Due to a recording error, this sermon has been re-recorded after the fact. On July 8th of this year, 18-year-old New Jersey native Nikki Hake got on World of Warcraft for the last time. Now, for those of you who don't know, World of Warcraft is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. It's an adventure, a video game, a virtual world that has almost 12 million subscribers. And Nikki Hake said after almost five years of being a part of it with over 4,000 hours play. It's almost 200 days solid that he had played. He decided to set up the video camera, go online, and give away all this stuff. People flocked when he announced he was giving it away for free. And then he recorded as he deleted all of his characters, including the level 80, the top level character that had consumed the majority of the five years of work. And then, after a recording, he posted it online on YouTube and Facebook by the end of the night just from friends and word of mouth that had 3,000 views. The end of the next night had 30,000 views. And now just two months later, it has almost half a million views. People just couldn't believe he would throw away all that work. Why would he? He said it was the constant pressure to perform, to constantly be leveling up and getting the latest items. He got tired of him. He missed his friends. He missed his life. He wanted out. He wanted freedom. Well, there was a strong response from various people commenting on his video saying that that was his fault. It was only a game for them. He shouldn't have been so all consumed with it. But when he was asked about that, Nicky pointed to the fact that the majority of the users were males between the ages of 18 and 44. He said they're just rationalizing. It's their insecurity. The conclusion, the thing that stuck people so hard was the last sentence shown on the video. Nicky said, the cooler your character looks in world of warcraft, the sadder your real life is. The cooler your character looks in the virtual world, the sadder your real life is. Now, it's easy for us to mock a teenager. But what happens when the problem is the character we're playing in real life? How do you hit the reset button then? John 3 is where we're going. It's page 1649 in your Pew Bible. We'll be spending the next two weeks in one of the most famous passages in all of Scripture. And that may be the most difficult thing about this passage. So let's hear from God, beginning in verse 1. Now, there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God for no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him. In reply, Jesus declared, I tell you the truth. No one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. How can a man be born when he is old? Nicodemus asked. Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born. Jesus answered, I tell you the truth. No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water in the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to Spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear it sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. How can this be? Nicodemus asked. Your Israel's teacher, Jesus said, and do you not understand these things? I tell you the truth. We speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things, and you do not believe, how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man, just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert. So the Son of Man must be lifted up that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life. This is God's Word. Let's pray. Lord, we think we know what this means. Lord, we ask that just like with Nicodemus, you give us a glimpse of the real meaning. Show us your face this morning. We ask in your name. Amen. Ground zero. If there's a term today that evokes some strong images, that's it. Ground zero. And right now, it's the middle of a political firestorm. It's a social concern. But it hit me as I prepared for the sermon this week, listening to someone talking in 1999 who used the term ground zero, and it's original meaning. You have struck me that the new meaning is almost the exact opposite. A scene that it evokes of tragedy, of terrorism, of horrible loss, of a hole in the ground in the middle of New York City. When the original meaning, going to ground zero, it wasn't a location. It was getting back to basics. But the term has now been literally hijacked. I think there's another two-word term that's a very similar misuse. Born again. I mean, people think when they hear that term, they think of a political or social label, a particular group of people. In 2006, when I went to Uganda, a country that, after coming out from under Ediamine, there was an explosion of Christianity. And it spread like wildfire through the country until basically the government, it was institutionalized. The Christianity was the religion of the day, and the term born again in Uganda has a particular meaning, a political group, a particular subset of Christians, and a type of Christianity that represents. So as we went about sharing to faith in Uganda that summer for three weeks, it was imperative that in order to reclaim the original meaning of the term, which is so central to what Jesus is talking about, that we had to come up with another way of getting there, another terminology, because people only heard a particular meaning when you use that term. It's not all that different today in America, and how can we reclaim the term? So as we come to this passage where Jesus coins this, how can you have fresh eyes? I want to ask you to