The New Birth

Introduction

If you have been tracking with us through our study in the Gospel of John, you’ve hopefully picked up on the theme of the eternal or divine life that Christ came to give us. We’ve seen that this new life is a radical departure from our old way of living and it requires a new name, new wine, and a new temple. If you need a refresher on what those terms mean, we have each of those messages online. This morning, we are coming to the climax of this series of messages as we look at one of the absolute essential teachings of the Christian faith, the doctrine of the new birth.

John 3:1–15 ESV

1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “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.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 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.” 9 Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered him, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

As we look at this passage, we are going to answer two questions from this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus:

What is the new birth?

What keeps us from experiencing it?

If you remember from last week, I brought up the point from the end of chapter 2 that Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, not simply because He is God but because He became one of us and struggled through the same temptations, if not even greater. And by virtue of the fact that he overcame every temptation to sin, we can now rest assure that He knows us down to the bottom of our hearts. He has seen through us into the depths of our sinful nature. From that unique vantage point, Jesus gives us the one solution to all of man’s ills and that is to be born again. Essentially what Jesus is saying is that all of humanity, including you and I are past the point of remedial help, that our problems are so deep, our nature so corrupted by sin, that no amount of religious teaching, behavioral therapy, self-help, or positive thinking can change the core of who we are. The transformation of the human heart can only be achieved through the new birth.

In the two conversations that follow in the book of John, here with Nicodemus and the other with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus puts everybody on blast. Whether you are a well put together, highly educated religious leader or a divorced, sexually broken woman who is an outcast of society, or for that matter anyone else along that spectrum, Jesus tells us that we all need to be born again. But as we see today, the message of the new birth tends to be less well received by the educated or the ethically moral or those who consider themselves spiritual because we don’t feel like we need radical change, at least not at the level of the new birth. We simply don’t have that type of desperation and we end up settling for the seven habits of highly effective people or maybe we’ll learn how to become more emotionally intelligent or we’ll explore transcendental mediation. That is the kind of change we prefer and this whole new birth thing seems way to drastic and abstract! Not surprisingly this is the attitude that Nicodemus approaches Jesus with in this conversation. And you can’t really fault him because logically speaking if there was anyone in Israel who should have been exempt from the new birth, it would have been Nicodemus. But Jesus says, “Nicodemus, even you need to be born again.” This is why this entire conversation catches him completely off guard.

In fact as he talks with Jesus, Nicodemus doesn’t even know what he is looking for and he is completely clueless about what it is that Jesus has come to offer him. Right off the bat, we see that he keeps the identity of who Jesus truly is at an arms length, a good healthy distance. Using the royal ‘we’, Nicodemus tells Jesus, “We know who you are, you’re a teacher that has been sent to us from God.” (Imagine if I came to you and said, “You are a programmer come from God. No one can code like you!) It doesn’t even cross his mind that Jesus could be at least the prophet that God had promised or even possibly the Messiah that the people of Israel have been waiting for. But you’ll notice that Jesus doesn’t entertain this line of thought and he cuts right to the chase by telling Nicodemus in verse 3, unless you are born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God. In a not so subtle way, Jesus is telling him, “The reason why you don’t recognize who I am, why you can’t see the king who has come to rule the kingdom, is because you have not been born from above.” Again Jesus doesn’t shy away from saying highly offensive things to people regardless of their position in life.

First of all, Nicodemus addresses Nicodemus with the royal ‘we’, we know who you are instead of I know.

This clearly catches Nicodemus by surprise and possibly offends him because he gets a bit snarky and sarcastic. He knows that Jesus isn’t talking about a literal new physical birth but he defends himself by trying to make Jesus’ claim seem absolutely ridiculous. How can a grown adult be born again? Should I climb back into my mother’s womb? Oftentimes people cover their ignorance by making fun of the things they don’t understand. No one likes to be caught not knowing the things that they are supposed to know especially if they are supposed to be an experts in it. Again Jesus is incredibly adept at reading human nature and he recognizes that Nicodemus doesn’t know what he should know as a teacher of Israel and he then proceeds to educate him on the essentials of the new birth.

The concept of being born again was not a new teaching isolated to the Gospels and the New Testament church, the origins of it are found all the way back in the Old Testament in books like Ezekiel and Jeremiah. So when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You have to be born of water and the spirit”, he wasn’t trying to stump the religious leader to make him look stupid, he was simply pointing out that there was this huge gap in his understanding and experience of salvation. Without this knowledge, he could never become a Christian or see the kingdom of God. As a prominent religious leader, he should have at least known these verses from that Jesus was alluding to:

Ezekiel 36:24–27 ESV

24 I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land. 25 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. 26 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. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

Ezekiel 36:25–27 ESV

25 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. 26 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. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

Ezekiel 36:24-

Ezekiel 36:25-

These verses proceed the famous story out of Ezekiel where God raises a valley of dry bones back to life. This prophecy out of Ezekiel is looking forward to the day when God’s people would be cleansed from their sin and given a new heart transformed by the indwelling presence of Holy Spirit so that we would be willing and able to follow the ways of God. Jesus is telling Nicodemus and telling us that this prophecy is ultimately fulfilled in Him because not only are our sins cleansed by His death on the cross, He has also poured out the Holy Spirit so that we might experience a complete and utter transformation of our hearts. This does not mean sinless perfection but it does mean a heart that is soft and sensitive to the Word of God and within that heart there is a desire to obey God because Christ is alive in it.

