Born of Above AM Sermon 1.16.11

Events in your life sometimes bring back memories and things that you had forgotten about. When Anna Grace was born this past year it brought back memories of the births of Carlin and Emory. I remember the first time around I was a basket case and was so nervous. I remember Carlin’s thick head of hair and Emory’s almost strawberry blond hair.
There are experiences that I will never forgot. In my limited cultural experience, I had never seen a real live nun. Our children were born in a Catholic hospital in Birmingham and I remember waking up in the middle of the night and there was a nun in my room looking at our new baby. I thought I was in some type of medieval movie for a minute.
I remember waking up with a box of donuts laying on top of me from my preacher. I remember the family and friends were there to celebrate the birth.
What makes those events so special? It is all about the birth of new life. The birth of a child into a family of love where that new child will share in that birth.
Today we are going to talk about birth but not natural birth.
To understand why this idea of spiritual birth is important we need to consider language used today in many Christian circles today. Many times we ask people if they have been saved.
We hear many sermons about salvation and that is an important idea. The term Saved or Salvation has taken on a life of its own in the 20th and 21st century. Jesus used the word SAVED in the sense that we use it today but he used it very rarely.
The terms that Jesus used more than any were the Kingdom of God – that refers to God’s sovereign rule over all and the other term is LIFE – Sometimes just LIFE and sometimes ETERNAL LIFE.
John’s Gospel is sometimes called the Gospel of LIFE because Jesus talks so much about LIFE. We need to understand that when we talk about Salvation that the term LIFE in John’s gospel means the same thing.
So talking about New LIFE or even Rebirth would be the same as being saved in John’s Gospel.
Last week we saw where Jesus used water for His first miracle.
This was water for ritual purity – the precursor to John’s baptism. John did not invent baptism but it was something the Jews did before.
Water and the concept of spiritual purity will run through John’s Gospel-
In John’s Gospel we will be introduced to John who is known as John the Immerser
Christ will be baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist and His baptism will be connected to the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.
We will even witness Christ and His disciples baptizing along with John the Baptist as one can witness at the end of John chapter 3
As we lead into John 3 we will look at a transition that helps make sense of John 3:


John 2:23-25 – Transition that leads to Chapter 3
23 Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name, observing His signs which He was doing. 24 But Jesus, on His part, was not entrusting Himself to them, for He knew all men, 25 and because He did not need anyone to testify concerning man, for He Himself knew what was in man.

Episteuon – John uses this word for belief throughout his gospel –
The people believed in Him because of the signs that He was doing, but He (Jesus) did not believe in them.
Why did Jesus not put his trust in man because He knows what is lacking in human nature.

Man – Antropos – used three times in the next few verses
Remember that in the original there were not chapter divisions, we pick up on this repeated theme of Antropos or Man in Chapter 3

John 3: 1-2
1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews ; 2 this man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher ; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him."

Here we meet a Man – Anthropos- he was like those mentioned in John 2:23-25 in that he believes in the signs that Jesus did.
Human nature fixates on the supernatural. People miss out on what Jesus is preparing us for what we are going to receive.
John wants to introduce us to a gift that is beyond what man can accomplish – A gift from God – Power to become His children

John 1:12-12
12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God

Stage one – We must Receive Him
Stage two – We must believe in His Name
But is that enough? – Can we as human make ourselves children of God?
God has given us the right to become children of God but this work is EXUSIA which is better translated as POWER –
God gives us power to become children of God.
We are purely creatures of God – we are fleshly beings and God is pure spirit – we have the nature of humanity but we are not children of God.
We can receive Him, we can believe Him in our own human faculties- we don’t have the capacity to make myself a child of God.
We are creatures- we are called to be children, but we are creatures- To become children it means we must receive a supernatural grace.
John is presenting Nicodemus as an example of this. Nicodemus has received Jesus, he is believing enough to come to Him at night.
THE THIRD STAGE IS THE IDEA OF SUPERNATURAL GRACE THAT COMES FROM ABOVE
The THIRD STAGE IS THE KEY- John 3 is about this stage three- Jesus brings out this idea of the 3rd stage in John 3:3 with His response to Nicodemus:

John 3:3
3 Jesus answered and said to him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God."

