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You must be born again

John 3: 1 – 15

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 05 Jun, 2005

WHEN I was in Theological College, we asked for a new ordination service, because what we were doing was very 1940s English. The President and General Superintendent were horrified.

  They were sure that we students would use beatnik language. They didn’t know about hippies yet. They gave examples of what they couldn’t tolerate — and it was pure Jack Kerouac, 1950s slang.

 I didn‘t know whether to laugh or be offended. I was 41, married, a working pastor with five years of theological training, and they thought we wouldn‘t know what was appropriate for an ordination service.

 The class got me to do the rewrite. I used a modern Bible instead of the King James. I shortened the sentences and rearranged some of the words.

 On the night, the wording was exactly as I had written it — except for one thing. Where I had used the expression, “born again”, they had replaced it with the Latin equivalent, “regenerate”.

 Why were they so afraid of using a Biblical expression?

You must be born again.

Everyone knows that.

  But is the Christian Church — even the denominations which most comfortably talk about being born again — becoming an unregenerate body? Are the churches filling with people who know the words, but have never allowed the Spirit of God to begin transforming them? Paul wrote,

2TI 3:1 But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. 2 People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God-- 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them.

  Is it fear of exposure which makes some people fear the words,

You must be born again?

  What does it mean to be born again? It means a thorough–going paradigm shift. Here’s what that means.

  If you asked a scientist in around 1700 what makes a poker get hot in the fire, he would have said, “It’s phlogiston. That’s a hot, colourless fluid in fires that gets into the iron.”

  But something wasn’t quite right. A poker could get white hot and it wasn’t any heavier than when it was cold.

 “That’s because phlogiston is pretty thin stuff; it has to be runny, to soak into metal,” says the scientist. But runny isn‘t the same thing as weightless, is it?

  Then an engineer comes and asks the scientist, “I’ve been making a gun barrel. I have to bore it out, but it’s getting so hot that the metal is softening. Where does the phlogiston come from? I don’t have a fire!”

  “Phlogiston must exist,” says the scientist. “We’ll understand it better when someone finds a way to trap some in a bottle.”

 But, bit by bit, more evidence came in until, finally, scientists had to admit that there really was no such thing as phlogiston.

 A different theory was needed.

  Here’s the amazing fact. Many scientists like you to think that, as soon as they see evidence, they change their minds. But the fact is that they generally resist adopting new theories. It took years of overwhelming proof before most scientists gave up on phlogiston.

 We are all like that. It’s not just scientists.

  Flanders and Swann did a comedy routine about a cannibal banquet.

 All the cannibals are sitting around having a great time, and eating up, and the chief notices that his son hasn’t touched his food.

 “What’s up, lad?” he asks. “Off your food?”

  “No, dad,” says the son.

 “What’s the matter, then?” the father asks.

  “It’s just that... I sort of... well, eating people is wrong!”

 The old chief is flabbergasted. “Eating people is wrong? You might as well say — I don’t know — that killing people is wrong, or flaying people alive is wrong. It’s like saying that it’s wrong to rob the neighbouring tribe, or that it’s wrong to rape and pillage!”

 Of course,the next thing is that the chief is worried about what people will think when the story gets out. Will they think he hasn’t brought his family up with proper respect for tradition? Will they think he is a strong chief to their faces, but a wimp at home?

 The old man’s mind is racing in terror.

  But isn’t that exactly what happens? We hate to change. We resist new ideas. We want to stay just as we are, and we struggle against anything that doesn’t fit our preconceptions.

  Thomas S Kühn wrote a book, The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, which looks at exactly how people change their minds. He says that it requires what he calls a paradigm shift. He says that we don’t ever change our minds gradually and smoothly. We always struggle against change until the evidence becomes overwhelming and we surrender to the new way of looking at things.

  Whether we are scientists working on the nature of heat, or cannibals suddenly waking up to the humanity of their enemies, or even whether we are human beings suddenly waking up to the reality of God’s love, we experience a paradigm shift.

  We have a picture of the nature of reality. We have a model for how the world works, and suddenly we are forced to abandon that model and adopt a new model.

  And that is exactly what Jesus is talking about in this conversation with the Jewish leader, Nicodemus. He says, ”It isn’t enough adjust the details. Nothing but a radical change of mind and change of direction will do.”

  Jesus tells Nicodemus,

Unless a person is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of Heaven.

  Without a paradigm shift, we can’t grasp what the Kingdom of God is really all about. Until we let ourselves see things from a totally different perspective, the world will block our view of God’s Kingdom.

 And Nicodemus immediately showed that he did not grasp the Kingdom of God, because he said,

How can these things be? Can a person re-enter his mother’s womb and be born a second time?

  He could think only in terms of the natural world. He had no idea of the radical nature of Jesus’ message.

  When I hear Christians carrying on about clothing styles or the food people eat or the drinks they choose to drink, when I hear Christians chucking wobblies about injecting rooms, and showing no compassion for addicts, I say to myself,“These people can’t see God’s Kingdom.”

  And that raises the question: are they truly born again?

  Maybe it sounds sacreligious to compare being born again with paradigm shifts such as scientists or cannibals might experience.

 The thing is that God invented paradigm shifts, and sometimes he lets scientists or cannibals or a whole range of other people experience them too. They get a glimpse of what being born again is like when they have those “Aha!” moments.

