Nic at Night

It's great to have you guys here. My name is René. I'm one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Thanks for making it. Whether you're joining us live here in the auditorium or watching over in the venue service in our 10:45 service, or maybe you're watching on Facebook live or the website, wherever you are, it's great to have you here.

I want to invite you to grab your message notes that look like this. If you're joining us online, you can download them too. It's kind of exciting, by the way. We were looking at the online stats, and every weekend we basically have a fourth service. We have a room this size full of people who are joining us online. So it is great to have that many people joining us. And you guys can download the message notes electronically, right there either on our website or on Facebook live. There's a little note app that you can download as well.

We are in a series we call 77. That's the name of our 77-day series on the life of Christ that's going to take us all the way up to Easter. And the series is all about who is Jesus and what was Jesus all about and what made him so controversial? What in the world did he say that got him into so much trouble? And we're looking at the plot line that leads up to Easter in this series.

Now, I was thinking that in our culture, it is really easy for people to think, why do I need a series on who is Jesus? I know who Jesus is. I mean, we're in church, right? We know who Jesus is. Or even we just live in American culture. So we all know who Jesus is and what Jesus was all about. That's easy to think because Jesus infuses our culture at so many levels. Still, he is so influential.

For example, a few weeks ago, we flipped our calendars over to 2019, right? 2019 what? Years since Jesus was born. All you have to do is look at your calendar and see how influential Jesus is on our society and on our culture, on our world. We live in Santa Cruz County. Santa Cruz means what? Holy cross. That stands for the cross of Jesus Christ. We live in a town named for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

We live just over the hill from San Jose. San Jose. Why is it called San Jose? It's named for Saint Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus Christ. We live just down the road from San Francisco. Why is it called San Francisco? It's named for Saint Francis, who centuries after Christ was one of the most famous devoted followers of Jesus Christ. We live a couple of hours away from Sacramento. Why is it called Sacramento? It's named for the holy sacrament, the bread and the cup that remind us of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

We live a couple of hours away from Fresno. Why is it called Fresno? No one knows and no one cares. But just kidding. My point is Jesus Christ influences us so much even today, and it's not just what did Spanish missionaries name our towns 200 years ago. Even to this day, I was just reading a little piece about the Library of Congress, and they collect basically every book that's ever been published, and they had an interesting little factoid in the article. In the last 30 years, there have been more books published about Jesus Christ than in all the previous years of human history combined. Isn't that amazing? Jesus still fascinates us today.

That's why we're doing this series to ask who is Jesus? What was his message? And it is, I suspect, a little bit different than you might think. Jesus, we sanitize Jesus. We over-explain Jesus, but the Jesus of the Bible is not exactly a safe character. He's not your Sunday school well-scrubbed Jesus. He's controversial. He's mysterious. He's puzzling. He's sometimes offensive and he's challenging, especially to religious people, especially to church people.

And I think if you stick with us during this series, when Easter hits, you're going to experience Easter with a new power, a new resonance, a new majesty than maybe you've ever experienced before. And I think leading up to it, your spiritual life will really be revitalized.

Now, to answer this question today, we're in one of the most famous chapters of the Bible, John 3, and it's famous because it contains what may be the most famous verse in the entire Bible. And this verse is part of a very memorable experience in my family's life. One year, Lori and I were returning from seeing my extended family in Switzerland, and we had to transfer. We landed in America and we went through customs. Excuse me, we had to transfer to another airplane, and Lori was very exhausted. She was pregnant with our first child, and she was tired and frankly, she was cranky. I can say that because she'll be in the 10:45 service, not this one.

And she was getting very difficult and she was upset, and the customs line was so long because of some strike in LaGuardia or something, and it was like two and a half hours long. We couldn't even see the head of customs. We were around the corner, hundreds of people ahead of us, and she began to cry because she said, "I don't want to have to stay in New York an extra day. I want to get home to the Bay Area. I want to get home to California. I can't stand it anymore." And so I thought, okay, let me see what I can do.