There is belief that is natural and there is faith that is supernatural. Jesus will want to show Nicodemus that these signs lead to something. Not earthly things that we can do in the flesh, but Nicodemus needs something that is from above.
Nicodemus doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.
In coaching we always say that you can deal with parents or administration that just don’t know. You can talk to them and educate them in your sport and the roll of the parent.
The Dangerous ones are the ones that don’t know that they don’t know and you never get through to them the roll of a coach and a roll of a parent.
Nicodemus is in this situation in that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know – He has no idea what Jesus is talking about because he is purely thinking about things from a natural human perspective.
Jesus in John’s Gospel uses PUNS, and this is found in the statement that one must be born from ABOVE – Not again – BUT ABOVE – ANOTHEN is the word.
Puns are something used in many stories and great literature and Jesus will employ these puns all through the Gospel of John.
An example of a modern day pun is the following:
“I used to be a watchmaker. It was a great job because I made my own hours.”
Jesus uses a word play – Unless you are born ANOTHEN you cannot SEE the Kingdom of Heaven. For a Jew not to be able to see the Kingdom is a big deal.
ANOTHEN is a GREEK word that has two meanings – One is temporal or in time which means born again, One is spatial which means that it Is born from above.
TEMPORAL USE – TIME – Born AGAIN
SPATIAL – where it comes from – location of this birth – Born of ABOVE
One could take Jesus as either meaning born again or born of above. This is the beauty of this passage and it will make much more sense to you when you understand what is going on in this discussion.
Nicodemus takes the wrong meaning by asking the question he does.
You will find in this passage that it seems that Nicodemus is confused and he is rightfully so confused.

John 3: 4
4 Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?"

Nicodemus’ question seems to show that he is still locked into his own natural understanding of what is going on.
Nicodemus sees Jesus usage of ANOTHEN as meaning being Born Again whereas Jesus means it BORN OF ABOVE

As a matter of fact in the rest of John’s Gospel where Jesus uses this word ANOTHEN He is translated as FROM ABOVE – John 3:31 and John 19:11, 23
Jesus answer to him is telling,

John 3: 5
5 Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

Jesus combines two ideas together in this verse of being born of water and Spirit. The earliest Christians saw this as a direct reference to baptism.
Some ministers today say that this verse cannot mean baptism because it would give baptism too high a place in the work of one becoming a child of God.
Some say that Jesus’ reference to water in this passage refers to the idea of natural birth- Literally the water breaking in pregnancy. And then the Spirit part of this verse refers to the renewal by the Holy Spirit in a person’s salvation.
There are two problems with this view and they are the following:

1) There was no such understanding in the ancient world of a woman’s water breaking in childbirth – they didn’t even have that type of language. This is projected a modern term onto an ancient text and is a big blunder in Biblical studies.
2) In the original language of this passage there is one preposition that goes for both water and spirit. In the Greek they are glued together and cannot be separated. In the grammar of Jesus water and Spirit birth happen together.
My personal belief is that this passage is talking about baptism. My reasons are because it most naturally fits the context. Nicodemus and the Pharisees have rejected John’s baptism and they need as much as anyone.

This passage is bracketed by baptism passages- the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist and then the baptism of John and Jesus are discussed in the end of this chapter. This passage is surrounded by baptism.

Also, Jesus baptism connected the Holy Spirit with Baptism when the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus in the form of the Dove.
Also, Acts – during the first Gospel Sermon to open the doors to the Church that Christ would establish through His apostles the idea of Baptism and the Holy Spirit are connected in Acts 2:38. The only reason you would not want this verse to not talk about baptism would be because you have a theological problem with baptism having such a high place in the new birth.
Jesus picks up with more Puns in the next section of verses:

John 3: 6-8
6 "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 "Do not be amazed that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' 8 "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going ; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

What is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit- the flesh is the anthropos – It is man and fleshly nature – the Spirit is the Heavenly aspect
FLESH- ANTROPOS – MAN – JESUS KNOWS WHAT IS IN MAN
Pneuma also means wind and is the same word for Spirit.
Jesus is giving another word Play here in John 3 – the Word for Spirit in Greek and the word for wind are the same words, you could interpret Pneuma as Wind or Spirit.
PNEUMA – WIND OR SPIRIT – SAME THING
Just like Anothen could be interpreted as Above or Again.
Jesus begins the sentence with one use of PNEUMA (as the Spirit) and ends the sentence with the other use of PNEUMA meaning WIND.
Until we realize these word plays going on in this passage we sometimes look down on Nicodemus but when we realize how tough Jesus teaching is here we give Nicodemus a little slack.
Jesus drives home his point to Nicodemus about the weakness of the flesh –

John 3: 9-13
9 Nicodemus said to Him, "How can these things be?" 10 Jesus answered and said to him, "Are you the teacher of Israel and do not understand these things ? 11 "Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you do not accept our testimony. 12 "If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things ? 13 "No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven : the Son of Man.