  But, as Jesus points out, being a Christian is a whole of life thing.

 If we want to be Christians we need to abandon the things which hold us back and give ourselves up to what will take us forwards.

  Didn’t Jesus say,

If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself daily, take up his cross and follow me.?

  What are the steps? Letting go of my will and my desires, surrendering to the costly way of the cross, and going Jesus’ way.

 When John Wesley really began to impact on the world, it was when he let himself preach in the open air. It would be a bit like the Greek Orthodox Priest preaching on the streets — something you just couldn’t have imagined in those days. Wesley was a High Church Anglican priest, and he was totally opposed to enthusiasm and undignified behaviour.

 He thought it was a vile practice to take preaching outside the church, the kind of thing that heretics might do. It was like making the church the same as a prostitute touting her wares on a street corner.

  There were only two things that persuaded him to overcome his revulsion. First, one of his friends, George Whitefield, had tried doing it and people had been converted. Second, Wesley knew that there were so few Anglican Churches outside the main old cities that people just wouldn’t hear unless someone went and preached to them. So that was what he did.

  Wesley had to have a conversion experience on that May night in 1742, when his heart was “...strangely warmed...” But he had to go on being converted; he had to continue surrendering his own will in order to follow the will of Jesus Christ. Being born again had real consequences in his life.

  Telemachus had to jump in with both feet when he leapt into the Roman arena and protested against the blood–thirsty Gladiatorial combat. It cost him his life, but his priority was Christ.

  You’ve heard of the two Moravian missionaries who went to Jamaica and found that the slaves ignored them. They sold themselves into slavery so that they could incarnate Christ to those needy men and women. That was what being born again meant to them. It was one thing to believe in Jesus, but the reality hit when they had to give up their lives and their freedom so as to bring some freedom and life to the enslaved.

 I am disturbed by the changes I am seeing in the contemporary church. More people claim to be "born again", but they are also opting for what the world offers.

  Where is the radical change that Jesus speaks about? Where are the people who turn the world upside down?

 “Blessed are the peacemakers,” said Jesus — yet there are supposedly Christian websites which support unjust wars.

 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness” — but how easy it is, to hunger for righteousness in others and tolerate unrighteousness in ourselves!

 “Blessed are they who are persecuted” — but don’t we camouflage ourselves so the world can’t see that we are different? Or we choose not to smoke or not to drink, yet say nothing about Jesus.

  “Blessed are the meek” — How could anyone claim to be Christian, yet love to use and abuse power to control and exploit the poor.

  Where are the born again? Are we it?

AM 5:24 But let justice roll on like a river,

righteousness like a never-failing stream!

  The world needs to see Christians who are real Christians.

  If you are tempted to say, ”There are too many hypocrites in the church, so I will have nothing to do with Christ,” let me tell you that you belong in a church of hypocrites, because hypocrites are just like you — pretending to be better than they are. You can’t cop out in that way.

  But I also want us all to think. I want us all to work out where we stand. Have we really made that paradigm shift? Are we truly working to a different model — Christ’s model?

  You can’t just tidy up the old way of seeing things. That way, you never get to see the ultimate reality, the reality of God’s Kingdom. You have to start afresh. You have to be born again.

  A man came to see me one day. He wanted to discuss the gospel with me. He had been to see Peter Dixon from the Church of Christ, and Peter told him that the gospel was not about doing better or living a more moral life, but it was about being born again.

  So he came to me to check. When he told me he wanted to know what I thought a Christian was, I asked him how he would answer the question, so I knew what he did and didn’t know. He told me about living a more moral life, and I told him about being born again through faith in Jesus.

 He said that was what Peter Dixon had told him, too.

  I said that I wasn‘t surprised.

  As Jesus said,

You must be born again.

  Renovations aren’t enough. Rebuilding is the only solution.

 Too often, we have been content to teach people that they have done enough by coming to the front, by shaking the preacher’s hand, by reciting a prayer.

 It’s not enough.

  Peter tells the hearers on the Day of Pentecost to repent and be baptised in the name of Jesus for the remission of sins. Repeatedly, the New Testament declares salvation as the consequence of repentance and the kind of faith that results in action. I cast off my old view of God, of myself, of the world. I resolve to trust Jesus enough to be baptised, enough to entrust myself to his church, enough to begin ministering in his name, enough to develop and express a passion for justice, for righteousness, for covenant love.

  I turn, I choose.

  The old time evangelists invited people to come forward and indicate their desire to seek the Lord.

  That’s a better start.

  God says,

But if [from there] you seek the LORD your God, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.

  We can’t force God’s hand — he is in control. But we can make ourselves available. We can choose to stop thinking of ourselves as good people. We can choose to stop thinking we can save ourselves by doing good. We can choose to stop thinking that Jesus was just a great teacher. We can choose to start thinking of ourselves as sinners, choose to start trusting that Jesus died for us and his death saves us, choose to start seeing Jesus as the one who upholds the universe with his powerful hand, yet made himself nothing in order to bring us life.

  If Jesus is showing you your need to be born again and to undergo a thorough shift in perspective, declare it! Tell me, or Bruce or Neph or Divina or John that you are going to seek the Lord until he finds you!

 He will bless you as you do so.

© Peter R. Green 2005. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)