“You Must Be Born Again”
John 3:1-17
2/17/08
Today I want to focus on Christ’s words,
“You must be born again.” It’s always
interesting to me when someone uses these words as a command, as if
Jesus were telling you what you must do to get saved. To them,
“You must be born again” means that you must get yourself
born again. But if you think about what Jesus is saying here, to
put the burden of being born again upon you, as if it were something
that you had to do for yourself, would be the same thing as telling a
baby in his mother’s womb that he had to do something to bring
himself into the world. But you mothers who have had babies know
that it’s not the baby that does the work of giving himself
birth; it’s you who gave your baby birth. And they
don’t call it “labor” for nothing, do they?
It’s work, a lot of work, hard work sometimes, even painful work
at times (although today with drugs that pain is more mitigated than it
has been in the past). But no one says that a child gave himself
birth; his mother gave him birth.
So, when Jesus tells us here that we must be born
again, He is not telling us what we must do to get ourselves born
again. We cannot give ourselves new birth any more than we were
able to cause ourselves to be born into this world in the first
place. At the beginning of his gospel account the Apostle John
writes that God’s children are born “not of blood, nor of
the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
You can tell a baby in the womb all you want that he must come out, but
it won’t do any good; that baby can’t help himself be
born. He must be given birth. The same goes with being born
again. We must be given new birth. Jesus’ use of the
word “must” here doesn’t lay an obligation upon us;
it simply means “it is necessary.” In order to enter
into the kingdom of God it is necessary for us to be born again.
But we can’t do what’s necessary to bring about this new
birth; it must be done for us.
This lays the obligation or the “must”
upon someone else. That someone is Jesus. He must give us
new birth. Like a mother in labor, Jesus does the work of giving
us new birth, and that without our help. He does the work alone,
and it’s painful and difficult. It required six hours of
agony on the cross. And this is what the Apostle John and the
Holy Spirit mean when they say that God’s children are born of
God. God alone through the labor of His Son, Jesus Christ, is the
Author and Perfecter of our faith. Salvation from beginning to
end is all God’s work and none of ours.
And yet, so many Christians want to focus on what
they did to get themselves born again. I wonder sometimes why
birthday celebrations are all about the one who was born, rather than
the one who gave birth. Birthdays should be a celebration of
mothers and what they went through to give birth to their
children. But we celebrate a child’s birthday as if he or
she were responsible for the fact that they’re here. (I
always like Bill Cosby’s joking remark as a father speaking to
his children, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you
out!”) Similarly, in the case of the new birth, many
Christians want to celebrate what they did to get themselves born
again. So they talk about their faith. I saw a bumper
sticker just this past week that said, “Got faith?”
Now, think about that question for a minute. Where does that
question direct you for the answer? Does it direct you to Jesus
and what He did for you, or does it direct you to yourself and what you
do? You might answer the question by saying, “Well, I have
faith in Jesus crucified for my sins.” And it’s
correct to say this, but that’s not the answer the question
“Got faith?” is looking for. It doesn’t direct
you to look to your Savior, Jesus Christ, for your salvation, but it
directs to look inward, within yourself, to see if you have this faith,
if it’s strong enough, and if you have enough of it, in order to
be born again. It is in fact just another way of reinforcing the
idea that you give yourself new birth, and that by your faith.
And that’s what some Christians mean when they point to
Jesus’ words here, “You must be born again.”
They mean, “You must do something, and that is believe, in order
to get yourself born again.”
But you see how all of this talk about what you must
do makes you the cause of your new birth; it makes you your own
Savior. Rather than focusing you on Christ, this kind of teaching
focuses you on yourself. And how is this going to help you on
those days when your faith is weak? Where are you going to turn
for comfort and assurance then? But faith doesn’t talk
about itself. It doesn’t wonder if it’s around, or if
there’s enough of it, or if it’s strong enough. It
doesn’t focus on anything you do to get yourself born
again. Faith talks about Jesus and looks to Him alone for
salvation. Instead of asking the question “Got
faith?”, the bumper sticker should ask “Got
Jesus?” If you can say “Yes” to that question,
then you’ve got faith.