come to this text and think about it, forget everything that you've heard about what this means, and hear what Jesus says. Now here we are picking up in John 3, we're beginning a section in the Gospel of John where the Gospel writer has put together various conversations with different people. In chapters 3 through 5, he talks with multiple different people. He's talking with a Pharisee, a religious leader here, he's going to talk to a Samaritan woman, then a royal official, then a handicapped man, and it's a great to see the different facets of how Jesus interacts with various people. He doesn't always use the same style, the same approach, but here coming out of the shoot, John purposefully sets us up with this conversation with a religious leader as his big stick. This is the most shocking conversation we can have because of who Nicodemus is. It's the biggest shift on what we would understand Christianity to be. So, as we come to this text, let it challenge you. See who Jesus is and how he relates to Nicodemus. So, if those of you who like a blueprint up front, here it is, Nicodemus, who is he and why is he here? First of all, then why does Jesus challenge him? And what does that mean for us? Who is he? Why does Jesus challenge him? What does that mean for us? All right, so first of all, who is this guy? Who's Nicodemus? We're told right at the beginning he's a member of the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin. Now, there's certain things we can know about him because of that. Obviously he's a man, but not only that, he'd have to be old. You've got to go through a long career, really, and be accomplished. So, he's an older man, and not only that, he's rich, he's wealthy. You would have to be a powerful, someone of respect and substance. He's a teacher. Not only that, he's had to be a scholar. He would have to know the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, and an out. So, you begin to get this broader picture of who he is, and we hear the term Pharisee today. And even if you've just been around a church a little bit, especially if you've been lived growing up in the church, we hear Pharisee, and we think the bad guys. We think the guys in black hats, but that's not how the original heroes would have heard the term. I mean, these were the good guys. The Pharisees were the faithful ones. Let me contrast them with some of the other groups, the other sex of Judaism that were around them. Yeah, the Sadducees. These were the functionally the secular Jews, who also were, they were the primary antagonists to the Pharisees. These were the folks who didn't believe the promises of the Old Testament. They didn't believe the resurrection or angels or miracles. They functionally just looked at an ethical teaching and ramifications of their faith. Not hall to one like the similar group in America today, a lot of people think of Jesus as just as ethics. And the Pharisees were in contrast to that. They believed in the resurrection. Paul starts an argument just by bringing it up in front of the Sanhedrin and Acts because they're fighting over, do they believe in the resurrection or not? Even the promises and the Pharisees were the faithful ones who believed in the Old Testament promises. But they're not militant like the zealots. The other group of zealots wanted to rebel against Rome. They're not militant believers. And they're not, they're not extremist either. The Essings were this other group that secluded themselves out in the desert. They withdrew from society. But the Pharisees don't compartmentalize their faith. They let it integrate with everything else. They've got going on. So the Pharisees were, their name literally means the pure ones. They were probably only, you know, somewhere under 7,000 of them in Jesus' day but they were highly regarded, highly educated, well respected. Believe the promises, the Old Testament knew it better than anybody else. They tied for the poor. I mean, Jesus even says that they tied even their mint and cumin, even the spices. They were faithful in giving to the poor. And people respected them. I mean, 200 years before Christ and the Maccabee in revolution, they fought with the Maccabees to throw off their Syrian oppressors. But when the Maccabee turned corrupt, they were decadent. They went against them even at their own expense. So these guys were faithful. They were the good guys, but they're the ones that Jesus is always the hardest on. I mean, we talk about, this is one of the themes of Christ going head to head with the guys who would be perceived to be the most like him. He wants to draw a hard line in the sand between himself and that sort of established religiosity. I mean, notice even what he calls Nicodemus in verse 10, the teacher of Israel. Israel's teacher. It's a technical term he's using because Nicodemus is a guy. He's got a PhD if not multiple ones. I mean, this guy is accredited by the establishment. He's accomplished. He's an insider. He's the teacher of Israel means if it's not literally to be taken as he's the best teacher in Israel, he's one of the primary ones. He's highly regarded. And you know, for a long time, I thought there's really only two places I know of and all of the gospels where Jesus is gentle with Pharisees. And what he says about the return of the prodigal son of the older brother in Luke 15 and then here. But now on further study, I think I'm wrong about this passage. I thought Jesus was, you know, here's a sweet conversation with Nicodemus who's coming seeking, but I don't think that's the