Being born again

Introduction

In this passage today, we see Jesus speaking with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is clearly interested in Jesus as he has heard and seen Jesus say some amazing things and do some amazing miracles. Nicodemus secretly comes to Jesus and wants to speak to him to find out more about him. And as he does so, Jesus says an amazing but also quite a bizzare thing: you need to be ‘born again.’ A lot of us have the privilege of having been at church for quite a while, so this phrase ‘born again’ comes to us quite naturally and doesn’t seem that odd to us. But put yourself in the shoes of this Pharisee: you’ve come to speak to Jesus to find out more about him, you’ve barely finished your first sentence, and Jesus suddenly says to you ‘you must be born again.’ It’s quite a shocking and bizzare thing to say, and naturally Nicodemus is incredulous. So Nicodemus goes onto question Jesus ‘How is this possible? How can this be? What are you talking about?’ But even if the phrase ‘born again’ comes quite naturally to you, perhaps you’ve heard this term so much that it kind of just goes in one ear and out the other. Perhaps the church has domesticated this term to the point that it has lost its original power and meaning.

So what is Jesus talking about here?

Why?

Before we go into what Jesus exactly means by being ‘born again’, I want to explore why we need to be born again in the first place. Notice how the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to Jesus ‘by night’ (see John 3:2). In John’s gospel, one of the big themes or metaphors he uses is light and darkness. John sets up a clear contrast between the two. For example, John 1:4–5 Jesus is said to be the “life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” So right from the beginning of the book, Jesus is described as the ‘light’ which ‘shines in the darkness’. And here in chapter 3, we see Nicodemus come to Jesus ‘by night’ indicating that Nicodemus is in the darkness.

What does this light and darkness metaphor mean in John?

Firstly, I think it indicates a spiritual blindness. Remember, God is our creator, and we are his creation, so there is an infinite distance between us and God. So God is inaccessible to us, and we can’t know anything about God unless God reveals himself to us first. In John 3:13, we see that it is only Jesus, as the one who has ascended into heaven and knows about heavenly things, that can tell us of spiritual realities - we would otherwise have no way of knowing. But then we see in John 3:11, even if we receive these heavenly realities, we refuse it, we don’t believe it. Here, Jesus is explaining heavenly spiritual realities to Nicodemus, and Nicodemus is completely blind to the true meaning of when Jesus says he needs to be ‘born again.’ Nicodemus repeatedly says in John 3:4 and John 3:9, ‘How can these things be?’ ‘How is this possible’? He completely fails to grasp the truth and reality of what Jesus is saying to him, and he is completely confused and dumbfounded. But Jesus says in John 3:10 that as a teacher of Israel, Nicodemus should have been able to understand and discern what Jesus was telling him. As an expert in the OT, Nicodemus should have immediately known what Jesus meant by being born again. Why? Because he is spiritually blind, he is in the darkness, he is fundamentally sinful and like the rest of us, refuses God’s truth in his life. His heart is hardened.

(And because of his spiritual blindness and his hardened heart, rather than letting God speak and give truth into his life, Nicodemus decides he is going to set his own standard of truth. He approaches Jesus saying John 3:2 “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” He approaches Jesus with a curiosity, but he can’t see anything beyond Jesus as a ‘teacher come from God.’ What’s interesting is what he says next: ‘for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.’ Nicodemus has set up his own criteria to assess who Jesus is. Jesus is a ‘teacher come from God’ because Nicodemus has decided that someone from God must be able to do all these miracles and signs. And I think this is what we all do to some extent as well. We often have certain expectations and criteria about what God should be like. Maybe these are expectations are set from our own opinions, or what other people have told us what God is like, or what we have heard in sermons. But who are we to set certain criteria for God; God reveals who He is to us as He is, he doesn’t change himself to suit our standards. We should let the Bible speak for itself about who God is, because the Bible is the very word of God. We need to ask ourselves, how much of our understanding of God and church is truly biblical?) -> might take this out

And remember, Nicodemus was a Pharisee which means he was highly educated, highly respected in society, a teacher of the law, and in addition it says he was ‘a ruler of the Jews.’ He was an expert in the OT. But because he is in the darkness, because he is spiritually blind, Nicodemus completely misses the point of what Jesus says. When Jesus says in John 3:3 “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God,” it completely puzzles Nicodemus, because to him the entry requirement into the kingdom of God was by meticulous obedience to the law; but Jesus says it’s not obedience to the law, but by being born again! So this shows us that if Nicodemus is spiritually blind despite all his knowledge, intellect, expertise, position and power, and cannot enter the Kingdom of God, what hope do the rest of us have? This is why we need to be born again.

Secondly, the darkness metaphor indicates a moral corruption. Look at John 3:18 “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” There is a complete black and white to the human condition regarding sin: you are either condemned or you are not. There is no in between. And the deciding factor between the two, is faith: those who believe in Jesus Christ are not condemned, while those who do not believe are condemned. And why are they condemned? See John 3:19–20 “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.” Those in the darkness ‘love the darkness’ and their evil works, and they ‘hate the light’, there is a distortion or disordering to their love. Augustine gives a helpful explanation of sin in his work ‘Confessions’, where he describes sin not as bad behaviour or actions, but he describes sin as ‘disordered love’. He describes that there should be a priority to our love: we should love God, love others, and then love ourselves. The problem of sin arises when our love becomes disordered and out of order; we start to love other things more than God. That’s when a good thing becomes a god thing. Here in John, it’s something similar. If we are not born again, we are in moral darkness because our love is disordered. We do not love God, and rather we love other things more than God, we ‘love the darkness’ and our evil works, and we refuse to come into the light because we don’t want our evil deeds exposed. So to solve the problem of spiritual blindness and our moral corruption, we need to be born again.

