Your New Life In Jesus

Sermon 1-

The Wemmicks were small wooden people carved by a woodworker named Eli. Each Wemmick was different. Some had big noses, others had large eyes. Some were tall and others were short. Each Wemmick had a box of golden star stickers and gray dot stickers. The wooden people went around the village sticking stars or dots on one another. The pretty ones got stars. Wemmicks with rough wood or chipped paint got dots. The talented ones got stars, too. Some could jump over tall boxes or sing pretty songs. Others, though, could do little. They got dots.

Punchinello was one of these. He tried to jump high like others, but he always fell. So, the Wemmicks would give him dots. When he tried to explain why he fell, he would say something silly, so the Wemmicks would give him more dots. "He deserves lots of dots," the wooden people would say. After a while Punchinello believed them. "I guess I'm not a good Wemmick," he decided. So, he stayed inside most of the time. When he did go outside, he hung around other Wemmicks who had lots of dots. He felt better around them.

One day he met a different kind of Wemmick named Lucia. She had no dots or stars. The Wemmicks admired Lucia for having no dots, so they would give her a star. But it would fall off. Others gave her a dot for having no stars. But it wouldn't stay either. That's the way I want to be, thought Punchinello. So, he asked Lucia how she did it. "It's easy," she replied. "Every day I go visit Eli the woodcarver." "Why?" "You'll find out if you go see him." Then Lucia turned and skipped away. "But will he want to see me?" Punchinello wondered. Later, at home, he sat and watched the wooden people giving each other stars and dots. "It's not right," he muttered to himself. And he decided to go see Eli.

Punchinello walked up the narrow path and stepped into Eli's shop. His eyes grew big. The stool was as tall as he was. He had to stretch on tiptoe to see the top of the workbench. Punchinello swallowed hard. "I'm not staying here!" Then he heard his name. "Punchinello?" The voice was deep and strong. "How good to see you. Come - let me have a look at you." Punchinello looked up. "You know my name?" "Of course. I made you." Eli picked him up and set him on the bench. "Looks like you've been given some bad marks," said the maker. "I didn't mean to, Eli. I really tried hard." "Punchinello, I don't care what the other Wemmicks think." "You don't?" "No. You shouldn't either. What they think doesn't matter. All that matters is what I think. And I think you are pretty special." Punchinello laughed. "Me, special? Why? I'm not very talented and my paint is peeling. Why do I matter to you?"

Eli spoke very slowly. "Because you're mine. That's why you matter to me." Punchinello didn't know what to say. "Every day I've been hoping you'd come," Eli explained. "I came because I met Lucia," said Punchinello. "Why don't the stickers stay on her?" The maker spoke softly. "Because she has decided that what I think is more important than what others think. The stickers only stick if you let them. "What?" "The stickers only stick if they matter to you. The more you trust my love, the less you care about their stickers." "I'm not sure I understand." Eli smiled. "You will, but it will take time. For now, come to see me every day and let me remind you how much I care." Eli lifted Punchinello off the bench and set him on the ground. "Remember," Eli said as Punchinello was leaving, "you are special because I made you. And I don't make mistakes." Punchinello didn't stop, but in his heart, he thought, I think he really means it. And when he did, a dot fell to the ground.

(Like Punchinello, we often let what other people think about us define who we are. Over the next few days we will be talking about our identity- what drives us, and how we view ourselves. Until Punchinello met his Maker, he let what other people think define his identity. Our identity can be found in many different things like grades, popularity, video games, sports, what we look like. But we find freedom from these shaky identities when the root of our identity is defined what God thinks about us. Let’s turn to God’s Word and find out what He says about us.)

Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

Jesus, here, is being shown by John as the source of new life. Before we can get new life, however, we have to recognize that we’re spiritually dead. We can have the new birth. We can be adopted into His family, and it all happens through believing on His name. Believe in Jesus, Become God’s family.

Here’s what John says. First of all, all human beings are dead. You see, in verses 10 and 11 we’re told that Jesus Christ’s life is like light, and yet when He came to human beings, they rejected the light, just couldn’t comprehend it, couldn’t understand it, and couldn’t grasp it.

Now the mark of someone who is dead is that a dead body has no sensitivity to stimuli. What the Bible tells us here, but tells us really throughout, is that in our natural state, we’re dead. We’re incapable of being sensitive to spiritual stimuli. What does that mean? Well, what does it mean to be physically dead? It means the body is dead. It’s not capable of movement or growth or sensitivity.

