So, we’re going to get into this word, a pretty familiar word about uh Nicodemus coming to see Jesus at night. And this is a a passage that to my mind it it just unfolds like a great film noir. You have in the darkness of night this well-dressed solitary figure and he’s making his way through deserted streets to engage in conversation with this new curiosity of a man who’s just come to town. this man who seems to have extraordinary abilities to do supernatural things. The atmosphere is it’s charged with mystery and the soundtrack I can imagine is very foroding and this black and white shadow world they’re speaking this exotic Middle Eastern language so everything needs to be subtitled for us. So it’s it’s it’s a perfect movie really. And I asked Adam this morning, Adam, do you know what movie that is from? and uh he said right away, “Well, that’s the third man with Orson Wells and uh and has nothing to do with Nicodemus, but uh Adam just has this encyclopedic knowledge of all of these old movies long before his time.” So, uh this um this perfect movie, we’re going to watch it together in our minds this morning. And the most explosive thing that gets said is repeated from the mouth of Jesus no less than three times in only five verses. He says, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless he’s born again.” Two verses later, “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he’s born of water and spirit.” Two verses later, you shouldn’t be surprised at my saying, you must be born again. And I I don’t know how those words hit your ears. Maybe they’re a little bit discomforting because it’s something of a social stigma in our world to be associated with the bornagains, isn’t it? I mean that term might carry connotations that people who are narrow or maybe overly emotional. Sort of a fringe element of Christianity. Isn’t that how people who who are who identify themselves as being born again Christians are often viewed? Can’t we just be regular, unassuming, normal, non-hyenated Christians instead of wearing that label of being born again? You might not feel comfortable going to your friends and neighbors and saying, you know, I go to Knox Church. It’s this lovely 118y old building in old Strath Kona, but what I most like about it is it’s just full of bornagains. You know, it it might not be our preference to flash that label, but Jesus says you don’t enter the kingdom of God. You don’t see the kingdom of God unless you’re born again. Which means it’s really no option for us to be Christians of any other persuasion. Born again is a term that uh you know it it’s not just a term that qualifies this brash subset of Christians. It’s an identifying term for all Christians. Either born again or outside the kingdom of God looking in. Born again or the kingdom of God is foreign and inaccessible to us. So, if that’s how it is, if that’s what Jesus says, then the questions we’re sort of addressing this morning are one, what what does it mean to be born again? And two, how does that work for me? If that’s uh if that’s how it is, uh what does it mean? And second, how do I become or how do I even know that I’ve been born again? So, first, what does it mean? And to see that involves getting to know this figure who’s walking through the dark night, intent on having a conversation with Jesus. Man’s name is Nicodemus. He’s identified in our passage both as a Pharisee and as a member of the Jewish ruling council. So that would indicate that he’s likely an older man, highly respected religious leader, man of some wealth and influence. You wouldn’t be on the Jewish Sanhedrin, the Jewish religious council, if you didn’t have status and reputation and some standing in the community. Now, as a group, we know that throughout the gospels, the Pharisees are viewed very negatively. They’re nitpicking, religious hypocrites. They set themselves in opposition against Jesus. But Nicodemus presents here as something of an outlier. He appears to approach Jesus with a far more open mind. So, the setting is a Passover festival week of Jerusalem. The end of chapter 2, as Jason read, we’re told that while Jesus was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many people saw the miraculous signs he was doing and believed in his name. But though many people believed in him, Jesus didn’t believe in them. using the same word. Jesus knew that a a faith that’s just based on a response to miracles is a shallow and a superficial a cardboard kind of faith. It’s not a faith that’s going to s sustain anyone through the troughs and the valleys of life and through the difficult path of really being one of Jesus’ disciples. So unlike a lot of other leaders, Jesus did not thrive on the enthusiasm or the adulation of people. He made disciples mostly in a very private setting among people whose hearts were hungry. People who would make themselves accountable to him. So what are we to make of Nicodemus here? He comes curious about the miracles, curious about the one who could work such signs. What kind of belief does he have? He’s an academic. He’s a religious teacher. He approaches Jesus having already worked some things out analytically in his mind. His posture is like one of an academic, an intellectual, a teacher coming to address a fellow academic or a fellow teacher. So he says, “Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who’s come from God. No one could perform the miraculous signs you’re doing if God were not with him.” But immediately Jesus interrupts him and says, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he’s born again.” It’s like Jesus pushes away all the soil of Nicodemus’s preamble and takes the conversation right down to the basement, right down to the bedrock truth that Nicodemus is going to have to come to grips with and he’s going to have to understand. Being viewed as a rabbi or a teacher, fitting into the world of philosophy and academia, that’s not flattering or attractive to Jesus. Jesus was a young man. He was a carpenter. He had none of the rabbitical training of people like uh Nicodemus. So being fit into the category of a rabbi or a teacher far too small a category for Jesus. Many many people in our world would like to