And I went, did something I've never even thought of doing before. I went all the way to the front of the customs line. I saw the guy that looked like he was in charge of all the other customs officials, and I said, "Can I ask you a kind of a very awkward favor?" I said, "My wife is very pregnant right now, and she's very upset, and I think we're going to miss our connecting flight if we have to wait and we're at the back of the line. Is there any way that we could take cuts and move to the front of the customs line?" I figured I just had to ask, right?

He looks at me and he folds his hands and he says, "What's your job?" And so I said with some trepidation because you never know how people are going to take this, "Well, I'm a pastor." And he says, "Right." I said, "What are you talking about?" He says, "You have no idea how many people tell us that they're clergy." I said, "Why would they say that?" He says, "Oh, I've got to get to a funeral. I've got to get to a church service. We around here, we think they're all con artists." I said, "Well, I really am a pastor." And he says this, he goes, "If you're a pastor, quote John 3:16." Kind of like, "That's my fail-safe. No mere mortal could know John 3:16." So now you might think, well, that's kind of easy, John 3:16. That's a Bible verse. A lot of people who grow up in church and every single denomination on the planet, they learn that when they're like in kindergarten.

But I thought to myself, "Great, I'm going to choke. I'm going to say like the Gettysburg address or the pledge of allegiance or something else is going to come up from those dim recesses of my memory." So I took a deep breath and I closed my eyes and I tried to go all the way back to the King James version of my kindergarten Sunday school class, right? And I said, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." And I took a deep breath and I opened my eyes and the guy was going, "Wow, you must be a pastor. Step to the front of the line, Reverend." And I said, "Yes, that kindergarten Sunday school teacher's memory program finally paid off, and we got home on time." That verse let us safely home.

My suspicion is that almost everybody in this room either knows that verse by memory or at least you've seen a sign that says John 3:16 at a football game or something, right? But what does it really mean? What's its original context? What does it mean for you and me today? Listen, life may be leaving you feeling cold and numb and exhausted these days. Maybe even your spiritual life has no life. I think if you really hear what Jesus is saying in John 3, it will enrich your life. It'll give you back some spiritual vitality.

So let's check out what comes right before this verse in John 3. Let's start at John 3:1. It says, "Now, there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council." Now stop right there for a second because just in this one sentence, it actually reveals a lot about this guy. Three very important facts, and I put these in your notes. First, he was a Pharisee. And I want to talk about this for a minute because today we hear about Pharisees and we think, "Oh, they're evil people. They're bad people." But there's probably none of us in this room or watching online who could live up to the standards that these Pharisees lived up to.

Here's how elite this made him. There were never more than 6,000 of them at a time in the entire nation of Israel. And all of them had made a vow before God and two witnesses that they would do everything they could, every single waking hour of their lives, to keep the law of God perfectly. And here's how seriously they took it. They took all the Ten Commandments and all the other commandments, and then they wrote down extra rules to make sure that the Ten Commandments were kept perfectly. Their main rule book kept developing and became what's later known as the Mishnah. And just for one example, just one of the Ten Commandments, the one about keeping the Sabbath, in English that's a nine-word sentence. There are 24 chapters in the Mishnah about exactly how to keep the Sabbath.

But that wasn't enough because then they had to interpret things in the Mishnah. So they eventually wrote something called the Talmud, which interpreted what the Mishnah had to say about the keeping of the Ten Commandments. Just for example, in the Talmud, there's 128 pages of interpretation on the 24 chapters in the Mishnah about the keeping of one commandment. So what I'm saying is these were very moral people, probably the most moral, the most outwardly holy people who have ever lived on planet earth. So it's pretty elite religiously.

And then this verse also tells us he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council. That was kind of like the Jewish Senate. It was a select group of 70 men who ruled over the Jewish people, not just in Israel, but on the entire planet. They had authority over every Jewish person in the world. That's a pretty elite group of 70. And not only that, in verse 10, Jesus calls him the teacher of Israel, and the word "thee" is emphasized. So here's how elite this guy is. Cut down from the general population to 6,000 Pharisees. Cut down from the 6,000 Pharisees to the 70 on the Sanhedrin. Cut down from the 70 to the one. He was the chief rabbi of Jerusalem.

