04 May To be a Christian

John 3:1-21

Some of you may have noticed the splint on my middle finger. A couple of months ago, I tore a tendon. It’s quite an unimpressive story. I wasn’t even trying to fight a bear or a lion. I was trying to clean a paint stain from the seat of my car. But I was really going at it when I heard this ‘pop’. And after calling nearly everyone at church. I called this couple from church, who are both physios, asking them what I should do. They told me I should call a guy from our church who is a doctor. He said I should go to ED, which I did. They did an x-ray. Thankfully, there was no bone fracture, but I’ve been wearing this splint on my finger for 8 weeks now. In the last three weeks they said I could take it off three times a day for ten minutes a day. It’s been a really humbling experience. Showering has become a challenge. I can’t get it wet, so the right side of my body rarely gets much love; Tying my shoe laces; Buttoning up my shirt; Tying a rubbish bag; Eating chicken; I’ve got to gel my hair with one hand now. And I’m often asking for help which I hate. I hate being in a position of need. I’d much rather be independent, self-sufficient, not needing to rely on anyone else and do everything myself

And yet, as we look at this section of John’s gospel today, we’ll see in Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus that neediness, to be needy, sits at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian. In fact, without need you will not see God. You cannot be a Christian.

And here are my three points this morning.

1. The reality of our neediness
2. The necessity of our neediness
3. The beauty of our neediness

 

And we start with the first one: the reality of our neediness

 

The thing with Nicodemus is he isn’t aware of the reality of his own spiritual neediness before God. And it’s hard to blame him. Because if there was anyone who you think had no spiritual need, it’d be Nicodemus. Look with me there in

1 Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.

Nicodemus is at the top of the Jewish food chain. He’s a member of the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish ruling body. He’s a Pharisee, an expert in the Law. He was the one you go to if you have any questions about the Law. Jesus says to Nicodemus later in

10 “You are Israel’s teacher,”

Which is why it’s so interesting that when it comes to Jesus and the Kingdom of God, he is so lacking in understanding. He has all the knowledge in the world, but he’s completely oblivious and ignorant when it comes to his own need before God

See there in

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!”

Nicodemus is thinking purely on an earthly level. And in a sense, if you take what Jesus says literally, well, he’s right, isn’t he?No one can re-enter their mother’s womb and be born a second time. That’s impossible. But what Nicodemus fails to see is that to be a Christian, to see the Kingdom of God, or as Jesus will say later, to enter the Kingdom of God, you need more than mere knowledge of the law.As one commentator has said,

Racial inheritance, circumcision, zeal, energetic law keeping, scriptural knowledge or acts of piety are not enough … What is needed is the receiving of a new spiritual life from God.

All the things that we might think, ‘Yep, that’s what gets you into the Kingdom, that’s what you need to do to be accepted by God, to be a Christian’, Jesus says that’s not it. No. You need something much more radical. What you need is to be re-born. To be born again. Or to be born from above. A spiritual re-birth or reboot. Hardware, software, everything.

When we were doing the final inspection before we moved in for our place where we’re living in now, we found that the gas stove wasn’t working. You could hear the hiss of the gas. But the stove igniter which should turn on and ignite the gas as it comes out of the burner wasn’t working. The real estate agent sent someone to take a look at it and his assessment was we needed to do was replace the particular part and it should work again. But Jesus requires something altogether different to be a Christian. What every Christian needs, what every Christian experiences, to enter the kingdom of God, is not just a slight adjustment, a minor alteration, a little tweak, change this part and we should be able to get going again. No. The whole thing needs to be replaced. The Reformer, John Calvin, said, that what we need is

… not the amendment of a part but the renewal of the whole nature

We need to be transformed from the inside out.

See what Jesus says there in

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.

God had said through the prophet Ezekiel that there would be a day when God would re-gather his people who had been living scattered in exile. He says in Ezekiel 36 from

24 “ ‘For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.

And listen to this.

25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.