acknowledge the existence of Jesus only as some great wise ancient teacher. But when you look at the gospels, how much teaching did Jesus actually leave us with? Of course, his words are all potent and powerful and wise and wonderful, but you’ll get far more teaching con content out of an introductory sociology course at university than you’ll ever get from Jesus in the Gospels. The actual volume of teaching that Jesus has left us with is pretty thin. And he made no claims to have come primarily as a teacher. Mark 10:45 he says the son of man didn’t come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So the teaching ministry of Jesus it’s only an addition to his primary purpose of giving up his life as a ransom for many. And that maybe provides the clue as to why Jesus cuts through Nicodemus’s preamble to essentially pull the rug out from under his feet. He says, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he’s born again.” And that’s very startling because Nicodemus is the last person you’d ever think would ever have to be asked to go back to square one to start at the beginning and to be born again. He’s this highly sophisticated religious leader, morally quite elevated. He’s doctrally sophisticated. How do you tell him that everything he’s ever done really counts for nothing? He’s going to be required to go back to the exact same starting point as everyone else or he’s never going to see and he’s never going to enter the kingdom of God. The implications of that are pretty enormous. One of the most, I think, radically infuriating things that Jesus would have ever said to a group of Jewish religious leaders must have been what he said to them in Matthew 21 when he said, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.” And he wasn’t saying that because the tax collectors and prostitutes were better people than the religious leaders were. They got into the kingdom first. They were first in line because they really understood and got the gospel. They they were thrilled. People like that were thrilled by the idea of a new birth where everyone’s moral record is discarded. Everyone can be transformed by the grace of Christ. We know that all of us came into the world the same way through our mothers. We all began acrewing different moral records. Everyone here uh some of us have succeeded in areas where others have failed. Some here probably have managed for the most part, by all appearances at least, to live lives as fairly moral straight arrows, maybe a bit like Nicodemus and others. You sit in church this morning and you think you you just have this huge impostor syndrome. You think if all these nice religious people ever knew what my real record was, they wouldn’t sit in the same pew with me. They might not even let me in the building. And Jesus says that those of you who feel that impostor syndrome are actually on a closer track to the kingdom of God than those who feel that they’re morally squared away. So if everyone here needs to be born again, then we should raise a bit of a cheer together because that means there’s there’s no hopeless or helpless cases. To anyone who’s full of pride and self-righteousness, the teaching of the new birth is very bad news. Because if we’ve been controlling our spiritual image and regulating our performance, and now we’re told we need to go back to square one along with everyone else, make ourselves completely dependent on God to transform us. What we’re to do after all the work and hard effort that we put in, the new birth is awful news. there’s no way left to measure ourselves or measure our spiritual progress. But if we know that we’re flawed failures and our then our hearts leap for joy to be told that we get to go back to square one and God is going to transform us into the person he wants us to be. So it’s little wonder that a guy like Nicodemus, he doesn’t get this first time around. He responds very incredulously and he says, “How can a man be born when he’s old? Surely he can’t enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born. And Jesus then elaborates. He goes deeper into this image of the birth. He says, “I tell you the truth. No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they’re born of water and the spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit.” You shouldn’t be surprised at my saying, you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you can’t tell from where from or where it’s going. So it is with everyone born of the spirit. Nicodemus isn’t getting it yet. He says, “How can this be?” And Jesus says, “You are Israel’s teacher and you’re missing this. You don’t understand this.” Jesus has some expectation that something in what he’s saying should ring a bell in Nicodemus’s academic bibleed mind. He’s a religious teacher. He should be able to access something from his knowledge of the Old Testament that enables him to understand this. And most commentators who teach on this passage point to Ezekiel chapters 36 and 37 as the passage that Nicodemus really ought to be accessing here. In Ezekiel, it says God’s word is that he he’s going to sprinkle clean water on his offending nation. He’s going to put a new spirit in them. He’ll replace their heart of stone with a heart of flesh. So water and the spirit are involved. And a few verses later comes the wind in Ezekiel 37. The wind comes and blows over these dry dead bones and it reanimates them. Brings life to what’s dead. So within those few verses of Ezekiel, water, spirit, the wind come together to bring new hearts to those who’ve been corrupted by their sin and by their idolatry. And for those whom the water cleanses and in whose hearts the spirit is placed over whose bones the uh the wind blows that the Old Testament picture is very resonating very clearly I think with what Jesus is referring to in the new birth. A new birth that has to happen if we’re to see the kingdom or enter the kingdom of God. Nicodemus should be making a connection here. You’re Israel’s teacher. Jesus says you do not understand these things. How can you teach others? Nicodemus, when you have so little spiritual self-standing and the Pharisees as a group, they didn’t know each other very well spiritually or emotionally