John 3:1-6 NASB
Our story, like all stories, needs a little background to help set the stage. In the book of John, in the New Testament, we find Jesus and Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. The Pharisees were a division of the Judaism who taught the Jews about God. Among their teachings, they believed that oral tradition had just as much validity and authority as the written Scripture. They taught that there is an afterlife, where the soul is rewarded or punished based on the life lived on earth, and they reasoned that it was impossible for the sovereignty of God and the free will of man to cancel out the other. Nicodemus approached Jesus to ask him about some of the things he’d been teaching thus far in his early ministry. In John 2, Jesus had performed his first miracle: turning water into wine at a wedding feast. He is in Jerusalem for the Passover at the time of our story and that’s where we pick up the tale.
In verse 2, Nicodemus acknowledges that Jesus must be from God, but Jesus immediately cuts to the heart of the true matter. He says in verse 3 that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. Nicodemus’ confusion is understandable, but his question strikes me as either being naïve, or possibly misleading by design. Jesus has told us how to see the kingdom of God. It’s really very simple, but he proceeds to break it down for us in the following verses. Every man and woman is born once in the flesh. This fleshly body is doomed to die from the moment we draw our first breath due to the penalty imposed on us by Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin is death. That means that you and I have earned death by committing sin. Sin, by its very definition, is anything that does not honor God. Do we die every time we curse, or cheat on our taxes, or run a red light with a fish on our bumper? Obviously not, but each of those actions qualified us to be separated from God for eternity. After all, God is righteous and the righteousness that God requires is the righteousness that God’s righteousness requires Him to require. Think about that for a minute. God is perfect. As a result, He can accept nothing short of perfection, or else He has compromised and is no longer perfect. If He is no longer perfect, He can no longer be God. This is the point that Jesus is trying to make. There’s an old saying that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and this is the very essence of the conversation here. Jesus is not saying that you must be physically reborn. He is saying that we need to be born into the life of the Spirit of God. Jesus continues that anyone born of the flesh (which is all of us) is flesh and anyone born of the Spirit is spirit.
The natural question then, is what can we do about it? After all, I didn’t ask to be born did I? Therefore, why is it my responsibility to pay this price for sin? Well, the rest of Romans 6:23 has the answer for that: “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Jesus said it Himself in the Bible’s most famous verse, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” To make it personal, just take out general terms like “world” and “whoever” and substitute your own name. For me, John 3:16 says that God loved Bill so much that He gave His only Son (Jesus) that if I, Bill, believe in Him (Jesus) then my eternal soul will not perish, but I will live forever. It really is that simple. Believe that God loves you and sent His Son to pay the price for your sin and you will be saved from eternal death.
Does the message ever change? No. A few years later, when Paul and Silas were in jail for preaching about Jesus, they were delivered by an act of God and when the jailer asked what he must do to be saved, they told him to “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” (Acts 16:31) When Jesus was right in the middle of paying the price for this free gift and was dying on the cross, one of the thieves with him asked Him (Jesus) to remember him when He came into His kingdom. Luke 23:43 records that Jesus told him, “Today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” Notice that Jesus didn’t tell the thief he needed to be baptized. He didn’t say he needed to shave or take a bath before he was acceptable. He just believed. That’s all it takes. It’s faith. I heard once that you don’t truly understand that faith is all you need until faith is all you have. I could not agree more. As a two-time veteran of combat operations in Iraq, I can tell you that there are times when faith is literally all you have. However, in those moments, faith really is all you need.
I want to ask you one question. Maybe you’ve heard this before. Maybe you haven’t.