The point is Nicodemus was at the top, religiously, morally, culturally, socially, politically. By all of his culture's standards, he was an absolute success, top of the top. But there's something missing, and he doesn't stop seeking. And this is something very positive we can learn from this Pharisee. Don't let your status keep you from your search. You know, sometimes you know you need something more spiritually. Just something's not right with your spiritual life. Or maybe you know your life's out of control with what's becoming an addiction or compulsion. Or maybe you know your marriage needs help. But you have so much status and so much success and your friends think you're so spiritual that the idea of going to a recovery group to get help or the idea of going to a marriage conference to get help or the idea of going on a spiritual retreat is kind of embarrassing. And so you don't do it.

Be like Nicodemus. Don't let your status keep you from your search. Keep searching because if you seek, you will find. But if you don't seek, you're not going to find the help you need. Now it says, he came to Jesus at night. The original Nick at night, right? And a lot of people think, "Ah, he did this so that nobody would see him." My opinion is he just wanted some time where he and Jesus could talk uninterrupted because they were both kind of celebrities. You know, they were both kind of famous at this point.

And he said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one could perform the miraculous signs you're doing if God weren't with them." And this shows you not every Pharisee was opposed to Jesus. Some were very intrigued, as you'll see as this story continues in this series. But what he's saying is, "Jesus, you got something. There's something about you. You got something that I don't got. And I don't completely understand it. What are you all about?" And then what does Jesus say to this sincere seeker?

Well, here is a challenge. Look up here for just a second. As I said, Jesus is more mysterious than we often paint him, sort of in Sunday school propaganda. And he does not always explain himself. And he does not fully explain himself in this chapter. What he does is he paints three pictures, three word pictures. And I want to explain them to you, but I don't want to over-explain them. Because I don't want to rob the three pictures that Jesus paints here of their punch. Because what Jesus is doing is he's responding to Nicodemus with art, with poetry. And poetry is meant to reach us at an emotional level.

And I think it's intriguing, by the way, that he responds to this particular person in this manner. Because if you ask Nicodemus, "What's the spiritual life all about?" he might have shown you rows and rows of books, something like these law books. Nicodemus knew so much. But he seeks Jesus out because something's missing. What's missing? Well, somebody said, "When it comes to our spiritual lives, we need less how and more wow." Nicodemus knew a lot about the how. Nicodemus was all about the how. Chapters and chapters just on the how. But Jesus gives him some of the wow back.

So what's the spiritual life all about? What's our relationship with God all about? Nicodemus shows Jesus law books. And Jesus says, "Well, a relationship with God is actually more like a baby being born," a brand new little baby. And this is the first word picture he paints. That's point one. It's not really about religion. It's about rebirth. It's not about religion. It's about rebirth.

In reply, Jesus declared, "Well, I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God." You think you're real righteous, and you are very righteous, Nicodemus, but nobody can see the kingdom of God unless he's born again. Now, this phrase born again, I think it's really been ruined because it's used so much in our culture now in all kinds of different ways. I heard a commentator say something like, "The LA Rams were a terrible team for so long, but under their new coach, they've been born again." I heard somebody say about Wall Street after a dip. And then the next week the stocks came back up and they said, "Well, Wall Street's born again today." I read a San Francisco Chronicle article that called Christians "born again" bigots.