or psychologically, their stellar religious performance, it just made them slow to perceive their need for grace. It wasn’t really their badness that was preventing them from seeing the kingdom of God. It was their goodness that was preventing them from seeing the kingdom of God. They assumed that they had spiritual stability. They didn’t see how spiritually unstable they actually were. Still, Jesus is reaching out to Nicodemus. He offers the images of the new birth and the water and the spirit and the wind. But then Jesus gives one more very potent Old Testament image for Nicodemus to chew on. He refers to a story that Nicodemus would know very well, an obscure little incident from the book of Numbers, chapter 21. That’s where God’s people, they’d been miraculously delivered from centuries of enslavement in Egypt. And at Mount Si, they’d received the law and the ten commandments and all the other things God wanted to teach them. And they’d been given instruction on building this great tabernacle they were to carry with them, their place of worship. And God was leading them inexurably toward the promised land he had for them. They’d already spent years in the wilderness being led to their destiny. And they suffered a big blip. In fact, their whole system crashed. These people were impatient. It says they spoke against God. They spoke against their leader, Moses. They complained about having no bread and water. And they found that the mana that God was providing every morning for them every day. They said, “This is detestable stuff. We’re so tired of eating this stuff.” And so God, as a result of th those complaints, sent venomous snakes into their camp. And it says the snakes bit many people and many Israelites died. The people then realized that they had sinned. They they shouldn’t have spoken against the Lord and spoken against Moses. Moses began to pray for them. And as he did, God spoke to Moses saying, “Make a snake out of bronze. Put it on a pole. When anyone who’s snake bitten just looks at that snake, they will live.” So they put this snake on a pole and everyone who looked at it survived. Now, why would God do such a thing as to as to send those snakes and then provide that very weird antidote? The main problem with the people wasn’t the venom that was in their bodies or in their bloodstream. It was the venom that was in their souls. That’s the poison that was really doing the damage in their lives. It was their sin that was keeping them from seeing God and seeing the grace of God working in their lives. And why does Jesus access this Old Testament story for Nicodemus? Look how he applies it. He says, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” And then these very famous verses, for God so loved the world, he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. God didn’t send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him. Whoever just believes in him is not condemned. But whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only son. Do you notice how entirely passive the images are that Jesus gives as instruction for entering God’s kingdom? Being born is an entirely passive thing. The mom does all the work. The baby’s just along for the ride. No one controls the wind. We just feel it when it blows. Wind of the spirit simply comes. All we do is receive it. The snake on the stick. What’s required to be healed? If you were in your tent and you were suffering and convulsing and swelling up from the uh the venom of the snake, all you had to do was crawl to the door of your tent and lift the flap and poke your head out and just look at the snake on the pole and that healing would just wash over your life. Jesus says that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. Which is again the picture of us just crawling to the door of our tent, lifting the flap, looking out the flap at at Jesus on the cross, putting our faith and trust in what he’s done for us, and we get reborn. It just happens to us. We become one of those great bornagains who can see and enter the kingdom of God. So that’s what it means really to be born again. We get what Jesus is saying, but how does it happen to people like us? And how do we know if it’s happened to people like us? I think Jesus wants to dispel any insecurity and anxiety that we might be feeling in that regard. Jesus would say about salvation that with man it’s impossible, but God does the impossible every day. So Tim Keller gives a helpful illustration of a hungry lion. And to feed the lion, you place in front of it a slab of raw meat and a bowl of oatmeal. What’s the lion going to choose? The lion has free will. It can choose either. No one’s forcing it. But a 100 times out of a hundred, it’ll choose the meat. Why? Because that’s its nature. And our nature is 100, this is what the Bible tells us, a hundred times out of a hundred to serve ourselves rather than serve God. And even if we’re religious people, we’ll use our religion to uh to make God useful to us. We’ll use God to serve ourselves. That’s our nature. And that’s why only something as radical as the new birth can bring us under God’s dominion and allow us to be transformed by his spirit. That’s why those images are so passive. Be born. Feel the wind. Cast an eye to that snake on the pole. Cast an eye at the cross and just believe in Jesus and be saved. Being born again can happen to anyone. There’s no effort or achievement involved. You can’t just make yourself a Christian. We don’t suffer when we’re born. Someone else is in labor. Someone else is doing all the suffering for us. Someone else is experiencing pain and someone else is in anguish and someone else is bleeding and I’ve seen three of my four children born and all the pain was Charlene’s. They didn’t seem to be suffering at all. Later in the gospel of John in chapter 16, the night before his crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples that they’re not going to see him for a while, but after that they’ll see him and at that point their grief will turn to joy. And he car compares that experience to a woman giving birth to a child. great pain, great anguish. Child is born into the world. When the baby comes, she forgets all about