“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.” John 3:16
That is probably one of the most memorized verses in the Bible. The rest of John 3 is rich with Jesus’ teaching, yet we don’t spend much time absorbing it and many of us don’t even know what it contains. Not that we shouldn’t focus on John 3:16, but we shouldn’t stop there.
The first part of John 3 is a conversation between Jesus and one of the religious leaders of the day. Nicodemus was struggling with his own beliefs. He believed that Jesus was a teacher who had come from God. But as a religious leader, he had studied the Scriptures to great length and his knowledge about how things should be (according to the beliefs he had accumulated) was getting in the way of accepting what Jesus was teaching.
Jesus immediately jars him off course by saying, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” John 3:3 This statement floors Nicodemus. What does it mean to be born again? This is a question we all need to deal with if we want to see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus is stuck in the here and now – where most of us spend a good bit of our time! He can’t make sense out of what Jesus is saying. Jesus clarifies, “I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” John 3:5
We are a people who likes to believe in what we can touch with our hands and see with our eyes. Yet Jesus is telling Nicodemus (and us) that there is a Spirit that we cannot see with our eyes or touch with our hands. Like Nicodemus, many of us struggle to comprehend this. We cannot control this Spirit and we like to control things around us. We cannot see this Spirit and we have a hard time believing in anything we cannot see. This struggle is true for those who believe Jesus is the Son of God and it is true for those who don’t believe Jesus is the Son of God.
This struggling is apparent throughout our lives as we try to understand why bad things happen to good people, as we try to understand why basically good people still need to be saved, as we struggle with prayer and the power or lack thereof of prayer, and as we struggle with whether or not God cares about the details of our lives.
Jesus goes on with Nicodemus, “You are Israel’s teacher, and do you not understand these things? I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony.” It seems that for most of us, the first step is to accept the testimony of someone who has experienced the Spirit. This is the bridge between the physical birth and the spiritual birth.
In this generation, it seems that we have a lot of people who know the Scriptures, who know the right words, who maybe even live the right way, but have not gotten past the physical world into the Spiritual one. How then can they testify and encourage the faith development of others if they have not experienced it themselves? Paul teaches us that “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Hebrews 11:1 This is a hard ‘pill to swallow’ for those of us who have our feet on the ground and believe what we can see.
As we see others living with this faith and hope, we may be able to take the first step across the bridge and believe that these people are interacting with the Holy Spirit and there may be more than our eyes can see and our fingers can touch. At some point, we may be convinced that they have something and be willing to take the plunge into the unknown and see if we can experience this same Holy Spirit. Once we believe it is possible, that step is easier to take.
What holds us back is the Light that illuminates the real self, the real motive, the ugly skeletons we love to hide in our closets. Like a 2-year-old, we believe if we can’t see it, it’s not there! Then this Light comes on and we see just how desperate we really are. But here the greatest of all things happens. Once we see our need, Jesus is right there. All we need to do is ask his forgiveness and he is right there ready to clean us up and let us begin again – born of the Spirit. “But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” John 3:21
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