So born again has a lot of different meanings in our culture, but Jesus is the one who actually first coined the phrase. So what did he mean when he said born again? Well, again, I don't want to over-explain it. Let the poetry of this image just sit with you for a second and ask yourself this question. When it came to your physical birth, how much effort did you have to expend to get born? I mean, think of what happens. First, you develop in your mother's womb little hands, little feet, eyes and ears and toes. Did you make your own little feet? When it came to your hands, did you go, "I need 10 fingers now"? And they just popped up at your will? No, you just grew. And then how active were you in your birth? Did you shove yourself out? Were you in radio communication with your doctor? Roger, we are good to go. In three, two, go. No, somebody else did the work. Somebody else felt the pain. Someone else made the effort. And it's the same exact thing when you're born spiritually. God gives birth to you. You're not born spiritually because of your effort. God does the labor on your behalf.

Now, in case you still don't get this word picture, you're in good company because Nicodemus doesn't get it either. 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." He's kind of like joking. He's just saying, "What are you talking about?" And Jesus answers with something like a poem. I tell you the truth. No one can enter the kingdom of God. I know, Nicodemus, you want so bad to be in the kingdom of God. You try so hard. But nobody can enter unless he's born of water. That's natural birth, water breaking, and the spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the spirit gives birth to spirit.

What's he saying? Let me put it this way. I think most of us are here today or watching because we are sincerely seeking after God like Nicodemus. We want to enter the kingdom of God. We sincerely want to become better people. We want to follow God. But how do we do that? For most of us, a lot of the time what it comes down to is what Nicodemus would have gotten a gold medal in. Willpower, right? We try so hard and sometimes we fail, and when we fail what do we do? We just promise that we're going to try harder. But it doesn't work. Why not? What's the basic problem with human effort at self-improvement? My human nature can't fix a fundamental flaw in my human nature.

You know in my experience the people who understand this best are the people who've been through recovery. They understand you can't depend on willpower to overcome a flaw in your willpower. You need something else. Flesh gives birth to flesh but the spirit gives birth to spirit. To solve a spiritual problem, you need spiritual power. I was reading a sermon on this by Reverend Bernice King. She's one of the daughters of Martin Luther King Jr. and she says, "It makes no difference how much education, money, prestige, power, or pleasure you acquire. If the time and invitation are right, you will go back to your old nature, and that's why you have to be born again. Because only when you're born again do you have the new nature of God planted in your heart."

So the first word picture Jesus paints is a baby being born. He's saying, "Nicodemus, you need to be spiritually reborn, and this is something that you can't work up. It's something that only God does for you." Okay, but how do I get that then? How do I get that new birth? Well that brings us to the second image. Jesus talks about something a lot of us saw this last week, the wind blowing through the tree branches, blowing the waves up, blowing wherever it wants to blow. Jesus says the spiritual life, well, it's also kind of like the wind. You shouldn't be surprised at my saying you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You can hear its sound, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it's going, and so it is with everyone born of the spirit.

What's Jesus saying here? Remember who he's talking to? He's saying it's not about systems, it's about the spirit. It's not about systems, it's about the spirit. Everything in Nicodemus's life was about knowledge; it was about control. 24 chapters just on how to keep a one-sentence command, how to keep the Sabbath. And Jesus is saying that's fine, but Nicodemus, remember you really can't put God in a box. The wind blows wherever it pleases. Jesus is saying there's something new and fresh that God is going to do here in my ministry. Something new and fresh God's going to do here on planet earth. Something new and fresh God wants to do in your life, Nicodemus, but it's of the spirit, not of your own human effort or control or knowledge.

You know, this is so personal for me. There was a time in my life I could relate to Nicodemus on so many levels. I, like I said, in kindergarten I learned John 3:16, and it was right around that time in my life when I received Jesus Christ as my Savior and I became born again, and I had the joy of the Lord like little children do. But as I grew in my faith, I became very legalistic, and by the time I became a pastor, I was very focused on the rules of the Christian life and what Christians shouldn't, shouldn't do and all the activities of the Christian life the Christian should be doing, and I just got more and more guilty about all the ways I was falling short. My wife told me, "René, you are the most guilt-oriented person I know," and less and less and less joyful.