her anguish because of the joy she has in her child. So Jesus says his disciples are going to go through that. They’ll experience grief followed by joy and then the grief’s going to be forgotten. But their pain and grief is will be nothing compared to um the pain and grief that Jesus himself is going to suffer. He’ll do all the suffering so that we can be born again. And Jesus then will forget about all the agony of the cross as he says people like us lining up to enter the kingdom of God through faith in him. So has has that new birth happened to you? Have you been born again? We shouldn’t think of it as just some great cathartic emotional experience that sparks have to fall from the sky and and set our soul on fire. I I’ve been around some people who’ve come to Christ with that kind of emotional experience. It’s not essential. It’s probably not the norm. In his Alpha Evangelism course, Nikki Gumble talks about train travel in Europe. And he says, “You can pass from one country to another in Europe on the train. You might be very awake and very excited as you come to the border crossing or you might sleep through it and not even be aware but you still wake up in a new country. So the most important thing for us is not to determine when did I put my faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for my salvation. What day or what hour or what year? The only real relevant question is are you trusting in Christ alone for your salvation today? If you can say that, then you have been born again. And you might have slept through the entire thing, but you’ve woken up in a new country. You’ll know it, I think, from the changes that are happening inside you, that are happening in your soul. You might become a bit of a puzzle or a bit of a mystery to the people around you who know you well. They don’t now understand you quite as they once did. They can’t quite figure out what’s come over you. Tim Keller suggests that not only do we become a mystery to other people when we’re born again, we also become something of a mystery to ourselves because we’re not running our life anymore. Something from the outside has come inside and is taking hold of us. So things that used to absolutely ruin our day, they don’t seem to be much of a challenge anymore. There’s there’s a joy. We kind of we’re amused by ourselves and the changes that are happening. We can laugh at ourselves because our lives are not our own. We don’t have to curate our image and and strive to present this identity and careful to monitor how we project ourselves to the world. We laugh at ourselves because someone else is moving the joystick around in our lives and transforming us to become more like Jesus. And we can’t help but take ourselves a little less seriously when we’ve been born again. So, we’ve looked at what being born again means and considered how it works for us and how we actually realize whether or not it’s happened to us. The last thing as we close is to try to finish the story, finish the movie by asking what ever happened to Nicodemus. Is this is this like one of the movies that just leaves us hanging? We never know the end. We never know what’s going to happen. Actually, not quite. Because Nicodemus shows up two more times in the Gospel of John. In chapter 7, the Pharisees are frustrated because Jesus, they wanted to arrest Jesus. This is fairly early on in his ministry, but he hadn’t been arrested. The temple guards went to arrest him and they came back and and the Pharisees says, “Well, why don’t you have him with you?” And they said, “Well, no one talks like him. You know, they just can’t do it.” And so, the Pharisees are very frustrated. And Nicodemus being one of the council, the Jewish religious council, speaks up for Jesus. And he says, “Does our law condemn anyone without first hearing him to find out what he’s doing?” And the Pharisees, the rest of them, they gang up on Nicodemus at that point. They kind of mock him for thinking that that a Messiah could ever come from a lowly place like Nazareth. And then although we’re never specifically told whether Nicodemus was ever converted, whether he was born again, in John chapter 19, two men go to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to ask if they can take charge of Jesus’ dead body that’s still pinned to the cross. Those men are Joseph of Arythea and Nicodemus. Jesus’ disciples, they’re nowhere to be found. They’re off hiding. But Joseph and Nicodemus, they bring that limp and lifeless body of Jesus down from the cross. And it’s normally completely the work of women. But these two men dress Jesus’ dead body themselves. They they wipe the crusted blood from Jesus’ head and body and they take strips of linen and they soak it in spices and they wrap them around Jesus’ body from head to foot. And then they carry together Jesus’ body into a garden tomb and they leave him there. So you have to ask yourself, what made Nicodemus so bold as to do that? What gave him the courage to identify so closely with Jesus when no one else would? What moved Nicodemus to do this foul, terrible work of preparing a dead body when men, especially men like him, would never touch such a thing? You know, he set aside his male pride and he set aside his cultural pride and he set aside his class pride. Something made him more bold and more courageous and more culturally flexible than he’d ever been. Something in him had been touched and changed by Jesus. Just maybe he had been born again and maybe he was already seeing deeply into the kingdom of God. Hey, there are a few things that we can pray about just quietly and privately before God and I’ll put them up on the screen. Few things you might want to pray in the next couple moments. This is a private time between you and God. You might want to ask yourself if you are trusting in Christ alone for your salvation today. And if you are, then thank Jesus that however it happened to you, you’ve been born again. You’ve been able to enter the kingdom of God. And finally, thank Jesus that you keep being surprised and amused by all the transforming changes that he’s working in your life. Pray that for a couple moments and then I’m just going to lead into a a group prayer together.