What Did Jesus Mean?
Notes
Transcript
What did Jesus Mean?
What did Jesus Mean?
That’s the question that so many people over the years have corrupted with Religion instead of Faith.
Religion is mechanism of the practice your beliefs. Unlike the chicken and the egg we know what comes first.
Belief.
When Jesus was dealing with people of honest inquiry Jesus was never rude. He was at times challenging but not rude. I love that about Jesus. In John chapter 3 Jesus simplifies everything. This is one of those times when religion meets Jesus and Jesus introduces it to faith.
Nicodemus didn’t know how to define faith, he understood religion. Now I know it’s seen as intellectually cleaver to attack religion, especially Christianity as a religion but lets take a step back from that way of thinking and ask the bigger question:
What should come first?
Jesus was always leading people to faith and not religion.
Not ignorant faith but faith that leaned into the unknown based on God’s love for humanity and not the knowledge possessed by humanity. Let’s be honest, Humanity is basically conceded.
Yes, I said conceded. Humanity is always making everything about itself as a way of replacing God by something they can control. That would be religion without faith connected to it.
The challenging thing about Christianity, is that it doesn’t give 7 steps to a highly effective you.
It doesn’t reduce the intimacy you have with God to some repetitive sets of acts, that seem spiritual but are just facade masking the corruption of your heart. Most religion in the world does that.
It gives people a sense of being spiritual without having to be spiritually connected and commited to God. Much of the religion of the world appeals to the vanity of humanity that equates certain actions or works with being a better person. Not with Christianity.
What Nicodemus was trying to do was to equate the religion of rules and social expectations with Jesus’ teachings and it wasn’t making sense to Nicodemus. He simply couldn’t reconcile it to himself. His entire life was about the function of religion without the substance of faith. Don’t be too hard on Nicodemus, people do this today by being religious in a self gratifying way, that validates their opinion of themselves.
Everyone likes to be valued and appreciated. When religion gives you that, it feels good but religion continues to force greater and greater control over your life because what starts off simple becomes overly complicated. Someone meaning well says these three things or six things or whatever works well for me. Some others think yes thats it… But its not it.
Simplicity of faith is the key. Nicodemus doesn’t get that. He wants a system that he can grade himself with, a checklist that will validate him. Jesus, as He is in the habit of doing, doesn’t give what Nicodemus wants but instead what is the Highest Truth.
To Believe is to Be Saved.
Belief in What?
You see people believe all kinds of things and in all kinds of people. However Jesus wasn’t trying get the world to walk away from the God of Israel but instead closer to Him. Jesus was the way to do that. Not because He had come up with some cleaver rules that would make humanity feel better about itself. Not because He was repackaging other religions into one synchronistic amalgamation, as does much of the latest age of humanity’s spiritualism.
No, Jesus became the way to God because God was His father and His father sacrificed Him for our sins.
All He asked of us is to Believe. To Believe that God did what God did in sending His son to die for our sins.
Its from that place that we start in faith.
So much of the world today has this idea that faith is here to serve us but they are wrong.
Faith in Christ isn’t a religion but instead the start of a relationship that changes us. You see God isn’t trying to get you to discover who you are in relation to yourself or the universe. You really won’t learn anything that way. You’ll discover that in the end you remain, just incomplete.
You see God wants you to discover who you are in relation to who God is. When humanity pauses and is honest with itself, we discover something is missing and has always been missing, even when we were distracted by life. We need more but we can’t find more in ourselves, which is why we often keep making the same compromises that shame us over and over again.
When We stop short of being changed by God, that means we are not operating from faith but instead from religion. (Regardless of it’s name.)
To Believe in Christ as God’s one and only Son, as the sacrifice for our sin, is the place most people stumble.
Nicodemus was having the same problem. He was happy to debate and question Jesus because that’s how his culture and religion worked. They worked all day and debated and questioned at night. So for Nicodemus everything was operating as normal.
Sometimes when I read this passage, I think Nicodemus never saw it coming. He never saw that moment coming where Jesus would make an impossible statement like, you must be born again. In this portion of scripture is the first time that statement was ever said. It was an earth shattering statement. Most people think they know what it means, but miss the mark by of understanding for a lack of Faith and Belief.
You have to understand for a second, that all around them life happened right out in the open. The world wasn’t sanitized and removed from seeing babies born, either in a barn, in the street or along the road. Animals gave birth where ever it happened and often, so did the women. So it is possible Nicodemus had seen something or someone born recently and wasn’t ill informed about a woman’s womb.
Being old Nicodemus is asking the question, How can a man be born again?
By his question you can tell that he was a literal thinker or he was jousting with Jesus. I think he was more likely a literal thinker and that’s fine.
For those of us who are literal thinkers we have been give a tremendous gift. We often see people for who they are and we see this with Nicodemus’ assertion that Jesus was sent from God.