If your body were to die right now, where would your spirit go? There are two possible answers to this question. The first option is that you have already proclaimed Jesus as your savior and your hope rests on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness, as the song proclaims. The second answer is that you are not sure what would happen to your spirit if you died right now. Would you like to be sure? Would you like to be able to trust Jesus for the security of your soul? If you believe that Jesus was sent to pay the price for your sins and you would like to receive the gift of life from the One who created you in the first place, then say so. It’s as simple as A-B-C. Admit you’ve sinned and deserve to die. Believe that Jesus’ death was the perfect payment for your sins. Call out to Jesus as the thief on the cross did. A simple prayer is all it takes. You don’t even need to close your eyes if you don’t want to. Simply say something like,
“God, I’ve screwed up. I’ve committed crimes against your perfection and I admit it. I need you to save me from death. Jesus, come into my life and be my savior. Thank you for your promise that anyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved. Amen.”
If you prayed that prayer, please let me know. I would like nothing more than to encourage you one on one in your new life as a follower of Christ. Please leave a comment and I will get in touch with you as soon as possible.
This is my first attempt at writing a bible study for this forum so I thought I should start with the basics. When I was in high school, the church where I grew up hosted a Youth Sunday. The teens in the church took over every aspect of the Sunday services for one week. This included taking the collection, teaching children’s church, leading the music and offering the message. For some reason, I was elected to deliver the sermon that morning. The end result was a short 15 minute study that I called “God and Yellow Paint.” I’m probably the only person who remembers that talk, but I may go back and revisit the issue later. Why do I bring that up here? Well, my father has been convinced for a long time that I’m going to be a preacher some day. I’m sorry, but unless God blesses me with a huge outpouring of patience, I just don’t see that happening. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve never spoken or delivered a message before. This morning, while sitting in the protestant worship service on board ship, I was inspired to start writing messages again. Since I don’t have a church or any other forum for my words, I pondered what to do when I was reminded that I’ve just created a new web log to chronicle my growth in both physical and spiritual fitness. That led me here. I’m going to experiment with publishing bible studies on Sundays for a while. If you read this post and found it helpful, thought provoking, confusing, or even wrong, please leave a comment and let me know. Future posts will probably be shorter, but I had to address this most important of issues before going any further. Is there an issue that is on your heart and you wander what the Bible says about it? Leave me a comment and let’s learn together what God says. Have a great week and God bless.
Our story, like all stories, needs a little background to help set the stage. In the book of John, in the New Testament, we find Jesus and Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. The Pharisees were a division of the Judaism who taught the Jews about God. Among their teachings, they believed that oral tradition had just as much validity and authority as the written Scripture. They taught that there is an afterlife, where the soul is rewarded or punished based on the life lived on earth, and they reasoned that it was impossible for the sovereignty of God and the free will of man to cancel out the other. Nicodemus approached Jesus to ask him about some of the things he’d been teaching thus far in his early ministry. In John 2, Jesus had performed his first miracle: turning water into wine at a wedding feast. He is in Jerusalem for the Passover at the time of our story and that’s where we pick up the tale.
In verse 2, Nicodemus acknowledges that Jesus must be from God, but Jesus immediately cuts to the heart of the true matter. He says in verse 3 that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. Nicodemus’ confusion is understandable, but his question strikes me as either being naïve, or possibly misleading by design. Jesus has told us how to see the kingdom of God. It’s really very simple, but he proceeds to break it down for us in the following verses. Every man and woman is born once in the flesh. This fleshly body is doomed to die from the moment we draw our first breath due to the penalty imposed on us by Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin is death. That means that you and I have earned death by committing sin. Sin, by its very definition, is anything that does not honor God. Do we die every time we curse, or cheat on our taxes, or run a red light with a fish on our bumper? Obviously not, but each of those actions qualified us to be separated from God for eternity. After all, God is righteous and the righteousness that God requires is the righteousness that God’s righteousness requires Him to require. Think about that for a minute. God is perfect. As a result, He can accept nothing short of perfection, or else He has compromised and is no longer perfect. If He is no longer perfect, He can no longer be God. This is the point that Jesus is trying to make. There’s an old saying that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and this is the very essence of the conversation here. Jesus is not saying that you must be physically reborn. He is saying that we need to be born into the life of the Spirit of God. Jesus continues that anyone born of the flesh (which is all of us) is flesh and anyone born of the Spirit is spirit.
