The Scholar

Scripture: John 3:1-17

John 3:1–17 NIV

1 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2 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.” 3 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” 4 “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!” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 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.” 9 “How can this be?” Nicodemus asked. 10 “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11 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. 12 I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” 16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

3/1/2026

Order of Service:

AnnouncementsOpening WorshipPrayer RequestsPrayer SongPastoral PrayerKid’s TimeOffering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)Scripture ReadingSermonCommunionClosing SongBenediction

Special Notes: Week 1: Communion

Opening Prayer:

Prayer of Confession

Gracious and forgiving God, we confess that we too often doubt Your promises and ignore Your goodness. We seek security in broken and morally bankrupt things that absolutely cannot satisfy. Forgive us for our sins and renew our faith in Your unfailing love. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Call to Worship

Leader: I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?People: My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.Leader: For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.People: Whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.Leader: Come, let us worship the one who gives life to all.All: We praise and trust in the Lord, our Redeemer!

The Scholar

Movement 1: All Sin Separates

It's become a common saying in the church that sin is sin. It doesn't matter how big or small; it's all the same in God's eyes. We say that a lot. If you go looking for it in Scripture, though, you won't find it worded quite that way. In fact, there are passages in both the Old and New Testaments where it really appears that some sins are worse than others. They don't all carry the same consequences. They don't all affect us or the people around us in the same way.

So why do we say it? I think in our heads, we know something is true even if we struggle to put it into words: no matter how we rank our sins, the outcome is the same. Sin separates us from God, and we can't get back on our own. In our hearts, we feel it too: that nagging sense that no matter how much good we do, we can never quite do enough to make up for the wrong in our lives. Both point to the same truth. That is why God sent Jesus into the world, to deal with the problem of all of our sin in all of our lives.

This Lent, we're walking through stories of people Jesus encountered, people whose sin He dealt with in very different ways. Last week, we started at the top with the devil, who had every advantage, who stood in the very presence of God, and still chose to fall. As we move down from there, we might think of the great prophets of the Old Testament, some of the priests, perhaps a few of the good kings, like King David on one of his good days. This week, though, we come to someone who might look a lot more familiar to people like you and me: a man who studied his Bible, who prayed faithfully, who gave generously, who served his community, and who still didn't fully know God. His name was Nicodemus.

Movement 2: Meet the Scholar

Nicodemus was a Pharisee, which means he was part of a group of religious leaders who had devoted their lives to studying and teaching God's Word. They were the Bible scholars of their day. If you had a question about God or Scripture, you went to a Pharisee. Not only that, Nicodemus was a leader among them, a member of the ruling council. He had wealth, wisdom, and influence. He could open doors that most people couldn't. Rich and poor alike respected him.

His life's work was trying to figure out how to take people whose relationships with God had been broken by sin and get them back on the path to be made right with God again. That's a noble pursuit. I strongly suspect that it was because Nicodemus genuinely cared for people that he even paid attention to Jesus in the first place.

He wasn't coming to Jesus looking for supernatural powers. I think his curiosity came from a place of honesty: he could see how great the need was around him, and he knew that all the knowledge and all the wealth of the Pharisees put together could barely put a dent in the hurt faced by the people around him. Then along came Jesus, who could heal, who could communicate God's Word in a way anybody could understand, and who could give people hope when they had nothing. That got Nicodemus's attention.

He wanted answers. He wanted to know more about this Jesus. But a man of his standing doesn't just walk up to a traveling rabbi in broad daylight and admit he needs help. So one night, in secret, Nicodemus went to see Jesus.

Movement 3: Pride Revealed

Nicodemus opens the conversation with a compliment. He says, "We know you are a teacher who has come from God, because no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him." That's polite. That's respectful. It's a good way to start.

Notice, though, how Nicodemus approaches Jesus. He doesn't come out and say, "I need your help." He doesn't say, "I've been doing this my whole life and something is still missing." What he's really asking is, "How do you do what you do?" It's a sideways way of reaching out, one teacher honoring another, keeping himself on equal footing with Jesus even as he's looking for answers. There are layers here. Even in this moment where Nicodemus is doing something brave, something humble, his pride is still holding him back from being fully honest about what he needs.

