John 3:1-10

00:00:00:25 – 00:00:44:15
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for closing out the week with us as we continue through the Gospel of John here in the third chapter. A well-known chapter in some ways the best known chapter, at least in part. We open with a story again, found only in John. And this is a good in some ways, it is good for us that this is a story found early because we’re going to see in this a lot of John’s storytelling style, and we’re going to see what John kind of does as he introduces themes, and then as he works them out through some of the stories that follow.

00:00:44:20 – 00:01:04:49
Clint Loveall
This is something that is going to come up again. And so, we’ll start it here today. This is also there’s a lot here. This is a historic story. It’s gotten a lot of attention from the church through the years. So, I’m I’m going to read through verse ten, and then we’ll see where we get with that.

00:01:04:49 – 00:01:29:06
Clint Loveall
And and come back to this to some thoughts. Now, there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night. And he said to him, Rabbi, we know that you’re a teacher who has come from God. For no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God. Jesus answered, I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

00:01:29:11 – 00:01:47:25
Clint Loveall
Nicodemus said, how could anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter the second time into the mother’s womb and be born? Jesus said, I tell you the truth, no one can come to the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit. What’s born of flesh is flesh. What’s born of spirit is spirit. Do not be astounded.

00:01:47:25 – 00:02:08:28
Clint Loveall
I said to you, you must be born from above. The wind blows where it chooses. You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone born of the spirit. Nicodemus said, how can these things be? Jesus said, are you a teacher of Israel? And yet you do not understand these things?

00:02:08:33 – 00:02:41:24
Clint Loveall
So, John introduces us here to a character that is not well known, but a man named Nicodemus tells us a few things about this. He is a leader of the Jews, a Pharisee, and he comes by night. And that’s significant in the Gospel of John, we’ll see the interplay of light and dark. Down the road a little ways, but it’s important to know that very important, given what John will tell us late in the gospel.

00:02:41:29 – 00:03:10:08
Clint Loveall
And he says, we you do these things, you’ve shown us these signs. It’s clear that you’re a teacher who has come from God. Now, this is high praise from the mouth of the Pharisee. And we are left to believe that Nicodemus is genuine, is trying to have this conversation with Jesus. And kind of typical of John, the Jesus in John.

00:03:10:08 – 00:03:38:58
Clint Loveall
Michael. He just he takes a hard corner here. He says, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. And this occasions a misunderstanding from Nicodemus. And we’ve said this before, but John loves misunderstandings. He loves to use them as a way for Jesus to tell information, get somebody confused, and then give them a lesson in the aftermath.

00:03:38:58 – 00:03:40:53
Clint Loveall
And that’s what happens here.

00:03:41:02 – 00:04:07:22
Michael Gewecke
One of the things I have discovered teaching Gospel John, especially when you’ve got youth clean, is, you know, stories about being born again are tough to people to keep kids along with you. Right? Because, just the literal imagining of that is ridiculous. And yet the idea of being born from above, it is it is a head scratcher.

00:04:07:22 – 00:04:32:00
Michael Gewecke
And I think that what John likes to do towards that point that you’re making, Clint, is he likes to keep us on our the back of our feet, just like Jesus is doing in his teaching. And I think actually the the gospel is written to affect the same kind of spiritual stance as what may have been heard the first time.

00:04:32:00 – 00:04:55:15
Michael Gewecke
And and so when Jesus offers a teaching like this, without being born from above, we too, if we’re going to take this passage seriously, we’re going to take Jesus’s words seriously. We’re going to have to wonder to ourselves for what is being born from above. What does that mean? And a lot of our modern Christian traditions will will hook into and use that language.

00:04:55:17 – 00:05:42:59
Michael Gewecke
Being born again is a is a phrase that gets used often and that becomes sort of, short code for us of, of the things that a born again life looks like. But if you can set that stuff aside for just a moment, if you consider what Jesus is doing here, he he’s inviting Nicodemus to reconsider that birth is the entry point into God’s providential plan that that, in other words, being a Jew, in fact, being a teacher of the Jews, that that while it may not be a negative, it it’s not fundamentally the only way into God’s kingdom that that the revelation of God is much broader than what Nicodemus may have thought.

00:05:42:59 – 00:06:06:56
Michael Gewecke
And I think that here what we see Jesus doing is he’s using this thing that Nicodemus would have at first taken for granted, and he’s now spinning it into a teaching which is, on its surface, hard to understand. But when we allow John to offer us some pastoral insight into it, we begin to see that what Jesus is doing is inviting John.