What?

So then what does it actually mean to be born again? Firstly, it is something that only God can do. If you look at John 3:3, when the English says ‘born again’, it can actually also be translated as ‘born from above’. So being born again, is a new birth that comes from above, from heaven, from God himself. It is not something that comes from earth. Remember in John 1:12-13, it says that those who receive Jesus become children of God, ‘born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.’ Similarly, if we look at John 3:6, we see that as flesh, we can only give birth to fleshly things; it is only the Holy Spirit that can give us a new birth of the spirit.

Secondly, being born again is a radical complete transformation. John 3:5 is helpful: “Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” When Jesus speaks of being ‘born of water and the spirit’, he is making a reference to Ezekiel 36:25–27 “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.”

Here we see God making a promise to us that he will cleanse us from all our sinfulness and idolatry himself because we are incapable of doing it ourselves - remember we are those who are in the darkness and love the darkness. But then God is making a further promise to completely transform our hearts so that we are not only made clean and free of sin, but God will transform our desires and affections and love so that we will no longer love darkness and evil, but we will love God and his commandments for us. God doesn’t promise us just a band-aid solution, he doesn’t just provide us with just a temporary fix or a superficial solution. Nor does he promise to just ‘fix’ our evil old self. God promises something more radical: he promises a complete rebirth, a radical remaking of who we are inwardly. It is a complete change in our hearts, our character, so that we will be able to follow God with our genuine hearts -> God gives us a heart transplant! In the terminology of Augustine, God is reordering and fixing our disordered loves. He is taking us from the darkness, spiritual blindness and moral corruption, into the light so that we can understand and accept God’s word, and love God and his commandments. This means we are no longer ashamed of our works, because we no longer do evil, but we do what is true and good. See John 3:21 “But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” - we come to the light not to brag about how righteous and good we are, but we come to the light to show everyone that our transformation and our good works ‘have been carried out in God’ -> to show everyone that this is all thanks to God, not ourselves.

This means that when we are born again by the Holy Spirit, we should see a change in our lives, because God changes our desires from loving evil, to loving the truth. John 3:8 says “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.” We don’t know where the wind came from or where it goes, but we hear and feel its effects. And just like the wind, those who have been born again by the Spirit, though they don’t know how it happened or maybe even when it happened, they can see and feel the effects of the Holy Spirit in their lives, as they have been given a new heart and God’s Spirit has been put in them. Being born again means that you now live a different life, not because you are forced to, but because you no longer love the sinful things you used to, and now you love God and you want to follow Him. If you are struggling with certain sins in your life, pray for God to continue to work his new birth in you so that he transforms your desires. Overcoming sin and addiction isn’t always about suppressing a desire, but it is when you experience a desire of something that is infinitely more valuable - God Himself - that your previous desires and temptations just pale in comparison.

How?

So then how are we born again? We come to the heart of John’s gospel, or even the gospel itself, to answer this question: John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” We can be born again because God so loved the world. He loved the world so much, that despite the world hating God, refusing God, disobeying God, and loving the darkness and evil instead, He still relentlessly chased after us so that we can love him. God’s love is infinitely greater than ours: we love things that are ‘lovable,’ we just love things that we like; God loves the unlovable. In all our evil and dirtiness, we were not deserving of love, and yet God loved us. And he showed us his love by sending his one and only Son into the world, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, who was God in heaven, became a mere man. Why?

Look at John 3:14–15 “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.” In the OT (Num 21), the Israelites complained to God and Moses in the wilderness, despite having been rescued by God from Egypt. So God sent a brood of serpents among them that bit them with their venom, and many Israelites died. So the Israelites plead with Moses to make them go away, and God instructs Moses to make a bronze snake, put it on a pole, and lift it up. And whoever looked up at it survived.

Jesus now refers to the bronze serpent, saying just as the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, Jesus must also be lifted up, which refers to Jesus’ crucifixion and exaltation. So in God’s love for us, he sent his only Son into the world for us, so that he would be crucified and lifted up, so that just like the bronze snake, when we look to Jesus, we would also have eternal life. And what does it mean to look to Jesus? It means to ‘believe in him’. It is faith. When we have faith in Jesus, we are rescued from darkness, from our spiritual blindness and moral corruption, and God completely transforms us by making us born again, so that we are no longer condemned, and deserving of death, but now we have eternal life. Jesus died on the cross for us, to take on the penalty of death that we deserved because of our sin and because of our love for darkness. Jesus took the punishment for us instead. And not only is our punishment taken away from us, but when we look to the cross and believe in His name, God completely transforms us and gives us new birth, a genuine heart transformation, so that we no longer remain in our sinful ways. This, is how much God loves us.

Conclusion

So don’t seek love from elsewhere in your life. So many people in this world seek love from the wrong places, from wrong people, from wrong things, to fill that emptiness and loneliness in their life. Seek it from God instead, because only He can fill it perfectly. And don’t love other things more than God. So much of immoral human behaviour comes from a disordered, distorted love. Love God first and foremost. And remember, it is not by our own efforts that these things can be true in our lives - it is only the love of God that sent his only Son to die for us on the cross that is able to bring these radical changes into our lives. Believe in the name of Christ, as it is only in believing in his name that we are able to look to the cross and receive this new birth.