We talk a lot about God’s Holy Spirit, and yet
the Holy Spirit is probably the person of the trinity we understand the least
about. We can understand God the Father, at least to some extent. We call Him by all sorts of titles: the Creator, the Almighty, the Ancient of
Days, on and on and on. And we can understand Jesus--God the Son--to some
extent, too. We can picture him--I mean,
I’m sure Jesus did not look like the paintings we have, but I think most of us
have some sort of mental picture of Jesus, whether it’s accurate or not.
And because Jesus actually walked on the earth and had conversations with real
people, it’s a lot easier for us to get our minds around who Jesus is--not
totally, but again, to some extent.
But the Holy Spirit? What’s the Holy Spirit,
exactly? Well, it’s--it’s a Spirit.
And it’s Holy. But what else?
In our Bible reading for today, Jesus talks a little about
the Holy Spirit. When we read this passage, we often skip down to John
Three, Sixteen. That’s the part we
like. And we will get to that, but first, we have to deal with some of
the stuff we don’t like. And what we
don’t like dealing with so much is the whole “born again” thing. It’s harder
to understand.
But Jesus said that no one can see the kingdom of God
unless they are born again. And then, just to make sure there was no
mistake, he said that no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born
of water and the Spirit. So being born again must be pretty important,
and we need to deal with it. And the way
we are born again is through God’s Holy Spirit.
One thing that people sometimes get hung up on is whether
being “born again” has to be a definite, instantaneous experience or whether it
can be a process that plays out over a period of time. As United
Methodists, we believe it can be either way.
There are people who have a “born again experience”, who are changed
instantly by God’s Holy Spirit. There
are others for whom it happens gradually, over a period of time.
That’s how it’s happened for me. I cannot point to
one specific time and place at which God’s Holy Spirit transformed me. I
can think of times where I’ve felt God’s Holy Spirit with me, but not in the
sense of a born again experience. For me, being born again has happened
gradually, over a period of time. And in
fact, I believe it’s still happening. I believe I’m still in the process
of being born again, of being transformed, of having God’s Holy Spirit work
within me.
I hope that does not sound arrogant, because I don’t mean
it to be. I have no control over God’s Holy Spirit. I’m not even sure I always recognize
it. I can be really good at convincing myself that I’m following God’s
Holy Spirit when in fact I’m just doing what I want to do. As Jesus says,
you cannot tell where the Spirit is going to go. All any of us can do is try to be open to God’s
Holy Spirit and do our best to follow where the Spirit leads us.
I say that, and you know, it sounds fairly simple.
And it sounds like a good thing. After
all, God’s Holy Spirit would never lead us the wrong way, right? And of
course that’s true. The Holy Spirit
never would lead us the wrong way. But
the Spirit might lead us to places we don’t want to go. The Spirit might
lead us to places that scare us. In
fact, the Spirit might lead us to places that are dangerous. After all, look where the Holy Spirit led
Jesus. The Spirit led Jesus to the cross.
But that’s the thing about being born again. That’s
the thing about truly being born of God’s Holy Spirit. If we do that--if
you and I fully and completely surrender ourselves to God’s Holy Spirit--we
give up control over our own lives. We go where God’s Holy Spirit takes
us. Jesus compared the Holy Spirit to
the wind. If you and I truly surrender
our lives to God’s Holy Spirit, we basically become leaves being blown around
by that wind. If it’s a soft, gentle breeze, we might not get blown very
far at all. We might make a nice, gentle
landing more or less where we are. But
if it’s a forty or fifty mile an hour wind, like we can get around here, we
might get blown into the next county or the next state or even farther. And
we don’t know which it’s going to be.
It is really hard to give up that much control of our
lives. It is really hard to completely surrender to God’s Holy
Spirit. I cannot say I’ve done it.
I’m not sure I’ve ever known anyone who has. I know some who’ve
come close. But even if we try, even
when we’re serious about trying to turn our lives over to God, we are really
hesitant to do it completely. We keep trying to take that control back
for ourselves. We say, “God, I’ll give
you most of my life, but I’m going to keep this part for myself. This part belongs to me.”
That’s why I say that being born again is a process.
Even if you had a true “born again experience”, there’s an extent to which it’s
still a process. Even when we truly are born again, our sinful nature
does not magically go away. Satan does
not just decide to stop working on us, either. Satan may wait for a
better time, just as he did with Jesus in the wilderness, but Satan does not
give up. That’s why we need to keep
trying to get closer and closer to God’s Holy Spirit, so we have the Holy
Spirit’s protection, both against Satan and against ourselves.
But the thing is, Jesus knew that. Jesus knew that
being born again is a process. Jesus knew the battles we were going to
have to fight. Jesus understood them better than we do. And that’s why, after Jesus told us that we
need to be born again, and after Jesus told us give our lives to God’s Holy
Spirit, Jesus said those words that we love so much. He said, “the Son of
Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life through
him. 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.”
When we accept Jesus as the Savior, God’s Holy Spirit comes
to us. And God’s Holy Spirit changes us.
It transforms us. That’s really
what we mean when we say we’re born again. We are no longer the people we
were before. Are we perfect people? No.
The only perfect person who ever walked on the earth was Jesus. As
I said, we’re still going to have to fight our sinful nature, and Satan is not
going to leave us alone, either.
God, of course, is
all-powerful, so God’s Holy Spirit could transform us into perfect people if
God chose to do that. But God continues to give us free will. And that means God gives us the ability to
turn away from God’s Holy Spirit and do things our own way. And sometimes
we do. Even after we’ve accepted Jesus
as the Savior, we still sometimes want to do things our own way. God’s Holy Spirit may come to us, but
sometimes we fight against the Spirit.
God understands that, too, of
course. But even so, when we accept Jesus as the Savior, and when God’s
Holy Spirit transforms us, we are different people. Because now, we’re
God’s people.
Listen to this part. We
don’t talk about this part so much, but this is verses twenty and
twenty-one: “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come
into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever
lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that
what they have done has been done in the sight of God.”
There are a lot of things we
can take out of those verses, but one of them is that when we accept Jesus as
the Savior, we come into the light. What we do is seen plainly. It’s done in the sight of God. That does not mean that everything we do will
be pure and perfect. There will still be
times when we’ll do what we want to do and try to justify what we’ve
done. But once we accept Jesus as the Savior, we stop trying to hide what
we’ve done. We especially stop trying to
hide it from God. Again, we may try to
justify it. We may even try to argue
with God about it. But we’re not trying
to hide it. We admit to God who we are and what we’ve done. We will live honestly “living by the
truth”. And when God’s Holy Spirit makes
it clear that what we’ve done was wrong, we’ll acknowledge that, ask for
forgiveness, and start again.
When we accept Jesus as the
Savior, God’s Holy Spirit comes to us and changes us. It transforms
us. We no longer feel that we have to
hide who we are. We can live by the truth,
confident in who God is and in who we are in relation to God. And, over
time, we can truly be born again.
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