00:06:07:01 – 00:06:18:07
Michael Gewecke
Sorry. Inviting Nicodemus to see that the gospel is far bigger and that Jesus’s revelation is far more powerful than what Nicodemus came to ask Jesus about.

00:06:18:12 – 00:06:51:52
Clint Loveall
I think one of the struggles of the Bible in general, but certainly a text like this that has become rich ground in the theology of the church and the vocabulary of Christian life, the idea of born again or born of the spirit, we have unfortunately taken that as a kind of litmus test or a kind of we’ve argued about these things rather than letting them be mysterious.

00:06:51:57 – 00:07:31:18
Clint Loveall
We’ve tried to define what it means and then apply those definitions to others, as if we could evaluate it in the church or in the world. Who was and who wasn’t born of the spirit? Who was or wasn’t baptized by water in spirit? Born of water and spirit? And I think there’s a sense in which that history hurts us and to whatever extent we can, if we can put that on the shelf when we approach the text and ask the core question, what is Jesus trying to tell this man?

00:07:31:22 – 00:08:03:25
Clint Loveall
And it has something to do with a new experience of life, to what is it to be born? To be born is to be introduced to the world, to be given life. Well, what is it to be born from above. It’s to be given a new life. And rather than argue the details of what that means and what the parameters of it have to be, and what does and doesn’t constitute that, I think it make those arguments make it harder to enter the mystery of this tax.

00:08:03:25 – 00:08:29:35
Clint Loveall
And Nicodemus is a character that helps us get there. What are you talking about? A person can’t be born again. And Jesus says, well, if they’re not, they’re not of the kingdom. That if if they’re not born again, if they’re not reborn, then they don’t yet know the spiritual truth of a new life in in me, in Christ.

00:08:29:40 – 00:08:56:06
Clint Loveall
And then he says, it’s like the wind. You hear it, you know something of it, but you don’t control it and you don’t contain it. And so it is with the spirit and with the spiritual life. And I think, again, if you can back up from some of the reservations about what this text has meant or how it’s been used, and you can just read it here, it as Jesus proclaims it, as John shares it with us.

00:08:56:11 – 00:08:58:42
Clint Loveall
I think there’s really powerful stuff here.

00:08:58:44 – 00:09:14:56
Michael Gewecke
What Clinton one of the other things we lose in that temptation to go down that road, to think about what are the boundaries of what, what’s the definition of the born again life as opposed to the not. But when we make that our prime interpretive frame, we miss? Well, I think is a very helpful part of this text.

00:09:14:56 – 00:09:44:38
Michael Gewecke
And that is the nature of what a believer coming to Christ or or a, a seeker coming to Christ should look like. And I think we see this here in verse two when Nicodemus comes and tells Jesus, Rabbi, which is a title of distinct and respect, we know that you’re a teacher who has come from God. This is a remarkable statement when we’ve already said, Clint, that in this gospel the Jews are often referred to very actively.

00:09:44:51 – 00:10:10:28
Michael Gewecke
And here we have a Pharisee who’s chief among the Jews as it relates to the keeping of the law, the the remembering of the law. And here the man who is literally called leader of the Jews comes to Jesus with a title of respect and with a question that that, you know. But Bible scholars say we have all reason to believe is is a legitimate, heartfelt, wholehearted question.

00:10:10:28 – 00:10:34:04
Michael Gewecke
And I think that kind of spirit of humility helps temper some of the vindictive language that Jesus has against the Jews throughout the Book of John, because here we have an example of one who comes to Jesus, a leader of the Jews, who’s asking a question and receiving an answer. Now to be clear, the answer he’s receiving is a difficult one.

00:10:34:13 – 00:11:02:43
Michael Gewecke
It’s not easily understandable. And yet we’re going to see Nicodemus more than just here. And actually we’re going to see some ways in which he may be changing as his encounters with Jesus progress. And I just think this does have something to teach us about what it means, not just to hear these teachings and inquire what they mean, but also to have the humility to come to Jesus with a legitimate question.

00:11:02:43 – 00:11:08:55
Michael Gewecke
And even if the answer goes over our head, there’s something to learn from the Nicodemus who shows up in this scene.

00:11:09:00 – 00:11:37:40
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And instead of pigeonholing the characters, I think if we can think through the nature of the conversation, hey, Jesus, we see God, or I see God in what you do. And Jesus says, well, to truly see God, you need to be born from above. And Nicodemus says, I don’t understand what that means. How could that happen? And Jesus says, unless it happens, you actually can’t see the kingdom.