And then one day it was late at night. I was in bed not sleeping but working because I figured I shouldn't sleep when I'm awake; I should be working and studying God's Word. And so I was reading the Bible, studying for a sermon series I wanted to do on the book of Galatians, and I got to Galatians 3:3, which says, "Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal through human effort?" And I realized that was me. I started with the Spirit just letting God love me, but I was now living on my own human effort. My religious life at that point was no more spiritual than somebody who worked real hard to get straight A's on a report card. It was all about my human effort. It was no more spiritual than somebody who worked really hard to make the softball team. It was all about my hard work.

But I read this verse, and it's like the clouds parted, and I suddenly remembered the spiritual life is lived by the Spirit, not the flesh, and everything changed for me. I mean, my whole perspective of Christianity changed and has stayed changed. I told my wife a couple of days after that, I said, "Laurie, I feel like I've been born again again." It's like I'd started seeing everything in black and white, but now I see it in color again. And this is what Jesus is explaining to this man Nicodemus.

So think of our two images so far, just to recap. Ask Nicodemus what does your spiritual life look like, and he would have showed you his law books. It's about following the laws. Ask Jesus what the spiritual life looks like, he shows you a newborn baby, and he points to the wind moving in the trees. And then he paints the weirdest picture of all, a bronze serpent on a pole in the desert surrounded by dying people. What is that all about? Well, this makes his third point. It's not about trying; it's about trusting. It's not about trying principles; it's about trusting a person.

Verse 14, here's the third word picture he paints. Just as Moses, and I brings up Moses because Nicodemus's hero would have been Moses, the lawgiver. So he says, let me talk about your hero, Nicodemus, and I want to show you how I'm bringing something fresh and new, but it's not, it's not, you know, discontinuous with what Moses started. It has its roots in something that happened with the children of Israel in the days of Moses, the lawgiver. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

He is talking about this weird story that happened centuries before Jesus in the time of Moses back in Numbers 21. A miracle happened. The children of Israel had been released from slavery in Egypt, and they're wandering in the desert. And what happens is suddenly this horde of vipers, poisonous vipers, comes up in the desert and they bite most of the people in Israel, and there's no cure, and it's fatal. They're all dying from poisonous snake bites, and there's no antidote. There is no hope; they are doomed. They're dying of this poison from the serpents, and so God tells Moses, "I'm going to do a miracle." He says, "Moses, here's what I want you to do. I want you to make a serpent out of bronze, this metal serpent, and put it on a pole and lift it up high. And what I'm going to do, the miracle I'm going to do is this: tell everyone if you just look to that bronze serpent in faith that I can supernaturally heal them, then they're going to be healed. That's all people have to do, just look in faith and they'll be saved from the serpent's poison. They couldn't save themselves, and they didn't have to understand how this was all working. They didn't have to do anything to prove themselves worthy of being healed, just look in faith and be healed.

Now do you see the parallels that Jesus is making here? The Bible says we're all dying of a poison in our soul. You could say it was introduced by the serpent in the garden, and so Jesus is going to sacrifice himself for us on a cross that is lifted up, and all we need to do is look and believe. Now this is a long time, maybe as long as three years before Jesus is crucified, and Jesus doesn't really explain this. So when Nicodemus hears this, he's puzzled. It's a mystery. John puts this here so early in his gospel as foreshadowing of what's to come, and eventually Nicodemus, as we're going to see later, is going to see Jesus on the cross and remember this conversation and go, "Oh, now I understand this new thing that Jesus Christ is introducing to us." But this word picture, this is the context for the very next verse John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes, whoever just looks on him on that cross and believes, whoever, they don't have to qualify. It doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter what they have or haven't done. Whoever believes in him shall not perish, shall not die of the serpent's poison, but have eternal life. Just look and believe, and everything changes. Just trust. Stop trying to earn your salvation and start trusting in the one who already did. It's really that simple.