Spiritually it’s the same. A spiritually dead person might enjoy football, might absolutely love art, might enjoy video games, and yet the spiritually dead person, when you bring him to the truths of the Bible, the sinfulness of human beings, or the death and resurrection of Christ … What you’ll find is the spiritually dead person either finds that disgusting, or he may find it uninteresting, or he may even say, “I believe it.”

But there is no sight. There’s no hearing. There’s no joy. There’s no delight. There’s no sense of any truth dawning on him. There is no connection. It doesn’t affect him. Yet when spiritual life begins to come in, you begin to see these things in a new way. You start to say, “I’m interested in this. I’d heard this before, but now I’m interested.”

As the spiritual life develops in your life you find that these truths now very much stimulate you. They thrill you. They electrify you. They comfort you. They strengthen you. and you’re always saying, “Why didn’t I see this before?” The answer is because you were dead. Dead people don’t see things. Dead people don’t hear things. Dead people don’t notice things. Dead people don’t know they’re dead. That’s one of the ways you know that you are. You don’t think you are.

“Well, now,” somebody says, “Why don’t you say that human beings are sick, that human beings are hurting; they need God as their physician and they need God to help them?” Well, because the Bible says very clearly we’re not sick in our sins, we’re not just hurting in our sins, we’re dead in our sins. We need to be made alive together with Christ.

To put it another way. The reason you don’t feel dead is because there are different levels of life. For example, you have vegetable life. Vegetables are alive, and yet compared to animal life, vegetables don’t even look alive. By the measures of the higher form of life, the lower form of life barely looks alive. A cucumber looks dead compared to a dog. Then we can go up one step higher.

When you see a human being living at the level of a dog you may not consider that person alive. Because mental human life is as much higher than animal life as animal life is higher than vegetable life. Now along comes Christianity, and it says there is a spiritual life (a way of seeing and thinking and perceiving) which is as much higher than mental human life as mental human life is higher than the animal or the vegetable.

The change from the natural to the spiritual life is about as big a change as for a puppet to become a real boy, like Pinocchio. Before the spiritual change that happens to you, you’re like a statue of yourself, a rigid image of your true self. But just as you need to be physically born into mental human life, you have to be spiritually born into spiritual life.

So, the first teaching is we are all dead, and therefore, we need a new life. Secondly, that new life comes in the form of the new birth. In verse 12 and 13, it says so clearly, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent … but born of God.”

As clearly as John can say it, he says, “We’re not talking about the first kind of birth, the physical birth that brings you into animal and human life, but we’re talking about a different kind of birth that brings you into spiritual life which is as much higher than human mental life as human mental life is to the vegetable.” We’re talking about the implantation of God’s own nature, the Holy Spirit, being implanted, grafted in, surgically put into our heart. It’s God’s very lifeblood.

The reason this is so important, and I’m sure this is important for some of you today where you are right now in your walk, right now where you are in your relationship with God. You need to hear this. Because whenever somebody begins to notice their need for God and they begin to see, “Hey, I really can’t manage my life without help,” you start to see God. The first thing you do is you say, “I need to turn over a new leaf. I need to get religious. I need to reform my life.”

You’re in for such misery. Because you spent all of your life being crushed by expectations and standards, trying to live up at school, at home, with friends. Now you’re going to take upon yourself a whole new set of them! The Bible says you don’t need to turn over a new leaf; you need a whole new root. Jesus says, “I am not out to make better people; I am out to make a whole new kind of person. I am not, in a sense, trying to get the horse to jump higher, but I want the horse to sprout wings so he’s a whole different species of creature.”

In other words, Jesus says, “I’m not out to make you ethical; I’m out to make you alive.” It’s not like you were unethical and had to become ethical, even though there is eventually a moral reformation that does happen in the life of a person who’s born anew. But Jesus says, “I’m not out to make an unethical person ethical. I’m out to make a dead person alive.” Those are different!

Look, let me give you two examples of how an ethical person is different than a spiritually alive person. First of all, ethical people and spiritually alive people have a completely different attitude toward truth. Ethical people say, “There is the truth. I believe it. I enjoy it. I stand for it. I defend it. I live by it.” But an alive person finds that the truth is a living thing. They find that they become alive to the truth and the truth becomes alive in them.

