5 EASTER 06 B

Today we celebrate Mother’s day. Many of us have learned a lot from our mothers. For example: Mothers teach us about foresight: "Make sure you wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident."
• Mothers teach us about logic: "If you fall out of that tree and break your neck, don’t come crying to me."
• Mothers teach us about maturity: "Eat your vegetables or you’ll never grow up."
• Mothers teach us about religion: "You better pray that comes out of the carpet."
• Mothers teach us about time travel: "If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!"
• Mothers teach us about contradictions: "Shut your mouth and eat your dinner!"
• Mothers teach us about contortionism: "Will you look at the dirt on the back of your neck?"
• Mothers teach us about perseverance: "You are going to sit here until you eat every last piece of that broccoli."
• Mothers teach us about genetics: "You’re just like your father."
• Mothers teach us about the weather: "It looks like a tornado swept through your room."
• Mothers teach us about the circle of life: "I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."

Today we honor our mothers for so many things, but specifically we honor our mothers for giving birth to us. If we think about the miracle of birth we can’t help but marvel at the pain of childbirth, the courage of the mother, and the new life that comes out of her. When a child is born we often think simply of the physical body that comes out of the mother. From a biblical perspective there is much more that comes forth at the moment a child is born. The Bible talks about three things that arrive at birth, a body, a soul and a spirit.

Each one of us here was born with the ability to exist physically, to think rationally, and to act at the direction of our inner nature or spirit. The Bible also tells us that we have inherited from our parents a sinful human nature. This nature is an inward spirit moving us to act in certain ways. Often that spirit moves us to act in ways that displease God or are in conflict with His commandments.

There are times because of our behavior when our mothers have wished we could be born all over again, to start over. Actually, Jesus addressed this very problem on one occasion when he was speaking to a Pharisee named Nicodemus in John chapter 3. Jesus talked about being born again.

Have you ever been asked the question, “Are you born again?” or “Are you a born-again Christian?” This later question rose to prominence in the late 1970s. While the phrase has gained in popularity there are still multitudes of average churchgoers happily testifying that they are Christians, but who don’t have a clue what this idea of being born again really means. Some have been prone to say, “Well, that’s all right for the Baptists or the Fundamentalists, but we are Episcopalians!” Some view the born again movement as strange and slightly fanatical.

Many of these people are probably much like Nicodemus, a Jewish rabbi who came to visit Jesus late one evening. He was a devout man, a man of letters, power, and political prestige; he had come to the Carpenter with this in mind, “I’ve heard You are a teacher come from God; could you teach me about Him?” In His response, Jesus did not stop to debate the nature of the universe, or seek to prove God’s existence. He went to the heart of the matter, saying, “Unless you are born again (or born from above) you can never get into the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus was as astonished at this statement as any religious person today could be. Nicodemus thought he was already a part of the kingdom of God because of his moral life and his attempts to follow all of the rules of the Law. He exclaimed, “Born again? What do you mean? How can an old man like myself go back into his mother’s womb and be born a second time?

Many modern-day believers are just like that. Many of them are astonished at the statement that they must be born again. They can understand going to church, trying to live a good moral life, paying their bills, obeying the law, or giving money to charity. However, when you begin to talk about being born again as being essential to real Christianity, they stop and stare at you like a deer in the headlights.

To some people, preachers who preach “you must be born again” are good people, but a little off above the collar – perfectly harmless, but they have a slight case of religious insanity.

What did Jesus mean when He said to Nicodemus, “You must be born again?” After all, He said it to a man who didn’t know he needed it. This new birth experience is not for a few elite people who happen to have found a new or different way to God. This new birth is the only way to God. There is only one door to heaven, and that is by way of being born again. It is a must; it is not optional equipment.

Jesus explained to Nicodemus that the new birth to which He referred was not a physical rebirth; it was not like reincarnation. Rather, it was a spiritual rebirth. It means a change in a person’s inner being, a change of our basic nature, the beginning of the process of changing our sinful human nature into a holy spiritual nature. Jesus was saying that we all need a rebirth in our characters, and only God can do that. That new nature is described as being born of the Spirit of God.

