Sermon Tone Analysis

A couple of months ago, Annette did something absolutely terrible.

She really thought she was doing something to help me out, and I appreciated the heart behind what she did.

And that made it easier for me to forgive her.

And I really thought I’d gotten past it, but as I was preparing today’s sermon, which is the beginning of a series I’m calling “Time for Something New,” the horror of what she did then came rushing back to me.

And so, I suppose I’m not really past it, after all.

Now, you need to understand that, while I’m calling her out publicly today about the pain that she caused me, we’ve had private conversations about it before.

And I made known her misdeed in the semi-public court of Facebook opinion when she did it.

So, consider what I’m doing now as kind of bringing her misdeed before the church.

I hope that doing so will prove therapeutic for both of us.

Perhaps you’ll know better how to pray for us.

What happened was this: I went into our bathroom one morning to brush my teeth, and I saw that she had thrown away my tube of toothpaste, when it still had a couple of days of toothpaste left in it!

Now, I don’t know about you guys, but one of my greatest joys in life is to squeeze the very last ounce of toothpaste from a tube I have been carefully flattening in the previous weeks.

I get great satisfaction from knowing that I got every penny’s worth of toothpaste from the tube.

And I get great satisfaction from putting a fresh, new tube on the counter to use the next time I brush my teeth.

So, when I walked into the bathroom that day, knowing I had two or three more brushings to go before I got to toss out the old and bring in the new, what I saw in our bathroom nearly brought me to tears.

There in the bathroom trash can lay the flattened and nearly-but-not-completely-empty tube, and a fresh new tube was standing up in the glass with my toothbrush.

At least, I assume it was new.

There was no way to tell, because I wasn’t the one to take it out of the box and put it in the glass.

And, what’s more, I’d been cheated out of the satisfaction of actually finishing the old tube.

Marriage is hard, y’all.

Especially if you’re married to ME.

And, yes, I know the toothpaste thing is a bit silly.

And, yes, honey, I DO know you were doing something nice for me.

And, yes, I’m kind of an idiot for bringing this up in front of everybody at church, although I DID warn her that I’d be doing so.

And the reason I have brought it up is that I want you all to be thinking about that experience of opening up a fresh, new tube of toothpaste.

Maybe you’ve never lived in a new house.

Maybe you’ve never had a new car.

Maybe you’ve never even worn completely new clothes that you knew had never even been tried on by someone else.

But everyone has opened a new tube of toothpaste.

Or a new container of coffee.

Or a new bag of potato chips.

There’s something special about new things.

They smell different.

They feel fresh.

They feel like they’re full of possibilities.

That’s what makes New Year’s Day so special.

We look — somewhat arbitrarily — forward to a new calendar year, and we think, “Things are going to be different this time around the sun.”

We think of the possibilities that are open to us.

And we hope that maybe we won’t make the same mistakes, that maybe we’ll be better versions of ourselves.

Actually, I think we’re wired that way.

We were, after all, made in the image of the God who specializes in doing new things.

And so, for the next nine weeks or so, we’re going to take a look at some of the new things that come about because of that child whose birth we celebrated last Sunday.

Because the Creator of the universe came to live among us as a man and then to give Himself as a sacrifice for we who have rebelled against Him in our sins, we who follow Him in faith have received new hearts and a new Spirit.

We have been made into new creatures and given new names.

We have new life in Him because of the New Covenant that God has made with mankind.

And we who have accepted the terms of that conditional covenant are subject to a new commandment.

Having been reconciled to God in Christ, we look forward to the day when, in heaven, we will learn a new song of praise to Jesus in heaven.

We look forward to the day when the New Jerusalem descends upon the earth.

And we anticipate the day when the heavens and earth are made new by Him.

But all of this, including the promise of new hearts and a new Spiritthat we will study today, begins with new birth.

Jesus talked to the Nicodemus, the Pharisee and religious leader in Israel, about this concept in chapter 3 of the Gospel of John.

Perhaps you recall that Nicodemus had come to Jesus to try to understand more about this man who had been performing miracles and teaching with the authority of God Himself.

Nicodemus seems to have recognized the hand of God in Jesus’ miracles, and he understood that the miracles were intended — just as miracles in the Old Testament were intended — as signs that authenticated the God-inspired message of the one who performed the miracles.

In other words, the miracles Jesus performed were God’s way of saying, “This one comes in my name and with my message; listen to Him.”

And, unlike many of the other religious leaders in Judea at the time, Nicodemus seems to have recognized this connection.

And so, he comes to Jesus by night, which is John’s way of describing spiritual darkness, and he seems to be trying to understand more about Jesus’ ministry.