case. Now look carefully at what is said here. Back in verse two when he comes, when Nicodemus comes, notice what he says. He doesn't say, I'm coming. He says, Rabbi, we know he's coming representing a group, a subset of the Pharisees that he represents. He's coming, knowing that the Pharisees is a whole, the Sanhedrin is turning against Christ, but he represents a subset of them that want to take him seriously. That understand, I mean, he's a faithful Jew. He knows his faith needs reforming. He knows some of the things that Jesus is saying are incredibly accurate. And so here he comes wanting to play ball with Jesus. He's not coming seeking Jesus approval. He's coming as accomplished man who knows how to get back room politicking done. He's looking to deal with Jesus, to play ball with him, to bring him under the establishment. It's someone ironic here. You look and here's a man who represents all of educated Israel. He represents their whole faith, but he's the best of the best. He's accomplished. He's earned his way up. He's older and all of his life has been built on this. He's the teacher of Israel and he calls Jesus Rabbi. I mean, this should stun us that here he is coming to this homeless carpenter and he's calling him Dr. Jesus. You know, it pushes on his established norms to the least, but when you understand what he's attempting to do, it's almost as if he's offering Jesus a professorship. Come be with us. We see the need to reform Judaism. You're a genuine guy. Come help us reform it. If we're going to understand why Jesus reacts so strongly here, why he's upset about this, it's as if Nicodemus is coming and saying, you know, we're in a spiritual adolescence. We just need some vitamin supplements. We need to grow some more and Christ is going to say absolutely not. You're misconceiving it. Nicodemus is full of a pride of his education. He's a repository of thousands of years of Jewish knowledge and he's proud of his pedigree, his faith. But Christ is going to say, that's not enough. It's not enough for you simply to be a faithful Jew. Let me push on us for a minute. Like the stereotype of our denomination, the PCA. You know, people are proud. Presbyterian legacy is always to be intellectuals. We trace our heritage through the intellectuals of the Christian faith. Frequently, the bad stereotype of PCA folks is they're the social elite. They're the knowledgeable Christians. They're proud of their doctrine. But here Christ is coming. He says, look, you're the problem. The educated elite should know better, the leaders. You're the problem. You're in the way for what I'm coming and bringing. Look, Nicodemus made a living teaching about God and he still missed it. I mean, he knows the Old Testament better than anybody in this room. And yet he missed it. You see what Christ is after? He's pushing very hard on him. He's coming. It's as if he's saying, look, Nicodemus, you are here. You walk in the mall and you see the map and it says you are here. Nicodemus orientation is off. He thinks he's over in one place and Christ is saying, no, no, no. You are here. Are you aware of your actual situation? And he's going to say you can't get where you're trying to get from here. It says you are here. Look, you think you are managing your life. You have a poor self-diagnosis. And you think that you can manage your situation from here. You're coming even trying to manage me. He's hitting him to say face where you are. Recently, a couple of weeks ago, Judge Taylor was telling me about a drug dealer who came in his courtroom. And he was standing there and orange jumps to shackled hands and feet tied together and had to shuffle his way in. He's standing there in front of the judge and the judges lecturing him about how drugs are ruining his life. You know, this is a huge problem. His drug problem is ruining his life and he's going on about this. And in the middle of it, he can see the man's jerking around and lifting his finger trying to get his attention even though he can't lift his hands because he's shackled. And finally, he stops and says, are you trying to say something? What are you trying to say? He says, excuse me, excuse me. He said, you're talking about somebody with a drug problem. I don't have a drug problem. And he stood there and all the face had listened. You're in an orange jumpsuit and shackles because of your drug problem. You are the definition of a drug problem. But the guy didn't think he had one because he knew people who were worse off than make a point to the guys who were stealing their grandmother's check to come pay him to get the drugs so he didn't have a drug problem. They're the ones with a drug problem. This is how we operate. As long as we can manage better than other people, we can look around other people and manage our situation better, we think we're okay. And that's why Nicodemus is in such a deadly precarious situation. He thinks he's okay. He's the best of the best. I mean, Jesus says, coming and saying, if you think you are good, then you might be the sickest person here. I mean, as we've said frequently here, if you do bad things, you know they're bad. And people do bad things, know they're bad. But people who do good things are counting them against God as though they don't need God in the situation. I like how one of my favorite songwriters in college, he put it like this, a song called advertising man about the tobacco industry. He said, crack will kill you quickly. That's why it's got to go, but they'll get more of your money if they kill you nice and slow. Yeah, the