Sin is like a stain we can’t get out. But the prophet Ezekiel envisions a day when God’s people will be cleansed from all their uncleanness. The stain will come out. Their sins will be washed away and they will be forgiven of their sins fully, finally and forever. As the well-known hymn, It is well, says

My sin—oh, the bliss of this glorious thought—

My sin, not in part, but the whole,

Is nailed to His Cross, and I bear it no more;

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

But not only do you need your sins cleansed to enter the Kingdom of God, but you need God to give you a new heart. Ezekiel goes on in

26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

We need new power, new ability to do what we could never do before, that is, to obey God’s law. And this is what Jesus means when he says we must be born of water and the Spirit if we’re to enter the Kingdom of God. Whatever we imagined a Christian to be, think bigger. There’s more to being a Christisn than maybe we ever dreamed. Jesus has in mind for us this radical, whole-of-life transformation, from the inside out, sins done away with, filled by the Spirit. An entirely new person, completely unrecognisable to the person we might’ve been before. What Nicodemus failed to realise was the reality of his neediness before God, how much he needed God to do for him. That to be a Christian is not a minor procedure, but major open heart surgery.

 

 

And this brings us to point two: The necessity of our neediness.

We’ve got an attic space at our place. It’s half play room for the kids and half storage for everything else we don’t want to see. When we first moved in, I was trying to get a big bag of clothes up there when I lost my balance and fell backwards. I ended up putting a hole in the wall the size of my fist on my way down. And initially, I was trying to fix it myself. I went to Bunnings twice. Used two small tubs of filler. Spent nearly $40. Still couldn’t get the wall back to how it was before. There’s this pride. I can do this. I needed help. But I didn’t want to admit that this is something that I couldn’t do by myself.

And we can be just as stubborn with our neediness before God. We desperately need God’s help. But we don’t want to admit it. Jesus says there in

6 Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.

Jesus is saying here that only the Spirit can produce the spiritual rebirth and spiritual regeneration, the change in desires, the renewed heart, all the things that need to happen to be a Christian. This is something you can’t do on your own. You can’t pay any amount of money to make this happen. We’re so used to thinking that if I do this, if I don’t do that, then I’ll be able to enter the Kingdom or get in God’s graces or move him towards me. But only the Spirit can bring about this change. And we don’t control the Spirit. Jesus explains there in

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.

Just as we can’t control the wind and make the wind go where we want it go, in the same way, we can’t control where the Spirit goes and make the Spirit do what we want him to do. Spiritual rebirth is a supernatural act of God. It’s God’s doing, not ours. This is why the necessity of neediness, and why without neediness, you will not see the Lord. Neediness is all we bring.

We bring the incompetence

We bring the inadequacy

We bring the sin

We bring the messiness of our lives

We bring the brokenness and emptiness of our hearts

We bring the neediness

And God takes all of that and he produces in us new birth by the Spirit. It’s one of the most wonderful things about the gospel and Christianity itself. John Gerstner says

… the way to God is wide open. There is nothing standing between the sinner and God. He has immediate and unimpeded access to the Savior. There is nothing to hinder. No sin can hold you back, because God offers justification to the ungodly. Nothing now stands between the sinner and God but the sinner’s ‘good works’. Nothing can keep him from Christ but his delusion … that he has good works of his own that can satisfy God … All they need is need. All they need is nothing.

And yet, it’s often the one thing we don’t have: nothing. Christianity is at the same time harder and easier than you may have thought. Easier because we don’t need anything to come to Jesus. In fact, until we realise, that as the songs says,

Nothing in my hands I bring,

Simply to Thy cross I cling;

Naked, come to Thee for dress,

Helpless, look to Thee for grace:

Stained by sin to you I cry,

Wash me, Saviour, or I die.

We will never see God. We’ll never enter the Kingdom. And yet, this is why it’s hard to enter the Kingdom of God, because not many are willing get down on their hands and knees to enter the Kingdom. That’s point two.