And, as He so often does, Jesus cuts right to the chase in verse 3 of chapter 3.

Now, I should note that the Greek word translated as “again” here normally means “from above,” and that’s how it’s used in every other occurence in the Gospel of John.

So “born from above” would be the better translation here.

But the Apostle Peter uses the term “born again” in 1 Pet 1:23, and the Greek there is not in question.

The only proper translation in that verse is “born again.”

I think it’s likely that as He taught His disciples, Jesus probably used both terms — “born from above” and born again” — to describe the rebirth His followers would experience upon placing their faith in Him.

But I think the “born from above” interpretation is a better fit for this passage in John’s Gospel, because of the conversation that follows.

Nicodemus reasonably asks how someone can be born after already having been born.

And Jesus responds by saying that He’s talking about a spiritual rebirth, not a physical one.

Spiritual rebirth is necessary for entrance into the kingdom of God and for eternal life — in other words, life the way it was always meant to be, in fellowship with and in the presence of God and of Jesus.

And spiritual rebirth can only come through faith in Jesus, the one whom God sent from Heaven to bring salvation and reconciliation to we who deserve judgment for our sins against God, for all we who practice evil in any of its degrees.

And that’s the gist of this chapter that includes Jesus’ famous one-sentence statement of the gospel in John 3:16.

If you want to understand what Jesus is all about, John 3:16 is a great place to start, and the rest of this chapter serves to expound and illuminate it.

In a nutshell: We are all sinners — doers of evil great and small.

And we are all eternal, created as enfleshed souls intended for a relationship of dependence upon God.

It’s hidden here in the English translation, but in the Greek, the emphasis in the phrase “eternal life” is on the word LIFE.

That’s because the eternal part of the equation was assumed.

The question was what sort of eternity was in store?

And what Jesus is saying here is that He came so that those who believe in Him could have an eternity of LIFE, which in the Bible has connotations of peace and order.

In the Genesis story of the creation of the universe, God is depicted as bringing life out of chaos, and at the end of each day of creation, He describes everything as “good” — a Hebrew word that can mean “pleasant,” or “joyful” or “agreeable.”

What Moses describes in his account of the Garden of Eden is a place of perfect shalom, a place of perfect peace and contentment in the presence of God Himself.

That’s what’s wrapped up in the promise of eternal life.

And that’s what was broken when mankind sinned against God in the Garden.

And we break that peace every time WE sin, every time we fail to manifest the character of the God who created us to be like Him — righteous and merciful and gracious and loving and peaceful and self-giving.

And in sinning against God by defacing the image of Him within us, we cause a separation between us and Him.

We continue to have the eternal part of us, but now, instead of enjoying the LIFE, we are cursed by death, both physical and spiritual.

Instead of aligning ourselves with the one who is life and in whom there is only truth, we have aligned ourselves with the father of lies, the one who is served by death.

Instead of having a heart like God’s heart — one that is gracious and self-giving and good and true — our hearts have become hard and selfish and mean and treacherous.

But Jesus, the unique and eternal Son of God, came to offer us eternal LIFE through faith in Him.

Our bodies may die, but His promise here is that our spirits — our souls — can have eternal LIFE.

We can, after all, experience, in the presence of God, the pleasant, joyful, peaceful, contented lives for which we were created.

And we can have that experience for eternity.

Jesus earned our redemption — our salvation — by taking upon Himself at the cross the just punishment that each one of us deserves for our sins against God.

In other words, God Himself came in the person of His own Son to make Himself a sacrifice to pay the just penalty for OUR sins against HIM.

What’s required of us is repentance and faith.

We must repent from our sins; in other words, we must commit ourselves to turning FROM the ways of this world and TOWARDS God’s ways.

And we must have faith in Jesus that He is who He said He is, the Son of God, equal in all aspects to the Father.

And faith that what He did at the cross and the empty tomb was both necessary and sufficient to reconcile us to God.

There is more to the message of the gospel, but that’s it in a nutshell.

Admittedly, it’s a big nutshell, but there’s quite a lot of theology wrapped up in Jesus’ words in this chapter.

But for the purposes of this first message in the series, Time for Something New, I want to direct your attention to verses 5 and 6.

Nicodemus had asked how someone born of a woman could go back into the womb and be born again.

Now, verse 6 is the clue that Jesus isn’t talking about a physical birth and that He is saying spiritual birth must come about from God in the person of the Holy Spirit.

As we will see in a future message in this series, it is the Holy Spirit who gives new life in response to the faith of a new believer.