only one who's laughing is the advertising man. Now listen, I'm not cracking down on tobacco users. They're not all that unlike my affinity for fast food. I mean, they're both killing us. But it's not even those bad things. It's the good things that we think we can manage. That we think we're okay. That we think I got this. I got a Protestant work ethic. I can pull myself up with my bootstraps. This is the live Americana that you can be anything you can do anything when it's what it's the exact opposite of what Jesus is saying. Have you come to the end of yourself? Nicodemus, do you see you can't fix yourself? I mean, Christ has come in and saying until you recognize that you've come to the end of yourself, you'll never ask for help. You'll never seek the help. You so desperately need. And the people who are best at hiding their need for help are actually the ones who are probably the sickest. And that's the reason that Southern American Christianity is so deadly, so deadly. Look, we are out for gurus and teachers in this society. I mean, the self-help section tells you everything you need to know. Go in any store. It's huge. One pastor was telling me about talking about a man came in to talk to this woman in the bookstore. He came up, walked up to her, he said, can you point me to where the self-help section is? And she looked at him, kind of cocked her head and said, I could, but that kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? And that's it. I mean, that's us. I mean, I'm sure the guy walked away and thinking, what a jerk, he just said, I'll find it myself. But what Christ has come in and says, you can't find your way out. You're that sick. You need to restart, to be reborn. And the irony is somewhere down deep we know we need help. So we need help as the reason we're going to some book to get self-help. We're looking for a voice from the outside. And yet we want to manage it ourselves. And that's the sickness under death. That's what's killing us slowly and preventing us from going. It's pride, preventing us from going to ask for help. Do you really want self-help? Because it's really about me being my own savior. I will save myself. Do you know you need to outside help? Do you know you need someone else until you come to the end of yourself? You will die the slow death of being your own savior. And Christ came to kill that. And that's why rebirth being born again tastes like death because all the things I thought I had accomplished are now being thrown out of the bus. But that brings us to why Jesus challenges him. Why Jesus is so upset. Now listen, he comes to a lot of different people in different ways as we said. But here he comes to Nicodemus and he's very gentle with the Samaritan woman as we'll see. But he is hard on Nicodemus. I mean, here you come in, this is the biggest baddest kid in school. If he's a bully, he's the best. He's the most moral. He's been the most faithful with traditional religiosity and religion. And here Christ comes and drops kicks him. I mean, Nicodemus is better than anybody in the room. Christ is saying, you know, if Nicodemus needs help, if he's dying, we all do. You know, being born again is not just for a particular group. It's for everybody. Why? Why is Jesus so upset? Why is he so mad? Nicodemus comes assuming we know that you are a teacher from God. This is a classic, it's a current American myth, honestly, that we can, we can jettison the content of who Jesus claims to be and simply take his ethical content. But the primary content of Jesus teaching was who he is. And the ethics flow from that. But he's coming thinking, Jesus is a teacher. Jesus has got knowledge that will help me accomplish what I need to accomplish. If I just had that knowledge, I could get to the next level. But that is not what Jesus came to do. He said, look, if you need a teacher, it's really about you getting the knowledge to be your own Savior. I'm not a teacher. I'm a Savior. Look, let's put this in practical terms. If I went outside and had a big metal pole and I wrapped it around the telephone pole and started, had somebody hold one side and I try to bend it. I'm pulling on one side as hard as I can, leaning back into it. You know, it's starting to give a little, it's bending a little bit. But the minute I release that metal pole, it snaps right back into place. Why? Because you haven't changed nature. You haven't changed its internal consistency. It's just an external force coercing change. And it's ineffective. I mean, that's why it snaps right back into place. You got to have heat. It's got to come from the inside. Outward behavior modification will never get it done. If you manipulate somebody into changing their behavior, they'll snap right back into place in time. As soon as everything calms down in that external force is gone. If it doesn't come from the inside, an inner change, that's what Jesus is after. That's why he says this about being a teacher in Christ, almost out of the blue, it's this blunt conversation change between verses two and three, where he just kind of says, out of nowhere, you got to be born again. You don't just need a teacher. You need to absolutely start over. Because the entire problem here, Nicodemus, is what you think you've accomplished. You think you are on the way to heaven because of what you've accomplished. I think Nicodemus here is self-projecting. He's seen Jesus as a teacher like him. And therefore he thinks he just needs a little bit more of Jesus advance teaching to accomplish what he needs to. To copy