I think before this conversation even started, the grace of Jesus was already working against the sin in Nicodemus's life, a sin he couldn't see. Nicodemus had spent his whole life surrounded by people who came to him for answers. His family, his community, his fellow leaders had raised him to take pride in what he knew, and he had grown comfortable with it. While I'm sure he would have admitted he wasn't perfect, there were probably few people Nicodemus believed were closer to God than himself.

In the presence of Jesus, though, all the knowledge and wisdom he had acquired started to look cheap, and in some cases, maybe wrong. Compared to the people he used to be around, Nicodemus looked like a godly man. Standing next to Jesus, he looked like just another man of the world. The image of God, the power of God, and the love of God in Jesus revealed something new in the life of Nicodemus. Ignorance.

★ It's ironic. Here was one of the most educated men in Israel, a teacher of God's law, and he didn't know what he didn't know. That's what pride does. It covers over what's really going on inside us. It blinds us to the problems we can't see, the sins we didn't know we were carrying, and it keeps us from the help we didn't know we needed. That's a familiar trap for all of us.★

Jesus, in typical fashion, doesn't play along with the compliment. He cuts right through every layer of pride and goes straight to the root. He says, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again."

Movement 4: Born from Above

This phrase, "born again," has captured the hearts and minds of Christians for two thousand years. Those same words can also be translated "born from above," and that's what Jesus actually means. Nicodemus hears "born again" and takes it literally. He asks Jesus how a grown man could climb back into the womb and be born a second time. Jesus tells him that's not what He means. This is something deeper. There is physical life, and there is spiritual life, and to truly live, you need both. That means two births: the one that brings us into this world, and the one that brings us into the life God has for us.

Think about what it takes to bring new life into the world. It doesn't begin on the birthday. It begins with conception, that first spark of life. Then comes a long season of growth, day by day, week by week, as that new life develops inside the care of the mother. When the birthday finally comes, it is a celebration, a first step into a brand new world.

Jesus is using that picture to help Nicodemus understand something bigger. Our physical birth, our arrival in this world, is like that first spark of conception in God's larger story for us. We're alive, but there is so much more to come. When someone gets baptized, it's like the announcement that a new life is on the way. It's a beautiful, hopeful moment, but the baby hasn't arrived yet. What follows is a season of growth and waiting, as God's Spirit works in us and through the people around us.

Then comes the birth. Born from above. That moment when we become something new and whole and alive in a way we weren't before. When a baby is born, you don't need a checklist to know it happened. It's obvious. It's celebrated. Everyone can see the difference. An unborn child can't even understand the world outside the womb. They've never experienced it. They've only heard about it. Once they're born, everything changes.

This is a hard concept to hold, and I think that's exactly why Nicodemus struggles with it. It may be why we struggle with it too. Bringing new life into the world doesn't happen alone. It takes God, it takes a community caring for each other, and it takes each one of us being willing to grow. God's Spirit begins a new life in us, and it starts small, and it grows. Much of that process is between God and us, and we don't fully control it. Sometimes that new life doesn't arrive the way we prayed it would. Even then, God is still at work, and what we cannot see or hold, He can. We have young mothers in our church family right now, and we pray for them because we know that new life, physical or spiritual, involves all of us working together and waiting on each other with God. Parenthood doesn't end at birth, either. It continues as we work with God to help each other grow into that new life from above.

Here's where pride creeps back in. We can take this beautiful, mysterious process of being born from above and flatten it into a checklist. Get baptized. Study the Bible more. Pray more. Give more. Serve more. Check the boxes. We try to make the new birth happen by doing the right things, saying the right words, and following the right steps. But an unborn child doesn't control when or how it is born. A baby can't deliver itself. No matter how much we do, we cannot manufacture our own spiritual birth. ★ We have to come to God willing to let go of our old life in the womb and trust Him to bring us into the new one. That's what it means to be born from above. That's how we finally see the kingdom of God. ★

The church can be really good at replacing that trust with a to-do list. We can be like the other Pharisees who only half-listened to what Jesus was teaching and never let it change them spiritually. Just like Nicodemus, pride can keep us satisfied with what we do and what we know, and blind us to the deeper relationship God really wants with us. It can keep us comfortable in a spiritually unborn place. If we stay there, we will die in our ignorance, having never really been born.