 

 

Point three now: The beauty of our neediness.

Recently, someone commented about me that they think I have a winsome nature. I didn’t quite know what they meant by it. I googled it and it means attractive or appealing. I’m sure that’s not what they were talking about. But after talking over it with my wife, Kezia, and I think what they meant when they said it was that they appreciated my vulnerability, my openness with my life, my fears and my struggles. And I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I’m just saying that in a similar way, there is an attractiveness, something that appeals to us, a beauty about neediness, which the rest of John 3 will show us.

If you think about it, Christianity as a whole is the story of our need and God meeting our need in Jesus. For example, see there in

13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.

Jesus here is responding to Nicodemus’ lack of understanding about being born again, saying, ‘Nicodemus, if you don’t understand what I’m telling you now, how are you going to understand everything else I tell you?’ And to show his authority to talk about heavenly things, Jesus tells how he came down from heaven, so he knows what he’s talking about. And that’s the first thing. We could never reach up to God in heaven. And so God came down to us in Jesus

The second thing that shows the beauty of our neediness is there in

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.

Jesus here shows us the simplicity of becoming a Christian. All you have to do is believe. Jesus here is referring back to Numbers 21, when God’s people were complaining to him, and so, God sent venomous snakes among them that bit the people and many died as a result. But when Moses asked God to take away the snakes, God said to Moses

8 … “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

And Jesus is saying here, in the same way, anyone who looked to the snake, lived, well, anyone who looks to him and believes in him, they will live. The famous preacher, Charles Spurgeon, tells the story of his own conversion. He was on his way to church one Sunday when he was caught up in a snow storm, and walked into a small Methodist church of about 12-15 people and sat near the back. The regular minister had not been able to make it due to the snow storm. So when it was time for the sermon a man came up who Spurgeon said looked like a shoemaker or maybe a tailor. He read the Scripture text. It was Isaiah 45:22: ‘Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.’ And he proceeded to say

“This is a very simple text indeed. It says, ‘Look.’ … It ain’t liftin’ your foot or your finger; it is just ‘Look.’ Well, a man needn’t go to college to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man needn’t be worth a thousand pounds a year to look. Anyone can look; even a child can look.

“But then the text says, ‘Look unto Me.’ Ay! many on ye are lookin’ to yourselves, but it’s no use lookin’ there. You’ll never find any comfort in yourselves … Jesus Christ says, “Look unto Me.” I am sweatin’ great drops of blood. Look unto Me; I am hangin’ on the cross.  Look unto Me, I am dead and buried.  Look unto Me; I rise again. Look unto Me; I ascend to Heaven. Look unto Me; I am sitting at the Father’s right hand. O poor sinner, look unto Me! Look unto Me!”

After about ten minutes of this, the preacher turns to Spurgeon himself, saying,

“Young man, you look very miserable.  And you will always be miserable— miserable in life and miserable in death— if you don’t obey my text.  But if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved.”

And raising his hands, he literally shouted:

“Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but look and live!”

Spurgeon later said

“I had been waiting to do fifty things, but when I heard that word—‘Look!’—There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun  … Oh, that somebody had told me this before, ‘Trust Christ, and you shall be saved.’

But you might say, ‘Really? That’s all I have to do? That sounds too simple. It’s too easy. Surely that’s not right.’ But it is. The beauty of our neediness before God. Well, here’s another one. Next Jesus says

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.

What was it that led God to send his one and only Son into the world? Was it our love for God? No. It was God’s love for us. For God so loved the world. While we were still sinners, God sent his son. God took the initiative. God pursued us. He moved towards us. It wasn’t us moving towards him. And one last thing about the beauty of our neediness. The neediest people are the freest people in the world. And here’s why. People who pretend that they’re not needy, they’re forever trying to cover up or hide their neediness. They’ve got to keep up appearances and present a strong ‘I have it all together’ face to everyone else, even if they’re falling apart behind closed doors. This is why it says there in

19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.