Jesus, but understand Jesus isn't like Nicodemus. I mean, Nicodemus burns the midnight oil study. Jesus doesn't study. As far as we know, the only time he ever cracked a book is when he stands up in the synagogue and opens the scroll. Jesus didn't spend his time studying books. He had first hand knowledge. I mean, look at what he says down there. He says, we know. I mean, in response later on in verse 13, we know. Because we've been there. No one's ever been to heaven except the son of man. He's claiming to be God. He's been there. That's why he knows this. I was reading earlier this week on this. I remember back in 03 when the big Antwerp diamond heist happened. If you don't know, Antwerp is the international capital for the diamond industry. They store all these expensive diamonds there. Incredible multi-million dollar security system. And these guys in 2003 pulled off the ultimate heist. They came away with their guessing over a hundred million dollars in diamonds that to this day have never been found. And I remember watching this show for back on NBC back in the day. And then talking about how these guys pulled this off. And they were talking about the outside. And then they just kind of moved to the inside. And they said, listen, we can't tell you how they got inside. Because they don't want you to have that knowledge. They knew they must have been so innovative, so creative, and such a great angle. They didn't want other people to copy it to have that knowledge to get in. And now Nicodemus is thinking that if he had that kind of knowledge from Christ, he could get in. He could, you know, get in and pull the great diamond heist, get all the way and get into heaven. But then as I was looking this up and reading about the top five diamond heists in history, which aside from all of them happening in the last 50 years or so, it said none of these heists happened without one thing being the case. They always had an inside man. They always had somebody with inside knowledge. How are you going to get into heaven unless you've got an inside man somebody with inside knowledge? That's what Christ is saying. I'm the inside man. Nobody else has been there. This is why who we understand Christ to be changes what we think getting to heaven is about and how we get there. Christ is coming saying nobody else could get you there because I'm the only one who's ever been there. And what I'm coming and telling you Nicodemus is you can't get there from here. You can't make it. You can't just have external coercion. Now listen, there's a reason that the religious right, the people who've been good, quote unquote, the bad people get this faster as Jesus makes clear. The good people don't like this. Why is it that this is harder for Nicodemus to get? Why is John swinging so hard coming out of the gate at Nicodemus? I used to run track in high school. I remember that you get down on the blocks, they pull the trigger, the gun goes off and everybody runs. And if somebody fault starts, if they come out of the blocks wrong, and they shoot the gun again, you got to come back. But if you're pushing it, come out of the blocks and say fire the gun. Who is it that's most upset? If you didn't cheat, if somebody else messed up, and you got the best start, you were out ahead, you got the best start, you've ever got and you exerted all that energy to get there, you're going to be livid that you've got to come back and try to do it again, even though you did it right in the first time. It's the person who messed up coming out of the blocks, I mean, if they didn't cheat, the person who had the worst start is happy that it's restarting. You know, it's the same thing. If you're the student who got the A on the test, you studied really hard, you got an A and your teacher comes and says I'm just going to give everybody a hundred. You're livid because you studied when everybody else goofed off and didn't get the hundred. You know, this is bad news for you. If you were the best case scenario, what Christ is saying is Nicodemus, you didn't get a hundred, you utterly failed, but you did better than everybody else. The reason Nicodemus is having a hard time accepting this, the reason anybody who thinks they're good religiously or even has a moral superiority since of that complex that they're better than others, looks down their nose spiritually. This is bad news for them. They hate this because what Christ is saying is you've got to start over. Your resume, your accolades, everything you've spent your whole life accomplishing Nicodemus, I'm burning. Cast it out. It was nothing. It does not help you. I mean, this is the reason that the weirdos, you know, the spiritual outsiders, the bad people came flocking to Jesus and the moral superiors, the accomplished good people hated him. He was saying you must be born again. You must start from scratch over again. He's coming and grabbing their spiritual etch a sketch, the picture that they think they've painted, this thing that they've spent their whole life doing, he picks it up and he shakes it and it's clean again. And if you thought the picture you had painted was so good, you're living. But if you know it was just a mess and not a jumbled nastiness, you're excited. This is bad news for Nicodemus because he still thinks he's his own savior that his goodness will get him there. Nicodemus thinks he just needs reform. And Christ comes and I didn't come to reform. I came to transform. I'm not here to manipulate what you've already got him coming with something absolutely new. We're talking about