The natural question then, is what can we do about it? After all, I didn’t ask to be born did I? Therefore, why is it my responsibility to pay this price for sin? Well, the rest of Romans 6:23 has the answer for that: “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Jesus said it Himself in the Bible’s most famous verse, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” To make it personal, just take out general terms like “world” and “whoever” and substitute your own name. For me, John 3:16 says that God loved Bill so much that He gave His only Son (Jesus) that if I, Bill, believe in Him (Jesus) then my eternal soul will not perish, but I will live forever. It really is that simple. Believe that God loves you and sent His Son to pay the price for your sin and you will be saved from eternal death.
Does the message ever change? No. A few years later, when Paul and Silas were in jail for preaching about Jesus, they were delivered by an act of God and when the jailer asked what he must do to be saved, they told him to “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” (Acts 16:31) When Jesus was right in the middle of paying the price for this free gift and was dying on the cross, one of the thieves with him asked Him (Jesus) to remember him when He came into His kingdom. Luke 23:43 records that Jesus told him, “Today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” Notice that Jesus didn’t tell the thief he needed to be baptized. He didn’t say he needed to shave or take a bath before he was acceptable. He just believed. That’s all it takes. It’s faith. I heard once that you don’t truly understand that faith is all you need until faith is all you have. I could not agree more. As a two-time veteran of combat operations in Iraq, I can tell you that there are times when faith is literally all you have. However, in those moments, faith really is all you need.
I want to ask you one question. Maybe you’ve heard this before. Maybe you haven’t.
If your body were to die right now, where would your spirit go? There are two possible answers to this question. The first option is that you have already proclaimed Jesus as your savior and your hope rests on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness, as the song proclaims. The second answer is that you are not sure what would happen to your spirit if you died right now. Would you like to be sure? Would you like to be able to trust Jesus for the security of your soul? If you believe that Jesus was sent to pay the price for your sins and you would like to receive the gift of life from the One who created you in the first place, then say so. It’s as simple as A-B-C. Admit you’ve sinned and deserve to die. Believe that Jesus’ death was the perfect payment for your sins. Call out to Jesus as the thief on the cross did. A simple prayer is all it takes. You don’t even need to close your eyes if you don’t want to. Simply say something like,
“God, I’ve screwed up. I’ve committed crimes against your perfection and I admit it. I need you to save me from death. Jesus, come into my life and be my savior. Thank you for your promise that anyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved. Amen.”
If you prayed that prayer, please let me know. I would like nothing more than to encourage you one on one in your new life as a follower of Christ. Please leave a comment and I will get in touch with you as soon as possible.
This is my first attempt at writing a bible study for this forum so I thought I should start with the basics. When I was in high school, the church where I grew up hosted a Youth Sunday. The teens in the church took over every aspect of the Sunday services for one week. This included taking the collection, teaching children’s church, leading the music and offering the message. For some reason, I was elected to deliver the sermon that morning. The end result was a short 15 minute study that I called “God and Yellow Paint.” I’m probably the only person who remembers that talk, but I may go back and revisit the issue later. Why do I bring that up here? Well, my father has been convinced for a long time that I’m going to be a preacher some day. I’m sorry, but unless God blesses me with a huge outpouring of patience, I just don’t see that happening. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve never spoken or delivered a message before. This morning, while sitting in the protestant worship service on board ship, I was inspired to start writing messages again. Since I don’t have a church or any other forum for my words, I pondered what to do when I was reminded that I’ve just created a new web log to chronicle my growth in both physical and spiritual fitness. That led me here. I’m going to experiment with publishing bible studies on Sundays for a while. If you read this post and found it helpful, thought provoking, confusing, or even wrong, please leave a comment and let me know. Future posts will probably be shorter, but I had to address this most important of issues before going any further. Is there an issue that is on your heart and you wander what the Bible says about it? Leave me a comment and let’s learn together what God says. Have a great week and God bless.
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