I was speaking in Oregon at a conference center, a Christian conference center with Lori. We were speaking at a marriage conference, and a woman was the housekeeper who was making up our room every day. And I used to work at a hotel in the housekeeping department, so I'm always interested in what they're doing these days. And so we got into a conversation with her. It turns out she's from Croatia, and I said, "Well, how did you get here from Croatia?" She said, "Well, I really wanted to work at a Christian conference center because I'm a Christian." I said, "Oh, were you raised as a Christian in Croatia?" She said, "No." She said, "In fact, I was anti-Christian." She said, "I was very, very radical the other way, as an atheist." I said, "Well, what changed for you?" And she said, "When I was 18 years old, a priest met me, and he said in our first conversation, 'I want you to know that God really loves you.' And she said, 'You'd think that most people would say, "Oh, thank you," but she said instead I yelled at him and I said, "No, there is no God first of all, and if there was a God, he wouldn't love me. He doesn't love any of us because look at the mess we have made of this world. How can you say there's a loving God?" She said, "I just argued with him, and she said he saw me over a number of weeks and just kept smiling at me, treating me kindly and telling me, 'You know God loves you.' And then she said, 'Our last meeting he told me, you know we may not see each other again, so I want to leave you with a Bible verse.' She said, 'I rolled my eyes and said, "Great," and she said he quoted me John 3:16 in our language, and she said, "You know in any language that there's something about that verse that is very memorable." And she said he said it to me once, and it stuck in my brain. And she said, "For the next two years I thought of that verse, and for two years I argued over every single word in that verse." She said, "What I didn't realize I was doing was I was memorizing that verse so that became part of the DNA of my soul." And she said finally at the end of two years I thought of that verse again one day and I realized I believed it now.

Now she said, "You gotta realize I didn't know really anything else about Christianity, but everything I needed to know was packed into that verse." So she said, and she's telling me this, she's starting to cry. She says, "I knelt down in that moment and I prayed the first prayer I've ever prayed in my life, and I said, 'God, I don't understand it all, but I believe it. I believe that we're so messed up that the only hope for us would be if you came down yourself and saved us. Our human effort hasn't saved us, so you gotta save us, and you've gotta save me.' And she said, 'That's how John 3:16 led me to Christ.' She said, 'I was won over by the love of God shown in that one verse, just trusting, just looking to Christ and trusting changed everything for her.'

So three word pictures to this very religious man who's trying very hard to do what is right. Nicodemus, Jesus says, just receive new birth like a baby being born. Just receive the power of the Spirit like branches, powerless branches are moved by the wind. But how do I receive that? Well, simply look like those children of Israel just received healing when they were powerless to get it. Simply look to the one lifted up on the cross. So that's what he suggests to Nicodemus. And as we close, I hope these images frankly haunt you a little bit this week. I hope they roll around in your head a little bit. But I want you to ask yourself one question: have I believed in Jesus as John 3:16 invites me to? Are you just looking to the cross for your salvation? Do you just have pure and simple devotion to Christ? Or even as a religious person, have you complicated it all? Have you added 24 chapters and 128 pages to one simple verse?

You know, much later after Jesus is crucified, guess who takes his body off the cross and gently lays his dead body in a tomb at great personal risk? Nicodemus. Nicodemus eventually got to the point where it didn't matter to him what anybody else thought. He was going to be a follower of Jesus. And maybe this verse has broken through to your life today too. You don't have to wait one moment longer. The living Jesus is here giving you an invitation that you can simply receive right now.

Let's pray together. Would you bow your heads with me? I just want to invite everybody here, no matter where you are in your spiritual journey, to let this be a time of prayer for you. You may want to tell God in your heart, "Thank you that you gave your son, and today I believe in you and I receive the gift of everlasting life." And many of us here have already made that commitment today. Maybe just take a moment to say, "Thank you, God, for this great gift," or to say, "God, I've complicated it. Help me every day of my life to keep growing the way I started my faith, to simply look to Jesus for love and for joy and for help and for strength." Father, thank you that you so loved the world that you gave your one and only son so that anyone who believes in you shall not perish but have the promise of everlasting life. And I pray that there be people like Nicodemus today who would lay down their trying and begin simply trusting in you. In Jesus' name, amen.