an entire identity shift, a paradigm shift, something completely new. There's a popular passage in Augustine's confessions where he talks about after becoming a Christian. Going back into one of the cities where he used to go, and of course he was known for his promiscuity prior to becoming a Christian. I mean that was his vice was his physicality. And he walks in the street in this woman who was one of his former escorts, comes up to him, given him the standard business, and he gives her the cold shoulder. And he thinks somebody else, he's forgotten who I am so she says Augustine, it is I. And he turns back and looks at her and he says, I know, but it is not I. He's had such a radical identity shift. Christ has brought something so utterly new that even his desires, which he goes on to admit, you know he still struggles, but he's wanting something so different than before. How do you get this? I mean look versus five to seven tell us about this. People look at this verse. You know they talk, Jesus talks about you got to be born of water and of the spirit. He's saying the same thing over again. People think he's talking about baptism or the amniotic fluid of birth. That's not what he's talking about. He's virtually quoting Ezekiel 36. And of course he's dealing with an Old Testament scholar. But Nicodemus would have recognized this. He says almost word for word Ezekiel 36. Let me read it to you. Listen to this. This is a promise from God. I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean. He's talking about cleansing with the spirit. I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 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. And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Do you hear that? Your very motives will shift. What you desire will change. And it's not because of what you did on the outside of gurting yourself up and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and giving it the old college try. It's just a matter of time to you collapse. And if you think that's what Christianity is, if you think I've done the Christian thing and I've tried really hard. I mean no wonder you'll say it didn't work. You've been inoculated against real Christianity with a false version. Every other religion teaches that. Try really hard. Do what God says and you'll get in. Christ is not saying that. He's coming bringing a completely new identity. I will put my spirit in you and now you've got a new root. My professor in college, Ralph Wood, used to look at us. It was popular in the early 90s to say radical. He said, do you even know what that means? A radical change from a Latin means to the root. It's a complete root change. Think about that. I mean I grew up in the Carolina. If you're growing tobacco products and you realize the tobacco industry is in trouble or whatever, you're going to change what you farm. You don't simply go out and start. I'm going to prune back here. I'm going to fertilize heavily. I'm going to sprinkle a lot more water on it. If you are a tobacco farmer and you just prune and fertilize better, you're just going to get more tobacco next year. If you want a new product, if you want something radically new, you've got to uproot what was there before and plant something new. If you're going to be a soybean farmer, you've got to uproot the tobacco and put down the soybean. A completely new root, that's what God's talking about. I'm going to so change your identity to the root. It's going to be a transformation, not just a reformation. It's a revolution, not simply an evolution. It's not trying harder. It is a complete change. Look, Nicodemus is beginning to think. You can see it because Christ starts talking more and more Nicodemus is talking less and less as it goes on. He wants him to soak on it, to understand changes. There's anything we can gather from this. I mean, as a pastor, I want you to see, here Jesus has dealing with the top, a clergyman, and somebody who should know spiritual things, and he's saying, you have to start over. You have to be born again. You can't see who I am until you start thinking differently than how you think now. You need a whole new lens. This is challenging Nicodemus to stop doing and thinking he's accomplishing and to look at him. He's aggravating him and to reconsidering what it's all about. He's undermined all of his career functionally. You know, get rid of all of this and look at me. And Nicodemus walks away. I mean, see that. Sometimes people don't get changed on the spot. They walk away. I mean, think about that. If Jesus is a failed evangelist by your standards, you've got the wrong standards. I mean, if people can't walk away from you and think, then you've got problems with how you think about who God is. You don't beat people over the head with us till they submit. Nicodemus walks away to think and Christ lets him go. He wants him to stop and consider. And it takes probably a couple of years. Probably two years before the cross. But what does this mean for us? I want to let Nicodemus's story give us an overview, a helicopter ride, of what Christ is about. I mean, see, Jesus comes and he tells this weird little tidbit verses 14 and 15 out of Numbers 21. And it so changes Nicodemus. So next, we just get a couple of little vignettes of Nicodemus's life. The next time we hear about him is in John 7, verse 51. Nicodemus stands up in the Sanhedron. He's a man of faithfulness. He's a man of character. And the Sanhedron is talking about Jesus and the problem that he's causing. And just being a man of the