I find that immensely encouraging to look to Jesus more and to be excited that, hey, I’m not perfect, and Jesus frees us to be imperfect. He frees us to acknowledge the reality of our sin—not so we can hang out in our sin, but so that we can name it, recognize it, and have the freedom to grow, the freedom to love others, the freedom to acknowledge where we’ve been wrong and to ask for forgiveness. Those things are all part of this new life that Jesus is bringing to us through his death, his resurrection, and through the indwelling Spirit that he gives us.

The opposite is also true, right? Flesh produces flesh. If we’re guided by the flesh, we’ll be in this place of darkness and hardship that’s struggling to understand. What do we do with that? Maybe this morning you’re looking at your life and you’re like, “I don’t see those fruits that Noah just said. I see a whole lot of fleshiness.” What do we do with that? Well, the hard news of the gospel, the bad news of the gospel so to speak, is you can’t do anything about it.

But Jesus can. And he promises that.

In the last part of the passage here: “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

In Numbers, there’s a story of the Israelites being encamped, and venomous snakes are biting some of the Israelites. The solution is that they take a bronze serpent and put it on a pole in the middle of it, and all who look on it were healed and cured from the life-threatening reality of the snake bites.

Here, Jesus is making a connection between that bronze serpent in the wilderness and himself. He is saying that he is the one who heals us from the poison and the reality of sin. As we look to him as the bronze serpent who has been lifted up to bring salvation to the people of God, as we look to him, he will bring healing. He will take us from death to life. He will rid us of the poison that infects us.

So friends, we can have eternal life. Not just a new life, not just self-improvement, but eternal life—a life that doesn’t fade, a life that doesn’t leave us. Because it’s a life that Jesus has purchased with his death and his resurrection for our sakes, so that we might be united to him, that we might behold him forever in glory.

So as you ask that question this morning: Am I born again? Am I too fleshy? Look to Jesus. He is your hope, he is your salvation, and he says come to him. Just as he doesn’t turn Nicodemus away, he doesn’t turn you away this morning. Wherever you’re at, go to him, find rest, find eternal life. He offers it to you for free.

Father, thank you for your grace that you love us. We thank you that in Jesus, we have all we need. We thank you that you give us newness of life in Jesus. We pray that we would take hold of that, that you would heal us from all that is wrong with us, heal us from our sin, and that you’d bring us to greater godliness as we look to you, the author and perfecter of our faith. May you fix our eyes on Jesus this morning. May he give us all the joy and satisfaction we need. We ask all these things in Jesus’ mighty name, Amen.