Sometimes, like Nicodemus, we have to be stretched and challenged to consider what is difficult for us. The abstract and the nuanced.
So Jesus is pulling Nicodemus along, not by force but helping Nicodemus to see that, no you can’t crawl back into your mothers womb, but you can be born again spiritually.
First the physical birth, but then the choice to believe, and have a spiritual birth.
This will always be beyond the rational prison of human thought and require letting go and allowing trust in God to awaken in you.
Think of the person who is holding the rail on a bridge. they are crossing the bridge but refuses to let of the rail when they get to the other side of the bridge. They will never know how good life is off the bridge until they let go of the rail. BTW The Rail ends five feet from the end of the bridge.
It requires trust to know you’ve made it this far and all you have to do is let go of the rail and trust for the last five feet.
(Chair illustration.)
You see this is what Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus and all of Israel to understand. Being born again is your trusting the extension of the design that is already in place but you can’t see until you let go.
It really is an amazing transition from being born again to the hard reality that Jesus wouldn’t fully answer Nicodemus’ question right away.
In Verse 12 Jesus explains that there is a direct connection between trusting what He says about earthly things and being able to trust him about Heavenly things. You see that there is a direct connection between trusting what Jesus says about the world we live in and trusting Him with what He teaches about in the world to come.
But if you don’t believe me when I tell you about earthly things, how can you possibly believe if I tell you about heavenly things?
“For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
3:16 is one of the most famous verses in scripture it is powerful but so is the next verses. They can’t be under stood apart. They joined in the understanding of what Jesus is saying.
God didn’t send Jesus to Judge But to Save the world through Him. (Christ.)
Listen to me clearly, If you believe in Christ there is no judgement for you.
If you don’t You have chosen judgement by default itself. You see you have a choice today either way.
There is freedom with this, Believe or Don’t. God isn’t forcing you either way.
He welcomes you if you Choose to Believe. He lets you reject Him but He never forces you to love Him.
That’s amazing when you think about the opinion of people about God and what they get wrong.
People know that God is Love but often say “Not for them.”
People will say that what they have done or believed about God precludes God from loving them.
Listen, If God says, Whoever Believes is saved. God doesn’t double speak.
When God says something, whatever it is, becomes reality.
So if you will let yourself believe God will accept you, as is, and gives you a warranty on your life right into heaven.
If you don’t, God will let you live in the judgement you already live in.
You see it’s not if God will accept you and save you, He will, It’s an issue if you will let Him.
God isn’t a bully.
However the Clock is ticking and when it runs out, there will be no do overs or additional chances.
God knows that people like their lives with secrets. Hiding what they don’t want others to see.
God sees it all. Here’s the deal, so do we. We all know what we have done, so understand, it has the power we give it to stop and deny our lives, of the victory over sin that God offers.
So maybe quit blaming God for what you have chosen if you have rejected His offer of salvation.
Perhaps today you are getting it for the first time, that’s cool! At the end of this service today you will have the chance to say yes to that offer of salvation is about a relationship.
We will help you to draw closer to God’s light. It makes understanding him easier as time goes by. It’ helps you overcome things that have been holding you back.
It’s a journey not a destination.
It’s a relationship that heals not one that harms.
It’s a hope that restores, not destroys.
It’s how God helps to continue to form you in the His greatest desire.
In the last part of this chapter is something amazing. Perhaps something I should have noticed before but didn’t.
So John is baptizing people. His disciples come to him,
So John’s disciples came to him and said, “Rabbi, the man you met on the other side of the Jordan River, the one you identified as the Messiah, is also baptizing people. And everybody is going to him instead of coming to us.”
Did you catch that statement: “The one you identified as the Messiah”
Already people saw Jesus as the Messiah. He wasn’t just another prophet. He was their deliver. Christ wasn’t seen as something less but more than a prophet.
There are so many religions today who try to limit Jesus as a prophet and they are wrong. There are those who want to reduce Christ to a Teacher, a great Teacher but they are wrong.
Even by the very standard of the day of the time Christ was walking the earth, He was seen as more than a man.
While He lived as a man, His peers and “Competition” saw Him as the nation’s salvation in the context of the Messiah.
They thought it would be a messiah of war, but He turned out to be the Messiah of sacrifice.
They got the idea of Messiah right, but what kind wrong.
John got it right and understood that he had to become less. John was only about 6 months older, understood Jesus was here and was more important than he himself.
Do you see how amazing it was that Christ was already looked at as the Messiah?
John Got it right spiritually speaking:
For he is sent by God. He speaks God’s words, for God gives him the Spirit without limit. The Father loves his Son and has put everything into his hands. And anyone who believes in God’s Son has eternal life. Anyone who doesn’t obey the Son will never experience eternal life but remains under God’s angry judgment.”
John the Baptist understood the nature of belief and non belief. There are always outcomes.
So today we simply ask the question:
Will you believe?
Yes.