law and faithful, he stands up and says, shouldn't we hear him? I mean, don't you have to have testimony. Witnesses shouldn't we hear from him before we judge him? And he gets mocked into silence. People, they laugh them into silence. Sit down and shut up Nicodemus. And that external behavior modification is what sets up the next thing that happens. I mean, the next official mention we get of Nicodemus's in John 19, after Christ has been crucified, he and Joseph were in the Thea. We only get that here in John because it's connecting back to this passage we're looking at. But we're told Nicodemus goes and gets the body. Now, we're not told explicitly, but from this I infer. I mean, I think this is to be expected that in John 18, when Jesus is brought before the Sanhedron and Nicodemus's name is not mentioned, but it's the middle of the night and they're giving Jesus a kangaroo core. I mean, it purposefully taken him straight through to get him killed. And you don't hear anything from Nicodemus. It certainly seems that the chapter 7 mockery of him that happened has shunned him and stunned him into silence. And he watches, even as they hit Jesus in the face because of the truth that he speaks, wrongfully accused, abusing him, and he goes to the cross. And Nicodemus is changed by the fact that he, the more man that he is, sees his own failure and he sees what happens. But how does he understand it? This little thing that Jesus says we get in two verses. I mean, the conversation might have been longer. We may be getting the cliffs notes from John. He's purposefully uses an economy of words. But here, you know, we get this little point. It's not a small deal when you're talking with an Old Testament scholar and you bring up an obscure story that really the rabbi struggled to understand. And numbers 21 is this weird thing where Moses and the people, they've come out of Egypt, they're going to the desert and people are starting to whine. Even as God's providing miraculously for them, they're sick of the man, they're tired of it, they're complaining against God. And the poison off their lips, God judges them by sending poisonous vipers among them that are biting them, they're getting them sick, they're dying from these vipers that are among their camp, biting them. And they ask for Moses to go to God on their behalf. He goes and God says, all right, here's what I want you to do. Get a stick and make a bronze snake and put it up on the stick. Now, what in the world is going on here? The answer for you dying is not try harder to be better spiritually. But look, it's what Jesus has been saying to Nicodemus, look, stop doing and look. But more than that, I mean, the weirdness of this is how can a fake snake be more powerful than a real one? You know, how you have deliverance from these snakes by another snake? And every good Jew would have known Genesis 3. I mean, Genesis 3, the serpent comes in the garden, he's the fall, he's the evil one, he's the curse. And now we're going to look at the curse for our deliverance. And what they would have understood is we are looking, you're asking us to look at our own sin to see our own sin in order to be delivered. How does that help me? I mean, somebody asked me in the last couple of weeks, that just makes me feel guilty of us until we get what Jesus is doing. Nicodemus didn't just feel guilty. He looked and saw. I mean, Jesus said just as the serpent is lifted up in the desert, so I will be lifted up. You hear that? Christ is comparing Himself to the snake. I mean, He's taking us to the edge, theologically. He said, is Jesus daring to say, treat me not just like a sinner, but like the sin bringer, like Satan Himself? He's taking us to the edge. Look at your sins and the consequences of your sins. And you will be delivered. How? This is the cross. You would have seen Jesus lifted up. He would have seen this twisted, tortured body lifted up on the stick and made the connection to the snake. What? Did that mean? I mean, I was our favorite verse in Chattanooga. It's the gospel in a verse, 2 Corinthians 5, 21, that God made Him who knew no sin to be sin in order that we might become the righteousness of God. And hear that. That we would become the righteousness of God. Now, He gets treated like the curse that I deserve so that I get treated like He deserves. Understand this. Here in John, back in John 1, we skipped over. We're going to come back to it. But in John 1, your affirmation of faith this morning, it says, yet to all who call on His name, to all who received Him, He gave the right to be called to become children of God. Now, this is offensive. This offends American sensibilities because Americans assume everybody's a child of God. But that is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches that everybody bears the image of God, Genesis 1. But here it's saying in John 1, He gave the right to become a child of God to those who call on Christ. The children of God are those who are in Christ. The reason we have to be reborn into the family of God. We are not part of God's family until we are under Christ under what He has done. Now, that's not saying we treat other people differently because we don't know who's in and who's out. But to be a child of God is to be born again to start over to say, it's not what I've done. It's about what Christ did. That's what Nicodemus is looking and saying, wait a minute. All of my best efforts. All I've accomplished comes down to me keeping my mouth shut in the critical moment and watching an innocent man be killed that