00:11:37:40 – 00:12:10:40
Clint Loveall
You can’t enter the kingdom. You you can’t be part of the kingdom because that experience of new life is the way in which one encounters the living God. It’s mysterious. And then Nicodemus says, how can these things be? And and yes, you can read this as as a story about Jesus stumping a religious leader and that’s a fair reading that may be in the text.

00:12:10:40 – 00:12:43:57
Clint Loveall
It will certainly be in other texts. And it’s a paradigm for the way John tells a story. And it might be what’s happening here, but I think alongside that leave a little room for the possibility that Nicodemus is encountering a mystery he doesn’t yet understand. And as would be the case for all of us, we would say, how can these things be I, I don’t, the human mind doesn’t comprehend the spiritual truth of Jesus Christ.

00:12:44:02 – 00:13:11:26
Clint Loveall
How can this be? What does it mean? Those are the right questions. Now what they mean to Nicodemus we’ll have chance to speculate about in the future. But I think don’t treat this story just as as Jesus arguing with religious leaders. It may be that, but in this particular case, I also think it’s likely that it may be more than that.

00:13:11:31 – 00:13:35:51
Michael Gewecke
I particularly light your comment about how the core of Jesus’s teaching here is that you can’t rightly see the kingdom in until, in some way, the kingdom lives inside you. And to make that very, very simple, I think that this is a little reductionistic, but it helps to illustrate the point. It’s a little bit like when you say, you know, it’s like learning to ride a bike, right?

00:13:35:51 – 00:13:55:43
Michael Gewecke
Once you’ve learned to ride the bike, then there’s an intuitive knowledge of how to do it. But if you’re going to just explain to a child who’s never done it and you try to describe, well, you got to get up some speed and then you have to keep your balance at the center, right, so that if it’s dark shifting, you’ll shift your light.

00:13:55:48 – 00:14:18:43
Michael Gewecke
The kingdom of God, as Jesus is presenting it here is something like that. It’s experiential. You don’t fully understand it until you’ve experienced it. You can’t speak of the kingdom until you’ve been in the kingdom. You can’t write a poem about this beautiful, beautiful place if you’ve never been to it. And it’s just an idea to you until it’s lived inside you.

00:14:18:43 – 00:14:53:16
Michael Gewecke
I think that some of the interesting juxtapositions of this text is we have an expert, a teacher, some someone who knows the words of Scripture and even the moral applications of it. But yet he doesn’t fully understand the reality of the kingdom because he’s not yet lived within the revelation, the full revelation of that reality. And though he’s come to Jesus now at night, he has come with an openness to hearing the teaching of Jesus.

00:14:53:16 – 00:15:15:55
Michael Gewecke
And now, you know, as we continue on through this text, we’re going to see how this deepens that. Of course, we’re going to approach one of the most well known passages of all the scriptures. But I think the fact that we have this juxtaposition of the expert coming to Jesus, the one who’s asking this question about what is but who can’t understand it because he’s not experienced the reality of the one who is revealing it right in front of him.

00:15:16:03 – 00:15:36:36
Michael Gewecke
That John setting all this up for us both to show us sort of this character and the transformation that might come, but also as an invitation for ourselves. This is a model of how a person might come to Jesus and and at first might be more confused than compelled. And we’ll see where that goes.

00:15:36:36 – 00:16:09:19
Clint Loveall
I think we’ll get more of it Monday in the next passage. But it also is an example for us, or at least beginning to give an example of some of how John tells stories. When when Jesus says things in John, they seem to me at least, to be almost simultaneously directed toward the character of the story, directed toward the reader, directed toward the early church, directed toward the enemies of the early church, or the the adversaries of the community, and all of that’s being unpacked at once.

00:16:09:19 – 00:16:32:06
Clint Loveall
And these there’s just layers upon layers to some of the way that John weaves this together and that makes it, that can make it tricky to know which part of the story that you’re dealing with or what layer you’re on. And so, we’ll, we’ll have a chance to unpack a little bit more of that in the next part of the passage.

00:16:32:06 – 00:16:34:17
Clint Loveall
But there’s a lot in here.

00:16:34:30 – 00:16:53:27
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, absolutely. I hope that a small part of this conversation has been interesting to you. Give this video a like if it has, it helps others find it in their own study. And then friends do subscribe. We will continue next week with the live study, and we look forward to continuing on, deeper into this book and of course, closer to John 316.

00:16:53:27 – 00:16:54:32
Michael Gewecke
So we can’t wait to see you then.

00:16:54:36 – 00:16:55:15
Clint Loveall
Thanks, everybody.