, that strange and great verse: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly …” That’s something that now and only now begins when you realize you’re alive. That’s the way you know you’re alive. Because what happens now is the truth comes on in and changes you, makes you look at yourself in a whole different way. It really gets inside and does some kind of surgery on you.

The way you can tell that your understanding of the truth is the understanding of a living, spiritually alive person is you start to say, “How can I worry now that I see the wisdom of God? How can I feel guilty now that I see the glorious mercy of God?” You’re saying, “Why didn’t I see this before?” The law of God, to a spiritually alive person, no longer is something you fear or resent. You start to love its beauty.

You start to say, “Oh, I want to be like that, and I want to please my Master with the law by becoming more and more like Him.” You have new sensitivity, because you’re alive. In Him is life, and that life is your light. Whereas an ethical person just heaps up ethical deeds. Like if you throw bricks on a pile, the pile grows, but it’s not alive. It’s a mechanical growth. It’s not an organic growth.

John Wesley, Martin Luther, and a number of the other great fathers of the faith spent a number of years in which they were ethical but they weren’t alive. You can read about their stories, and you can see they heaped up ethical deeds. They heaped up good deeds, just like throwing bricks on a pile. But it wasn’t until they received new life that they actually began to grow from the inside, organically, that they began to become wiser, deeper, whole different beings, sprouting wings.

Ethical people differ completely from alive people in their attitude toward truth, and … hear this … ethical people differ completely from alive people in their attitude toward themselves (identity). You have to be careful, because deep down inside there is a lot of insecurity, but on the surface ethical people feel pretty good about themselves.

Ethical people say, “Hey, I carry my weight in this society. I’m responsible. I live life the way it should be lived. The world would be a much better place if people lived like I did.” They know enough not to brag too much, but they feel, “Hey, I pull my weight.” But the identity of an alive person is completely different. Because, they have the gospel in their center. The gospel becomes a living thing that transforms their identity. The gospel comes to you and speaks to you in a sense, the gospel of Jesus, the message of Christianity.

The gospel says you’re a sinner. All human beings are sinners. Yes, there are the pillars of the community and there are the violent criminals, and yet you’re all sinners because you all build your life around yourself and you all center everything on yourself. None of you love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Yet, through what Jesus Christ did on the cross, not on the basis of anything you have done, or can do, or ever will do, but on the basis of what Jesus did, God can welcome you into his family. Believe in Jesus, Become God’s family.

Now that message, what does that do? It humbles you. It destroys your pride, and yet you can’t be depressed. You try. The first response of a Christian who hears about sin, who God is really opening his eyes to his sin and also to what Jesus has done … You try at first to be depressed, but you can’t. Because the message is that all people are equally sinners, and all people are recipients of grace if they come to God through Christ. So, on the one hand you’re humbled, but you can’t be depressed but rather joyful and bold.

Look at the difference it makes. Paul says, “I was a Hebrew of the had attained academically. I had attained racially. I had attained in every way, but I count it all as garbage for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ.” He says, “My old life doesn’t count. The accomplishments are nothing. Those things that I lived for, they’re nothing. The trophies, so what? My sins of the past, they don’t count either. Not only do my trophies not count anymore, so I can’t be puffed up, my sins don’t dog me anymore, so I can’t be destroyed.”

Instead, Paul has a new identity. The Bible is full of it. The Bible says “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” So a person who’s alive is not always looking at himself. There is not this miserable self-consciousness. You’re not wondering and worrying about who’s looking at you and what they’re thinking about you.

The new life, do you have it? Are you alive? Listen, the best way to know that you’re alive is you know you were dead. The one way you know you’re dead is that you don’t know you’re dead. I mean, what dead body ever knew it was dead? Do you have the new life?

If I were to bring an elephant into your bedroom and let it spend the afternoon and then take it away, you don’t think you’d know it was there? The magnitude of the elephant demands that it will have changed your room. It will have moved things around. How much more so must it be if the great God lives in your life? The Bible’s definition of a Christian is someone where God has made His dwelling.

You don’t think, therefore, that a Christian is anything less than somebody who’s been moved to the depths of his being by the gospel, someone who’s been radically changed, somebody who’s had the furniture rearranged and it’s continually happening, someone who’s surprised at what God is doing in their life, someone who’s constantly saying, “I never saw that before. I never knew I could do that before?” Is that happening to you? He cannot stay in a corner. You know he’s there.