Today, in modern evangelical Christianity, the experience of the new birth seems to be out of style. We generally associate it with fundamental,

Sadly in modern evangelical Christianity, the experience of the new birth seems to be going out of style. We tend to associate it with either fundamental, dogmatic, and narrow minded Christians or some weird strange cultic ritual, not knowing that the new birth is the essence of biblical and historic Christianity. If you were to ask Christian leaders of the past like John Newton, what turned him from a violent slave trader into a pastor that fought for their freedom throughout the British Empire or St. Augustine, why he gave up his comfortable life of wealth, leisure, and womanizing to become one of the great theologians of the church, or John Wesley, why he left the dead orthodoxy of the Anglican church and began preaching with fire across all of England leading to the conversion of nearly 25% of its population, each of them would have said, “It was because I was born again! The old has passed away and I have become a totally new creation with a new heart and spirit.”

John Calvin, the great reformer of Geneva, clarifies these words of Christ in his commentary on the gospel of John. He writes:

Today, in modern evangelical Christianity, the experience of the new birth seems to be out of style. We generally associate it with fundamental,

The Pillar New Testament Commentary: The Gospel according to John 5. Jesus and Nicodemus (3:1–15)

‘by the term born again He means not the amendment of a part but the renewal of the whole nature. Hence it follows that there is nothing in us that is not defective’

This leads us to our second question of why it is so hard for us to experience and live out the new birth. We see that even after Jesus explains clearly what the new birth is, Nicodemus still has a hard time accepting it. It doesn’t register in his mind and he immediately rejects it.

Martyn Lloyd Jones who was an influential pastor in London during the 1950s and 60s states that the primary reason why we resist the concept of the new birth, even among religious people, is the pride of intellect and a misplaced confidence in our understanding. To say that this is a major issue in a place like San Francisco is a great understatement. There are three critical errors that the pride of intellect leads us into:

We won’t believe that which we don’t understand.

We limit God to the measure of our understanding.

We reject the revelation of God as our authority because our reason becomes our authority.

1 Corinthians 2:14 ESV

14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

1 Corinthians 3:19 ESV

19 For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their craftiness,”

When Jesus realizes that Nicodemus won’t allow himself to believe in the necessity of the new birth, he says something deeply insightful, “If you don’t believe in earthly things meaning if you don’t believe that every one including yourself needs to be born again, how can you believe in heavenly things that “I am the Son of God and whoever believes in me will have eternal life.” The first belief leads to the other. And herein lies the problem, only a few people see the need to be be born again, to be radically transformed but if you don’t believe that, you can’t really believe in the Gospel. Let me try to break this down with an example.

Growing up one of my favorite books, believe it or not, was the Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum. The story itself seems very inspirational. Dorothy, the tin man, the scarecrow, and the cowardly lion all travel together to find the magical wizard who would give them what they are lacking, a new brain, a new heart, new courage. But they find out that the wizard is nothing but a sham and a fraud and it dawns on them that what they have been wanting from the wizard was already in their possession, they just didn’t see it. They already had the brains, and the heart, and the courage within them. The moral of the story is you don’t need a wizard to change you, the power to change is within yourself.

It is a subtle but remarkably powerful message that tells us that there is nothing wrong with us, we don’t need a wizard or for that matter, God to change us. Change is entirely up to us. This is the great American myth and we forget that these are lessons from a children’s fantasy book and has little to do with reality. There are plenty of other books, much better books that speak of the true nature of the human heart.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a book entitled the Gulag Archipelago which chronicled his time in the labor camps under Lenin and there he saw the depths of the human heart, not only in the jailers but within the prisoners and within himself. In his memoirs:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Solzhenitsyn at least partially recognized the problem with mankind, there are pieces of our heart that need to be destroyed. Jesus simply takes this thought it to its ultimate conclusion, the human heart is already dead and it can only be made new by the truth of the Gospel and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

Inevitably when I share about the new birth, people wonder if they have experienced the new birth. And one of the mistakes that people make is that being born again simply means having a cathartic experience. And for some, that is a part of their conversion experience but I’ve met enough people who have had an emotional and cathartic experience who show no signs of an inner transformation. The most concrete evidence of the new birth is a life that has been irreversibly changed and this can happen dramatically or it can happen quietly.

For those of us who have had multiple children, you know that every birth is different. Some are long and withdrawn, while others are short and intense. Some come early, some come late. You never know how the birth is going to happen. So it is with the Spirit. The salvation story of Nicodemus is probably one that many of us can relate with because it didn’t happen in an instant but it was a long drawn out process.

John 7:48–51 ESV

48 Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? 49 But this crowd that does not know the law is accursed.” 50 Nicodemus, who had gone to him before, and who was one of them, said to them, 51 “Does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?”

John 7:48-

We see Nicodemus one last time in the book of John. At the very end, when all of the other disciples had deserted Jesus, Nicodemus was there to take the body of Christ and to give Him a proper burial. In the moment that it was most dangerous to be associated with Jesus, Nicodemus was there. The man who was afraid to be seen with Jesus in the light of day was now willing to follow Him to the grave. His heart of stone had been transformed into a heart of flesh. This is the sign of the new birth!