Sermon Tone Analysis

Hello, my friends.

I want to ask you a question.

Have you been born again?

Have you ever asked yourself that question?

Have you ever said to yourself, “Am I born again”?

Do you know what that means?

Well, let me ask you a different question.

Does it make any difference?

Does it matter if you have been born again?

If it does matter then you’d better know what being born again means, right?

I’m assuming that you want to know the answer because you are listening to this talk.

But let me ask you yet a different question.

Are you a true follower of Yeshua, Jesus?

Again, I don’t think you’d be listening to this talk if you had no interest in that question.

The short answer to both these questions is this:

It most definitely makes a difference if you have been born again.

And if you have not born again you are not a true follower of Yeshua.

But if you have been born again you are most definitely a true follower of Yeshua.

The two things, being born again and being a true follower of Yeshua are totally connected.

Before I go much further let me ask a third question.

Are there false followers of Yeshua?

The answer is YES!

These would be people who profess to believe in Yeshua but have not been born again.

The Letter to the Hebrews, in the New Testament, talks about people in that category.

False followers of Yeshua are definitely NOT born again.

False followers of Yeshua may profess to believe in Him, but they don’t have faith in Him.

They are not born again.

They are not saved.

You cannot be saved without being born again.

People who are not born again will not be spending eternity in heaven with God.

So we’d better know what it means to be born again.

In fact this is a question of supreme importance, my friends.

Do you remember the famous Jewish leader and teacher of Israel?

His name was Nicodemus.

He was a Pharisee.

He came to Jesus one night, addressed Him as Rabbi and called Him a teacher come from God.

But before Nicodemus could pose a question to Jesus, and he obviously came to ask Jesus some questions, Jesus spoke first, cutting right to the heart of things, to what was of crucial importance.

Let’s turn to the gospel of John:

When Jesus says truly, truly - when He says truly twice in a row - Jesus is saying “Listen up.

This is really important”.

And what was so important?

Just this: Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

So Jesus is setting down a standard: a person cannot see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.

Implicit in this statement is this.

Only a saved person, a true follower of Jesus, can see the kingdom of God.

What does Jesus mean by seeing the kingdom of God?

It means a lot of things, spiritual things, but I think that as a minimum seeing the kingdom of God has to include knowing who the King is (Yeshua) and knowing how one can enter into eternal life (through faith and not through works).

You don’t see the kingdom of God with your physical eyes.

The prophet Isaiah records what the Lord told him about this kind of inability to see;

So the lord, through Isaiah, is showing us that dull ears and dim eyes are in the same category as insensitive hearts: people with ears and eyes and hearts that are like that can’t understand, they can’t see.

In Scriptural terms seeing the kingdom of God is to understand the kingdom of God.

And the hearts we were born with can’t see it because they can’t understand it.

So what kind of heart do we need to see and understand the kingdom of God? Please bear with me and I’ll try to answer that shortly.

But Now, at this point in his conversation with Jesus, Nicodemus does ask a question.

How can a grown man be born again?

Nicodemus was thinking of physical birth, the way a baby is born of his mother.

Nicodemus didn’t understand that Jesus was not talking about a physical birth.

He was talking about a birth from above, from heaven.

And Jesus was saying that without this heavenly birth a person cannot see the kingdom of God.

Listen to Yeshua’s answer to Nicodemus:

Now in order to understand what Jesus meant we have to understand that Jesus is not talking about physical birth here.

He is talking about spiritual things.

If Yeshua was talking about physical birth, then we might think that one is born of water might be referring to the rupture of amniotic membranes with the pouring forth of fluid that occurs just prior to a woman giving birth.

But what about being born of the Spirit?

Spirit here refers to the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is not directly involved in physical birth.

No, this is a birth of or from the Holy Spirit which is a birth from above.

That being the case, being born of water here has to symbolize the Holy Spirit.

When a woman says late in her pregnancy, “My water broke”, she is talking about the rupture of amniotic membranes.

That is not what Jesus is talking about here.

I think a verse from Ezekiel helps us understand what water symbolizes here.

Water in this Ezekiel verse is providing spiritual cleansing, not physical cleansing.

And that becomes clearer if we look at Ezekiel 36:25 in context.

Let’s take a look.

And please note that these verses are talking about something that has not happened yet.

This is a prophecy of future events.

Ezekiel 36:24–27 (NASB)

24 “For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands, and bring you into your own land.25 “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.26

“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit 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 you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

The Lord is talking about cleansing the people of Israel after bringing them back to their Land, from all their idols, about giving them a new heart, about putting a new spirit within them, about putting His Holy Spirit within them, and causing them to walk in His statutes and to obey His laws.

Now this is a spiritual operation from start to finish.

And all that from sprinkling clean water on them.

That water has to signify the Holy Spirit.

So we should read and understand John 3:5-6 like this:

John 3:5–6 (NASB)

5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of Holy Water, yes I say, even the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.6 “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

I believe that Jesus spoke this way using a figure of speech and saying twice that a person must be born of the Holy Spirit in order to emphasize that this rebirth, this being born again, is of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, from first to last.

Yet, Nicodemus still did not understand.

And truthfully my friends if I was Nicodemus back in that time and place, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have understood either.

And yet, Nicodemus should have understood.

How can I say that?

Because of what Jesus said to Nicodemus:

Apparently, Nicodemus was quite a revered teacher of the Scriptures.

Those Scriptures were of course the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament or Tanach.

Nicodemus would have known those well.

So what Scriptures or passages of Scripture did Yeshua have in mind?

I feel certain that one passage would have been the one that we just read, from Ezekiel, chapter 36.

Let me read it to you again.

Now it surely seems to me that this passage is talking about a new birth, a spiritual birth.

Is there evidence for that in this passage?