They don’t want to be exposed. They don’t want people to see them as they really are: needy sinners in need of grace like everyone else. And because of this they stay in the dark. Better to stay hidden in the dark than to have to admit my need before God and to others. It’s our greatest fear: for others to see our faults, flaws and failures. And yet, look at the freedom that needy people live with, those who have come to the light with all their sin, all their mess

21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.

Needy people live with the weight of the world off their shoulders. Why? Because when they mess up, well, what did you expect? I came as a mess. I told you I’d mess up often. What were you expecting? But even more than this, Jesus knows about it and he’s already covered their sin by his blood. Nothing that could ever come out about you, be revealed about you, be exposed about you, could change God’s love for you. It’s the exhilarating experience of being fully known and fully loved .

Tim Keller describes it here

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.

He knows everything about us and he still went to the cross to die for us, not because we were good, but while we were still sinners. And if he has loved us when we were at our worst, that was when Jesus died for you, endured the punishment and wrath of God that we deserved because of our sin, then what’s stopping him from loving you now? Do you think there’s anything new that you could do now, that God didn’t factor in, that he didn’t know about, that could somehow surprise God or change his mind? No. Instead, be free to live in the light before God.

Oh, do you see? To be needy is a good thing. The story of the gospel is the story of God meeting us in our need again and again and again. I mean, we’re so needy that God had to come down to us, because we couldn’t reach up to him. We’re so needy that God made it so that all who would simply look to Jesus on the cross and believe, they will be saved. We’re so needy that it was because of God’s love for us, not our love for God, that led God to send Jesus into the world. We live in the freedom of being needy, not having to pretend, hide or live condemned and ashamed, because God already knows it all. He sees our flaws, faults, and failures, and yet, he still loves us. This is the beauty of our neediness

I’ll finish here.

To be a Christian is to be needy.

Without neediness, no one will see the Lord. Today, we’ve seen the reality of our neediness. We need much more than little tweaks here and there. We need spiritual rebirth. We’ve also seen the necessity of our neediness. That spiritual rebirth is not something we can do ourselves. We need God, by his Spirit, to work in us this new life in God. We’ve also seen the beauty of our neediness. How it’s a good thing. When we can freely admit our neediness, we can actually live free. No more hiding. No more shame. No more pretending. Do you see your need?

Luke 18 tells about the time when

18 A certain ruler asked Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” … 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’” 21 “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said. 22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 23 When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy.

The ruler had done everything right. He had kept the commandments since he was a boy. And yet, because he loved his money, he was found lacking by Jesus and missed out on the Kingdom of God. I wonder if Jesus will say the same thing to us.

There once was a church in Atarmon.

The church had gathered and they asked Jesus,

18 … “Good teacher, what must we do to inherit eternal life?” … 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’” 21 (“All these we have kept since we were young,” they said.) 22 When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “You still lack one thing.

Come to me needy, on your hands and knees and cry out to me for help. Recognise that you bring nothing. Ask me to save you and forgive your sins. Humble yourself before me. Stop looking to yourself, your achievements, anything else for security. Believe that I am your righteousness. Then come and follow me.

But when they heard this, they became very sad, because they were a competent people, full of religious deeds, who treasured all they had achieved in life. They weren’t willing to put down their own righteousness and receive Jesus as their righteousness. They had no need for Jesus. It was the one thing they didn’t have, and sadly, as a result, they missed out on the Kingdom of God.

Jesus looked at them and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”

Let’s pray.

 

 

Discussion questions:

1. What struck you the most from the sermon?
2. Are you generally a needy person? What do you think about needy people? What would it look like for you to be needy before God?
3. How does Jesus expose Nicodemus’ spiritual need? What does Nicodemus need if he wants to see/enter the Kingdom of God?
4. ‘Christianity is at the same time harder and easier than you may have thought’. Discuss.
5. How would you answer someone who asked, ‘What do I need to do to become a Christian?’