Today we
come to the end of our sermon series “The Bible’s Greatest Hits”, looking at
the favorite bible verses as determined by searches at biblegateway.com.
And for some of you, it’s not any big shock as to what the number one
verse turned out to be. John Three, Sixteen: “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.”
That’s been one of people’s favorite
Bible verses as long as I can remember. In fact, if you’re a sports fan
and you’re my age, you may remember a guy named Rollen Stewart. He used
show up at major sports events and get a seat where he knew he’d get on TV,
like right behind home plate at a baseball game. He’d wear a
rainbow-colored wig, and he’d hold a sign or wear a T-shirt that said “John
3:16”. I don’t know how effective that was, but I imagine at least a few
people looked up John Three, Sixteen after they saw that shirt. It shows
how people have considered this a very important verse for quite a while.
But as we’ve said before, it’s
important to put Bible verses in context. And when we look at the context
in which Jesus said those words--”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.”--there is an awful lot there. There’s so much there that I
kept thinking of different directions this week’s message could go. So,
instead of covering it all in one message and moving on, we’re going to make
this both the end of one sermon series and the start of a new sermon series,
“God So Loved the World”. We’re going to look at today’s passage, John Chapter
Three, Verses One through Twenty, in some depth, because there is just so much
there. And we’re going to start with Jesus telling Nicodemus “No one can
see the kingdom of God without being born again.”
That term, “born again”, is kind of
a loaded one to use these days. Nicodemus did not understand it. In
fact, he seems to be kind of making fun of Jesus for using that term. He
took it literally, asking how a person can go back into their mother’s womb and
be born a second time.
A lot of times we don’t really understand it, either. There
are some people for whom being “born again” is the most important thing about
being a Christian. They believe that being “born again” is something that
has to happen in an instant. They believe there has to be a specific time
and place that one is born again, just like there’s a specific time and place
that one is born on earth in the first place. And if you don’t have that,
they would say that you have not truly been born again.
I do believe there are people for
whom it does happen that way. There are people who can tell you a
specific time and place where the Holy Spirit came to them and they were born
again. Maybe that’s happened to some of you, and if it has, that’s wonderful.
That has to be an awesome thing to experience.
But as United Methodists, we don’t
believe that it has to happen that way. We believe the Holy Spirit can
come to us gradually, over a period of time. And it can happen in a
variety of ways. But having said that, we need to not ignore being “born
again” and not consider it important at all. Jesus did say it, and he
meant something by it. There needs to be some way in which our faith in
Jesus Christ makes us different. There needs to be some way in which we
do feel the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. If our faith in Jesus never
made any difference to us, if we never felt anything because of it, if we never
acted any differently because of it, then our faith would be pretty
meaningless.
Jesus told Nicodemus, and he tells
us, that we should not be surprised when he says we must be born again.
Jesus explains it this way: “The wind blows wherever it pleases.
You hear it’s sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it
is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
And Nicodemus basically responds,
“Huh?”
That may be how you and I respond,
too. Does it ever bother you that there seem to be so many times when
Jesus does stuff like this? I mean, seriously, it seems like there are so
many times when Jesus used figures of speech and parables and things like that
to make his point. Don’t you wonder sometimes, why does Jesus not just
come out and say what he means?
Well, when you read what people have
to say on the subject, you get lots of different explanations. But think
of it his way. What was one of the titles Jesus was given by the people
around him? In fact, Nicodemus uses it
in this passage. It’s teacher, right? Jesus was called “Teacher”.
What does a good teacher do?
Good teachers don’t just give the students all the answers, do they?
Good teachers want to teach their students to think. Good teachers
want to teach their students how to come up with the answers themselves.
They don’t just want their students to know what the answer is.
They want their students to know why the answer is that.
They want their students to be able to think for themselves, so when they
come across other problems, they’ll be able to solve them for themselves.
I think that’s at least part of what
Jesus was trying to do. It’s what we try to do in our confirmation class.
The point is not just to memorize a bunch of facts. The point is to
understand our faith. The point is to know, not just what we
believe, but why we believe it. That way, when our faith is
challenged, we’ll be less likely to fall away. We’ll be able to meet the
challenges, because we don’t just have faith, we know why we have
faith.
So let’s look at what Jesus says.
Again, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear it’s sound,
but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is
with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Here, as in other places in the Bible, the Holy Spirit is compared
to the wind. We cannot control the wind. It blows wherever and
whenever it pleases. Sometimes, it’s from the north, sometimes it’s from
the south. Sometimes it’s strong, sometimes it’s barely noticeable. But
you and I have no say over any of that. We might wish we did sometimes,
but we don’t. God is the only one who controls the wind.
And of course, that’s true of the Holy Spirit, too. We have
no control over what the Holy Spirit does. God is the only one who
controls the Holy Spirit, because of course the Holy Spirit is one of the
persons of the trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
So the Holy Spirit is God. And no human being can control God.
We cannot control the wind. We cannot even see the wind.
But we can see what it does. We can see the effects of the wind on
the things around us. We can see it blow the flag. We can see it
blow the leaves and the trees. On a windy day, we can feel its effect on
us as soon as we walk outside. The wind can be a gentle breeze, or it can
be a strong, powerful force. When the wind blows, it changes things.
And that’s true of the Holy Spirit, too. We cannot control
the Holy Spirit. We cannot see the Holy
Spirit. But we can see what it does.
We can see the effects of the Holy Spirit. We can see its effects
on others, when the Holy spirits act in and through them. And we can feel
its effects on us, as soon as the Holy Spirit acts in and through us.
Sometimes the Holy Spirit works gently and sometimes the Holy Spirit
works powerfully. But when the Holy Spirit works, it changes things.
And when the Holy Spirit acts in and through us, it changes us.
I think that’s at least part of what Jesus was trying to get
across when he said we need to be born again. We need to feel the Holy
Spirit acting in and through us. We need to have the Holy Spirit change
us. Sometimes that change happens suddenly and powerfully, like a strong
wind. Sometimes that change happens gradually, like a gentle breeze,
nudging us along. But if the Holy Spirit is acting in and through us, it
will change us. It will make us different from the way we were before the
Holy Spirit came.
God did love the world so much that he gave his one and only son.
Whoever believes in him will have eternal life. But if we truly
believe, that belief has to affect us in some way. If we truly believe,
we will ask the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts. And the Holy Spirit
will change us. The change may come quickly or it may come slowly, but it
will come. And when it does, we will truly be born again.
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