John 3: 1-17
3 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2 He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.” 3 Jesus replied, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
4 “How can
someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter
a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” 5 Jesus answered, “Very truly I
tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and
the Spirit. 6 Flesh gives
birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7 You should not
be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows
wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes
from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
9 “How can this
be?” Nicodemus asked. 10 “You are
Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand
these things? 11 Very truly I
tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but
still you people do not accept our testimony. 12 I have spoken to you of
earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of
heavenly things? 13 No one has
ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven – the Son of
Man. 14 Just as Moses
lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone
who believes may have eternal life in him.”
16 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. 17 For
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the
world through him.
Genesis 12: 1-412 The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. 2 I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” 4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran.
Introduction
My basic
point this morning is found in the title. God blesses us both for our own sake,
and for the sake of those around us. We are part of a much bigger story than
our own lives. We play our part, in order to bring about God’s desire to
reconcile the whole world to himself. So when God calls you and blesses you, he
expects you to become a blessing to others—to pay what you have received
forward to others around you.
We’ll look
briefly at the passage in John, a little more at Abram’s call in Genesis, and then
ask what that has to do with us today.
Nicodemus
In
John 3 Jesus has begun his ministry. Chapter 2 gives two incidents—one from the
beginning of his ministry: changing the water into wine at the wedding feast in
Cana, and one from the end of his ministry: clearing the temple during the
preparation for the Passover. The former begins to reveal who he is; the latter
notes that many people saw the signs he did and believed. Jesus himself
remained free from whatever others did, “for he knew all people…, he knew what
was in each person.”
So in
the passage we read, one of the Pharisees (his chief opponents) came to learn
more about him. Nicodemus shows us that the Pharisees were not simply bad
people; they were also truly searching for God’s work in Israel. After Jesus’
death and resurrection, many Pharisees were among those who followed the risen
Christ (Acts 15: 5). So with Nicodemus: he wanted to know if Jesus was really
the Messiah.
Jesus
began Nicodemus’ education in a new way to see the world. Those who are born
into their place in this world know what is going on in this world, but that’s
all they know. If you want to know about the world that is real and full and
complete, you have to be born into this new world: “You must be born again.”
This new birth comes only by God’s Spirit, acting in the person who comes to
God. “New Birth” is a metaphor to describe the incredible change that takes
place in a person’s life when he/she re-orients their life around God,
something that is possible only as a gift of God’s Holy Spirit.
In
the final two verses, the gospel in a nutshell (as it is sometimes called),
John gives his own commentary on Jesus’ words. Truly these two verses describe
what God is doing in our world—what he was doing when Jesus lived on earth, and
what he is doing now:
16 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. 17 For
God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the
world through him.
Our first point this morning is to recognize that this new life is what
God wants in everyone’s life here. It doesn’t matter if you grew up in a
Christian family or came to faith when you were 30 years old. It doesn’t matter
if you know the Bible from back to front, or have trouble finding the Scripture
reference without a page number. It doesn’t matter if you have been a really
good person (as our society thinks of it) or a drug dealer. God wants the same
thing for everyone of you, just as God wants it for me: God wants each of us to
have the new life that he gives by the Holy Spirit.
Abram (and Sarai)
Genesis 12 has sometimes been called the first or foundational
missionary text. In chapter 11 we see the people try to “save the world”
through their own efforts. In chapter 12 we see God’s
work to save the nations. Millard Lind (my OT professor at AMBS) used to call
chapter 11, “the Canaanite city-state” and chapter 12, “God’s community of
faith”. Note the differences through parallel construction.
Chapter 11 Chapter 12
2: they
found a plain in the land 1: Go ... to the land I will show you
3: let
us make bricks 2:
I will make of you
4: let
us build
5: let
us make a name for ourselves 2: I will ... make your name great
You see the difference. The people of chapter 11 tried to build a city
that would make them invincible, and they failed. God then took one family from
all the people scattered in chapter 11 and built them into a people who would
live forever. In their own way the Pharisees from whom Nicodemus came repeated
the mistakes of Genesis 11. They tried to build a system of laws that would
make them fit for God’s presence. Jesus told Nicodemus there is only one way to
be ready for God: You must be born again.
Look again at what God called Abram and Sarai to do.
·
Leave your
home and family and go to a new land—God will tell you when you get there.
·
Implied:
Rely on God to keep you and protect you as you travel and when you get to this
new land.
Observe what God said he would do for them.
·
I will
establish you.
·
I will
bless you.
·
I will
make your name great.
And note what God said this process would do for others.
·
People
around them will relate to God based on how they relate to Abram and his family.
The words that follow sound a lot like the way that Jesus tells the disciples
that what they bind and loose on earth is bound and loosed in Heaven.
·
Good
relationships will lead to blessings; bad relationships will lead to curses.
·
This
process will eventually encompass the whole world.
Abram and Sarai and some of their extended family followed God’s call
and began the trek to what we call the Promised Land.
You see the basic truth that God called Abram for the sake of the world.
At one level this gives us the overarching storyline of the Bible—God used the
children of Abraham, the Jews, to be the means by which God himself entered the
world in the person of Jesus. At another level this truth gives a pattern that
applies in all of life. When God blesses you and me, the blessing is always for
more than just us. God seeks to bless the world through us. We live in Christ
for the sake of the world.
Paying It Forward
I am reading a book by Alan and Eleanor Kreider called Worship and Mission. Alan and Eleanor
were Mennonite missionaries at the London Mennonite Centre. Now they are part
of the faculty at AMBS. In this book they explore the relationship between
worship and mission.