Take the example from the O.T. that Jesus mentions
here regarding the bronze serpent that Moses erected in the
wilderness. Moses set up this serpent on a pole at God’s
command. He did this because the Israelites were being bitten by
poisonous serpents and dying on account of their murmuring against
God. Realizing that they could not save themselves, they pleaded
with Moses to intercede for them before God for His help. So, God
told Moses to set up this bronze serpent as the cure for their
poisonous bites. By God’s promise anyone who looked at this
bronze serpent when bitten would not die from their snake bites.
But no one could have rightly taken credit for his miraculous recovery
afterwards and said, “Look at me! I got myself cured when I
looked at the bronze snake!” No one could have boasted in
what he had done to “get saved.” The only One they
could have boasted in was God. It was God who provided the means
for their cure. It was God’s Word connected to the bronze
snake that did the healing. Their looking to the snake was simply
the means whereby the cure was received. And faith is the same
thing; it is simply the means whereby the gift of salvation is
received. It is not something that we do to get ourselves saved,
otherwise we’d be our own saviors. The Apostle Paul even
tells us that faith itself is a gift to us from God, a gift that comes
by hearing the word about Christ. So faith doesn’t focus on
faith or anything that it’s done to get born again. Like
the Israelites in the O.T. it looks to Jesus Christ on the cross for
salvation. Faith talks about Him and only Him. We
don’t boast in our faith; we boast in our Savior.
He’s the One to whom God’s promise of salvation is
connected. He’s our Savior, not us or our faith.
He’s the One who’s given us new birth by way of water and
the Spirit. We haven’t gotten ourselves born again.
And here reminding ourselves of our Baptism helps us
out as well. Most of you were baptized when you were just a
baby. Did you choose to be baptized? Or did someone else
bring you to the font? And when you were baptized, who was doing
the baptizing? You or God? Even if you were baptized when
you were older and did choose to be baptized, it still wasn’t you
who was baptizing yourself. It was God. It was His Name
that He was putting on you. It was His promise that He was giving
you. It was the blood of His Son that was washing away your
sins. And it was with Jesus and His righteousness with which He
was clothing you. God was running the whole show; He was doing
all the verbs.
He was doing all the verbs, because you
couldn’t. There’s no way that you can or could have
contributed in the least to your salvation and gotten yourself born
again, because you had been bitten with the poison of sin and were dead
in your trespasses. It was for this reason that Jesus said,
“You must be born again.” You were born into this
world “of the flesh,” as Jesus says here. To be born
of the flesh is to be born in sin, to be an enemy of God, to be a
citizen of the kingdom of the devil, to be spiritually dead, unable to
save yourself. Jesus says that in order to enter into the kingdom
of God, you must be born again. The only way this can happen is
if Jesus gives you this new birth. He gave you this new birth
when He baptized you and gave you the faith to believe His Word.
It was in your Baptism that you were born of water and the
Spirit. There Jesus gave you eternal life, He pulled you out of
the kingdom of the devil and transferred you into His kingdom, He
reconciled you to God and cleansed you from all unrighteousness with
His blood, and He gave you His Spirit. He did all the verbs, just
as He lived in perfect obedience to His Father’s will for you,
overcame the temptations of the devil for you, and died on the cross
for you.
Jesus did all these things, because by you had to be
born again, in order to enter into God’s kingdom. Born of
the flesh as you were into this world you were on your way to
hell. But God loved you too much to allow you to remain in your
unbelief and perish. So, out of His love for you He sent His Son
to suffer God’s judgment and wrath for you on the cross, so that
through faith in Him you might not perish, but have eternal life.
Jesus took the “must do” upon Himself and accomplished
everything necessary for your salvation. It’s only by
rejecting His finished work that you keep yourself from His
salvation. It’s only by declining His gifts that you keep
yourself from being given new birth.
So, what is it that we’re to do? If
Jesus has taken care of the “must does” for us, what must
we do? Maybe the better question is, “What do we get to
do?” We get to rejoice in our Savior and the gifts and new
birth that He has given us. We have a Savior who has laid down
His life for our sins, taken it up again, and given us new birth by way
of water and the Spirit. We’ve been reconciled to God, we
have the forgiveness of our sins, and we look forward to the
resurrection of the body and the life everlasting to come in the
kingdom of God. And through our obedience to His Word, living in
faith towards Him and in love towards our neighbor, we give Him glory,
honor, and praise. Now that’s faith talking.
That’s Jesus. Amen.