In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus was preparing His disciples for his impending death by saying that He would soon go away, but He would not leave them without someone who will represent Him in their lives. That someone is described as another Counselor or Comforter, the Spirit of truth, whom people who are not followers of Christ are not able to receive until they are spiritually reborn. The Holy Spirit, Jesus said, had been living with God’s people. We know from the Old Testament that the Holy Spirit had come upon particular people, at particular times, for particular tasks. Jesus was now saying that the Holy Spirit was not just going to be with them, He was going to live inside of them. That Holy Spirit would begin to effect a change in the nature and character of the believer. The Holy Spirit was given to the disciples shortly before Jesus ascended into heaven when, in John 20 Jesus breathed on them and said “receive the Holy Spirit.” Just as God breathed into Adam the breath of physical life in the beginning, giving Adam a human spirit, so now Jesus was breathing into his disciples the spiritual breath of new life, giving them the Holy Spirit to mingle with their human spirits.

They became spiritually reborn, born again at that moment. They had a new spiritual nature to coexist with their sinful human nature. That spiritual nature would begin to do battle with the sinful human nature and would begin to change it more and more into the likeness of Christ’s holy nature.

Perhaps you are wondering why this is so important. Well, it has to do with what’s really wrong with you and me and our world and what will really cure our ills. We have seen the large increase in self-help books, psychiatrists, psychologists, drug prevention programs, sex education programs, and the like do virtually nothing to change our essential moral nature, which governs our relationships with our fellow human beings. Despite advances in technology and science we still continue to steal, murder, lie, cheat, and grab. Little of non-religious human nature has changed since the beginning of time. The newspaper accounts of rape, murder, brutality, and runaway crime indicate that somewhere we have failed.

Many sociologists think all that is needed is to change our environment. They say sin is external, not internal. Man is all right; it is his environment that is wrong. They say sin is imaginary, and man is simply a product of bad circumstances. Thus, a juvenile delinquent is merely underprivileged; a robber is simply maladjusted, the murderer had an abusive parent, and on it goes. In this philosophy we have abandoned the idea of sin and individual responsibility, and blame everything but the offender. Therefore, all that is wrong with the world can be explained in terms of bad housing, slums, racial discrimination, poverty, unemployment, bad parenting, and so on, while the real offender – man himself – remains untouched and unchanged. Of course, some fo these bad circumstances may have added to the condition of the individual, but ultimately sin is to blame.

Perhaps the sociologists to whom I just referred are wrong. The Bible teaches us that we all need a new nature to change our inner being, our inner spirit, because that inner nature is sinful, selfish, and godless. Our problem is not where we are but what we are. I do what I do because I am what I am. I commit sins because I am a sinner at heart. There fore, to stop me from sinning, my heart must be changed. That is why Jesus said, “You must be born again of the Spirit.”

When we make a conscious decision to acknowledge and turn away from our sins, and accept Jesus as our Savior and follow Him as our Lord, whether that be before we are baptized as was the case with the Eunuch, or when we are baptized as in Acts 19, or after baptism as is the case for those infants and young children who could have been baptized in Acts 16 and 1 Cor. 1, we are born again of the Spirit, whether we feel like it or not. Jesus promised that He would send His Holy Spirit to live inside of us. He will cleanse us of our sins and give us a new nature – a Christian nature.

As we allow the Holy Spirit to begin to change us, we find that our priorities begin to change. We begin to be less and less motivated by a selfish spirit. We find that we are more aware of the commandments of God and start growing in our ability to obey those commandments to love God and love our neighbor.

John R. W. Stott, preacher, evangelist once wrote, "Love is not the finish of the law (in the sense that it dispenses with it); love is the fulfillment of the law (in the sense that it obeys it). What the New Testament says about the law and love is not 'if you love you can break the law', but 'if you love you will keep it'."

This is not a new morality, or trying to do better, or turning over a new leaf, it is a new birth. It is something God does in us, not something we do for Him. It is divine regeneration, not human reformation.

A pastor once had a member who always had the same comment after the sermon, You sure told ‘em today, Preacher! This dear fellow was the most faithful member, always attending every time the church doors were open. But, somehow he always seemed to think the sermon was for everyone else, and not for him. The pastor prepared a sermon to speak to the issue.
One day the pastor’s opportunity came in the form of a terrible snowstorm. Nobody showed up except for – you guessed it – Brother Told ‘EM was the only member of the congregation. The pastor hauled out his sermon and pulled every trigger available. At the end of the two-man worship hour, guess what was heard going out the door? “Preacher, if they’d-a-been here you sure woulda’ told ‘em this time!...”

This sermon is not for someone else, it is for you and me.

If you don’t know whether you have been born again, whether you have this new nature within you, if you don’t know if the Holy Spirit is living inside you, then I would urge you to invite Jesus to come live inside of you through His Holy Spirit and to give you a whole new start in life.