If you think about our times of worship as times we experience God’s
blessing, you begin to see how this pattern applies to us. When we meet God
here on a Sunday morning, at least two things are always true: 1) God blesses
us for our own benefit; and 2) God blesses us for the benefit of those around
us.
I want to focus on this pattern. First
in our services here in the church: We come together in worship and praise.
Often we ask: What do I get out of our services? It’s a fair question. We
praise and worship the Creator of the universe. We can expect that this worship
should change us somehow. I suspect that we take worship too casually
sometimes. We may not really think that God is here, or we may be so burdened
by the weight of daily life that we can’t sense anything beyond our own need.
But you came here to meet God this morning. Abram didn’t seem to be expecting
anything in Genesis 12, but he met God. Nicodemus came looking for Jesus in John
3, and he met God. This is the first and most basic aspect of our worship
together. We are here to meet God.
And God is here too. As the hymn
has it:
God is here among
us; let us all adore him, and with awe appear before him.
God is here within
us; soul, in silence fear him, humbly, fervently draw near him.
Now his own who
have known God in worship lowly yield their spirits wholly.
Come, abide within
me; let my soul, like Mary, be thine earthly sanctuary.
Come, indwelling
Spirit, with transfigured splendor; love and honor will I render.
Where I go here
below, let me bow before thee, know thee, and adore thee.
Gladly we
surrender earth's deceitful treasures, pride of life, and sinful
pleasures.
Gladly, Lord, we
offer thine to be forever, soul and life and each endeavor.
Thou alone shalt
be known Lord of all our being, life’s true way decreeing.
If you don’t come to church with that expectation, you need to! Come
expecting to meet God and receive God’s blessing. That blessing may take shapes
you don’t expect, as it did for Abram; but you can’t live without it!
Now when God blesses you in your Christian walk, whether in worship
here, or in a care group, or in your own prayer time, or when you’re walking down
Main Street, God expects that blessing
to have an effect in the lives of people around you. You know, your friends
are watching you. If God heals you of some deep hurt, they will see it. If you
love God more than anything else in life, they will see it. If you talk a good
story, but you don’t actually walk with God, they will see that too!
Over time the blessing you receive in following God will leak over into
your friends’ lives, and they too will want to follow God. When we say that we
are a missional church, the first and most important way that is true is in
what your friends see of God in you. If God blesses you, they will know, and
they will seek God’s blessing too.
God’s blessings also come to us outside the church. The events of our lives also become God’s blessing with which we bring
blessing to others. I think of what happened to my own parents many years
ago when they first went overseas. They went to Zambia in 1946 with a one-year
old daughter, my older sister. In 1948 they had a second daughter, who my
sister, Dorothy. When she was eight months old, Dorothy contracted malaria and
died. This was devastating to my parents, as you would expect. The missionary
family and the Zambian Christians gathered around them to comfort and
strengthen them.
Some months later my parents got word that a family living in a nearby
village had just lost their child. My parents went to the village, where the
bereaved mother was wailing, inconsolable. My mother went to her and embraced
her, and the two mothers sat and grieved together. In the process, mother was
able to give the Zambian woman comfort where others could not. Because they
shared the same grief, she could also pass on the comfort and strength she had
received. God blesses us—even with strength in times of trouble—so that we can
pass that blessing on to others.
In 2003 Lois and I and our sons were back Sikalongo, where my sister
Dorothy is buried. We had visited many people in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and they
all identified me by my family—my grandparents, and my Uncle and Aunt, and my
own parents. But when we got to Sikalongo it was different. We met the
headmaster of the school there, and when I said our names, he replied: “Your
parents are David and Dorcas. Your sister is buried there” (pointing at the
cemetery). One of the teachers took us to his house for tea and biscuits. As we
visited, he told us that his family also had lost a child the year before, and
they had used the verse on Dorothy’s grave for their own funeral: “Suffer the
little children to come to me.”
The blessing of God’s grace present in our grief had continued to bless
others in that place even 55 years after the event. I don’t understand how
these things work, but it is clear that we are bound together in relationship
as a human family. God normally uses people to bless people, so that when you
experience God’s goodness and grace—even in times of great sadness—that
experience is meant for you and for everyone you know.
Conclusion
I used the well-known phrase “pay it forward” to express the way we are
to live. The same idea is found in the old hymn “Make me a blessing to someone
today.” Not in a pushy way, where we decide we’re going to help this person or
that person. You may know some people who are so ready to bless you that you
run for your life!
But I’m talking about something more organic, more natural. God calls
you, just as God called to Abram and to Nicodemus; and you respond to God’s
call. Don’t hide it. Don’t pretend that nothing happened. Be natural. Be open.
Share what God is doing with you. God is working in you for your good, and for
the good of everyone around you.
I wonder what our church could look like if we learned to expect God to
touch us as we’re gathered together in worship, as well as when we’re living
our lives the rest of the week. I wonder what our church could look like if we
learned to share God’s goodness to us as naturally as we share our delight when
the Jets win a game. I wonder what would happen if we allowed God’s blessings
to flow into us and through us into all the people around us.
The potential is here for us to be a sacred place where we laugh and
love and discover God’s presence from the cradle to the grave. It doesn’t need
to be dramatic, although it may be sometimes. It doesn’t need to be worth
putting on the front page of the Carillon, although it may be sometimes. But it
does need to be real.
Only God can make it real. Only God can make you born of the water and
of the Spirit. Only God can call you to leave everything and follow him. When
God calls you, do like Abram and Sarai and Lot. Follow God! When God calls you,
do like Nicodemus. Go to Jesus and let him sort you out. And as you discover
the blessing of God’s new life, share the blessing with everyone in your life.
Pay it forward for eternity.
No comments:
Post a Comment