Now the only other thing we have to mention is the new birth gives us family rights. It says, “Yet to all who received him … [he gave power] … he gave the right to become children of God.” Now a lot of people are surprised at this. They say, “Well, I thought God created everybody, so everybody is a child of God. I thought God is everybody’s Father.” I mean, if I build a chair you could say I’m the father of the chair, but I’m not sure our relationship is a family relationship.

What we’re being told here is when you’re born again you have rights because you’re adopted into the family. Believe in Jesus, Become God’s family.

What are those rights? Just two. Every Christian who’s here who has received the new life, I want you to look at yourself and I want you to ask, “Am I living on the basis of these rights?” The first right is intimate access to the Father, intimate access.

The Bible tells us what one of my classmates told me. My classmate has three biological children and one adopted child, and for the life of him he says, he can’t find any difference in his heart in regarding one over the other.

If that’s true of my classmate, who’s just a man, how much more true must it be of God, who says, “I adopt you.” That means you have to say to yourself, “My Father in heaven loves me with all the power and magnitude that He loves his natural born Son. My Father loves me more than I love myself. My Father wants greater things for me than I even want for myself.” Live in that reality and you have real power for living.

The other thing that is a family right is you’re an heir. The Bible tells you that if you’re a son or a daughter of the king, then everything the king owns will come to you. What does the king own? Everything. says someday, when the sons of God are revealed in their glorious liberty, then the entire world, all of nature, is going to be revealed in all of its glory. That’s our inheritance! We’re going to rule and reign forever.

On that day when the world is revealed in its glory, every blade of grass will be so clear, so sharp, so radiant, so colorful, so unbearingly beautiful, that we’ll bow down and worship the one who made it. We’ll get new bodies, glorified bodies. That’ll be part of our inheritance too. C.S. Lewis says, “He can make the feeblest and filthiest of us into bright stainless mirrors, reflecting back to God his own boundless love and glory and beauty and delight and nobility and wisdom.” That’s your inheritance.

Now here’s what I want to ask you, Christian friends. I’ve already spoken to people who may need the new life. Now I’m speaking to those of you who have the new life. Let me ask you something. Are you rejoicing in your rights? Are you living on the basis of your rights? Is this what you remind yourself of constantly? Why do you think you’re so up and down? Why are you worried about things like … Who likes me? Who notices me? Who’s not noticing me? How do I measure up to the other people in my life?

That’s why you’re up and down all the time. That’s why you’re clinging to life rafts. Life rafts pitch up and down. Here’s bedrock. Here’s something to walk on. How can Christians sing while they suffer? The people of the world can’t understand it, because the people of the world know that they have about 80 years here and, “I have to get every bit of my fulfillment and satisfaction and joy and comfort out of this life. YOLO” They can’t understand people who are suffering and singing, because if anything comes and disrupts their life, well, this is all they have and they’re destroyed.

What does Paul say? “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Paul looks around and he says, “I’m going to think out the glory of my sonship. I’m going to think it out until I remember I have a Father in heaven who is in charge of history, who tells me that he has history all working out for my best. I have a Father in heaven who will guide me, who will accept me, who loves me.”

He lets the glory of his sonship overwhelm him and overshadow him until he has a comfort that can match anything. What do you do when you get depressed? Do you jog? Do you play the piano? Do you go see a movie? That’s all so temporary. Or do you think out the implications of your sonship.

Conclusion. Somebody here is saying, “You know, I came for some inspiration, I think what you just did was told me I’m a wicked, miserable, sinner and I need to be changed from the inside out. That doesn’t sound very inspiring to me.” I’ll tell you why it’s not. Because Christianity doesn’t inspire people like that. Christianity isn’t a tranquilizer that knocks out your nerve center so you can’t see how bad things are.

Christianity doesn’t minimize and say, “Well, in every cloud there’s a silver lining. It can’t get much worse. I’m sure it will be better soon.” Christianity doesn’t say that. “You probably won’t experience hardships in life.” Is that what Christianity says? No. Instead it says, “For those who believe in his name, he gives you this power.”

That means those who believe Jesus is God, that he died and rose for you, and that you stand on the basis of that and say, “Father accept me because of what Jesus said.” If you believe that, there is a comfort that will overcome everything. If you don’t believe that, there is no comfort. So many of us are down on the ground and you’re eating roots and grubs in the mud and Jesus Christ has a feast ready for you at His table. Go to him.