shouldn't have been. My sin put him there and now he's dying in the place of my sin. I mean, that's the message here. You will be delivered because of my suffering instead of yours. Look at the snake. He's been treated like the snake. He had two years to think about this passage that just didn't make sense and it's so deeper and deeper and deeper. Now listen, if that image doesn't strike you enough, think about birth. I mean, birth is a graphic, gory thing. It's a bloody mess. And in those days, I mean, today at least we've got modern medicine. We've got anesthetics. It's a great gift that women seem to survive. The survival rate's incredibly higher. Back in those days, every time a woman had a child, her life was at risk. She was put in a precarious situation. She was risking her own life in order to bring a child into this world. You came into the world through somebody else's pain and Christ is saying, you will be born again through my pain. I mean, he's comparing himself to being a spiritual mother. I mean, look at this and what he said in John 16. In a little while, you'll see me know more and then after a little while, you will see me. He's talking about his death and resurrection and just two verses later, he says, a woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come. John, whatever he talks about, the time or the hour he's talking about his death because her time has come, his death has come. But when her baby is born, she forgets the anguish because of her joy that the child is born into the world. I mean, hear that. Christ isn't calling us to look at the cross and be depressed. He doesn't look at the cross and get depressed. As Hebrews 12 tells us, for the joy set before him, he endured the cross. Christ rejoices that at his expense, we are brought into the family of God. We're born again. We're starting over on his record, not ours. We jettison our record and we get his, our past is gone. But not just that he's healing us for the future. We've been born. I knew we got a new identity at his sacrifice. We've not just been forgiven. We're being repaired. And all we got to do is look, it's not at work. It's his work. Look at what he's done and soak it in. All right. So how do you know if this is you? Let's just apply this really quickly. How do you know if this is you? You know, Dr. Appgar back in the 50s, she came up with this score system with this test to know how a baby was doing at birth. And they used her name Appgar as an acronym. Memory serves its A's appearance. Then pulse, grimace, or facial expression, activity, and respiration. It tells you signs of life. Is the baby alive? How do you know if you're alive in Christ? There are certain things you can see. I mean, sure you can fake it. I mean, nobody can have no end of faking it. But if it's not just external coercion and bending the metal pole, but it's actually from the inside, you begin to want new things. And Nicodemus's life tells us that. Look at this. He's a man who was above everybody else and looked down his nose as a them because of his accomplishments. He comes to negotiate with Jesus because Jesus is below him. It almost, you can sense he would almost look down at him even as he comes. He would have anything to do with unclean people and unclean things. And the last picture we get in John of Nicodemus is of him going to ask for Christ's body. I mean, recognize he's risking his whole reputation. He's going to pilot his risking his life. He could be recognized as a sympathizer with an insurrectionist. And not only that, but then he goes and handles the body himself. I mean, if you handle an unclean thing, a dead body, he's handling a cadaver. And who did that back in those days? Whose work was it to handle the cadavers? The second-class citizens? And back then, that was women's work. They weren't considered equal like they are now. They were second-class citizens. These are people who were beneath him. So something that was beneath him. How will we know that the gospel has come to Brookhaven? It will be when we see the rich old accomplishment in this society doing things that they never would have thought. They would have said, this is beneath me before. When they start serving everyone else, because they see that their savior served them, that he washed their feet. It wasn't beneath him, that he was lifted up so that we would be lifted up out of our sin and nastiness. That it's not somebody else's job, but it's my joy to serve you like I was served by the king of kings. That nothing is beneath us because it wasn't beneath him to come into our personal hell and bring us up out of it and suffer in our place. We get heaven because he was lifted up in our place. We get lifted up. Have you been born anew? Has the reset button been hit? Let's pray. We have no doubt that there are people listening to this who are not believers. And even to use it that way is an insulting term. How do we even say born again when they think so many other things about it? Lord, that we haven't had the new birth, that we haven't started over, that we're still clinging to the old self, the old identity. Give us that identity change. Put your spirit in us that we would want everything else out. Like last week, the cleanse in the temple, that we would want you to clean out the filth, that we would want you to grab the edge of sketch and we've so defended and shake it and give us a new identity, your picture, your accomplishment, your record not ours. Set us free to be made yours, to be made your children. And your name we pray. Amen.