Movement 5: New Life and the Table

Here is the good news. Throughout the New Testament, Paul, John, and Jesus Himself all point to the same promise: God wants to make us new creations, with new hearts and new minds, and He doesn't make us wait until heaven to begin.

When we are born from above, we're no longer the same people we were before. We're something more. We no longer have our sinful human nature controlling us. We have a new nature given to us by Jesus. That's the life God has for us, and it's available now.

In just a moment, we're going to gather at this table and celebrate the Lord's Supper, where we come and confess our need for Him and offer our lives to Him. It's a moment, for a first or a tenth or a hundredth or a millionth time, to come to God and trust Him with our lives.

Before we do that, I want to tell you what it costs. John 3:16, which many of you know by heart, tells us that it cost Jesus everything. It cost God the life of His only Son, to take on the sin that was too great for us, every sin, big and small. Jesus paid that willingly. We often say that grace and forgiveness are free because we can't pay for them even if we wanted to. Jesus has already paid for us. This relationship with God is not without cost, though. It costs us everything.

Jesus tells a parable in another place about wineskins. Back then, people stored wine in pouches made from animal skin. Think of it like a balloon. When wine was new, it would grow and expand, and the fresh skin would stretch with it, just like a balloon the first time you blow it up. Once the wine was finished and the skin had been used, though, it would harden. It couldn't stretch anymore. If you've ever tried to blow up a balloon that's already been used too many times, you know it doesn't work the same way. Jesus says you can't put new wine into an old wineskin, because the new wine wants to grow, and the old skin can't grow with it. It will burst and break, and you'll lose both the skin and the wine.

Here's the thing, though. At the end of that parable, Jesus says something interesting. He says that people who've been drinking the old wine don't even want the new. They say, "The old is good enough." They've gotten used to it. They're comfortable with it. Some people won't give up the old wine until it has completely run out and they have nothing left.

That sounds a lot like Nicodemus, doesn't it? That sounds a lot like us. We hold on to what we know, what we've built, what makes us feel safe. God is saying, "I have something new for you, a whole new life, a whole new you. Let go and trust Me with your birth." If we really want that new life God has for us, we need to become new to hold it, so there is room for it to grow.

Maybe that's what this season of Lent is about: being willing to give it all up, hand it all over to God, the good, the bad, everything, and trusting that the new life He has for us, the life that is pure and good and holy and right and true and comes from above, is worth it.

Closing

Nicodemus thought he had it all. When he met Jesus, he saw how much he was missing. After being with Jesus that evening, he realized he was not ready to be born from above. Not yet. God still had work to do in his life.★ That's not the end of his story, though. Later in John's Gospel, we see Nicodemus defending Jesus before the other Pharisees. At the very end, he's one of the people who helps take care of Jesus' body after the cross. God wasn't finished with Nicodemus that night, and He's not finished with you, either. ★

Reflection Questions

As we prepare to come to the table, I want to leave you with two questions to sit with this week. For the adults: what is your greatest strength or talent, and how does it sometimes keep you distant from God? What is your weakness, and how is God using that weakness to call you closer to Him? For our younger friends: what is one thing you're really good at, and have you ever thanked God for it?

John 3:17 tells us that God did not send Jesus into the world to judge us, but to save us. There is no pressure for you to do anything today. Wherever you are in your journey, whether you feel close to God right now or far away, whether you understand all of this or just a little bit, God is not here to judge you. He just wants to be close to you and to bring you one step closer to that new life.

Closing Prayer

Lord, we thank You for loving us. We thank You for giving us life, both physical and spiritual. Thank You for growing us and transforming us, sometimes in little bits each and every day, until we look like and talk like and act like and live like the people You've created us to be. As we come to the table today, help us to let go of our old life and trust You with the new one.

In Jesus' name, amen.