Jesus is giving a statement of fact – You are a ruler of the Jews, you are a Pharisee, you are a scholar but you still can’t figure this out.
Jesus is letting us know that no matter how many natural things we have going for us it doesn’t guarantee spiritual blessing.
Nicodemus had every earthly, natural advantage, but spiritual renewal is the work of God. It will take God’s illumination of Nicodemus for him to understand. It will take God’s work of renewal by the Spirit to open Nicodemus’ eyes.
Jesus is making His point that He is talking about Heavenly things and not earthly things.
Jesus is bringing something that has been present in the Scripture since the beginning. This is found in Genesis-
Adam had the breath of divine life breathed into him at the beginning of the Creation story – Adam had divine life, or supernatural grace.
Adam was more than the noblest of creatures but was one that had the life of God, and had received the grace of Divine adoption.
God tells Adam that if he eats of the forbidden fruit that you will surely Die, Die – in Hebrew double meaning – really strong – literally die the death.
The Serpent contradicts God and tells Adam and Eve that they will not die if they eat the fruit. It seems at first Satan is telling the truth because they don’t drop dead when the eat the fruit.
The Life that God gives Adam is more, this is the Divine life that Adam loses, he dies a spiritual death at this point.
Human nature is intact, we are still creatures but we lose the Divine Grace of sonship with God- God’s family.
The soul had possessed the Holy Spirit, the Divine Life, the Life of Divine Adoption, and all of this was lost in Adam’s sin.
Many of you have seen the movie the Sixth Sense – the little boy named Cole can see dead people. Cole meets a counselor named Malcolm and he tells him in a chilling part of the movie, I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
In John’s Gospel, Jesus walks around and sees dead people. He sees people that don’t even know that they are dead. Nicodemus doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that he is truly dead, and only has natural life. He has lost the blessing and grace of Divine sonship.
Part of the reason God removed the tree of life for one particular reason. If man were able to eat from the tree of life and keep from dying a fleshly, mortal death, there would be not need to be reconciled to God.
Knowing that we are spiritually dead without Christ and the idea that we will die a physical death means that we need to make things right. If we enter into eternity unreconciled to God’s family we will die the worst death of all and that is eternal separation from God.
DEATH- many times we misunderstand the Biblical meaning of death. Death is not just the decay and the ending of our physical body, but death literally means separation.
The first death that we experience is the separation of our bodies from our souls. That is physical death.
In 1846 former president John Quincy Adams suffered a stroke. Although he returned to Congress the following year, his health was clearly failing. Daniel Webster described his last meeting with Adams: "Someone, a friend of his, came in and made particular inquiry of his health. Adams answered, 'I inhabit a weak, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in upon by the storms, and from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.'"
Just as John Quincy Adams understood, the landlords of our bodies does not intent to repair but this is as good as it gets. Our bodies are breaking down and decaying, we are all going to die a physical death unless we are here when Christ returns.
To illustrate the terrible nature of death let me share with you a bit of history that happened not far from here.
The battle of Franklin Tennessee was one of the bloodiest battles in American History.
One place that epitomizes the carnage of this battle is the Carnton Plantation.
The Carnton plantation was built by the Mayor of Nashville Randall McGavock and the plantation stayed in the McGavock family.
Beginning at 4 p.m. on November 30, 1864, the Carnton plantation was witness to one of the bloodiest battles of the entire Civil War.
Everything the McGavock family ever knew was forever changed. The Confederate Army of Tennessee furiously assaulted the Federal army entrenched along the southern edge of Franklin.
The resulting battle, believed to be the bloodiest five hours of the Civil War, involved a massive frontal assault larger than Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg.
The majority of the combat occurred in the dark and at close quarters. The Battle of Franklin lasted barely five hours and led to some 9,500 soldiers being killed, wounded, captured, or counted as missing.
To put that into perspective – Franklin, TN at that time had a population of 2,600 people.
Nearly 7,000 of that number were Confederate troops.
The citizens of Franklin went into their cellars that evening to wait out the fighting and what they saw the next morning shocked them. It was carnage and death beyond belief.
Historians say that it took the citizens of Franklin decades to recover from the death and destruction that haunted their imagination.
Carnton served as the largest field hospital in the area for hundreds of wounded and dying Confederate soldiers.
The name of the plantation proved to be prophetic because the plantation was named for a city in Ireland and the name means ‘city of death’.
After the war the McGavock family had all the bodies of the soldiers exhumed that had been buried in a mass grave. They had the soldiers re-buried with honors in a military graveyard.
This graveyard became the largest privately owned military graveyard in our nation’s history.
An interesting fact about the average confederate soldier is that they put their names inside the uniform on average of seven times. They were terrified about dying and no one knowing who they are.
You see there is something about us that understands the death is not final. There is a part of us that longs for eternity.
Those soldiers feared death just like we do. Death is affront to God’s good creation. Death is not natural.
We see an advanced medical science that has developed to help keep us from dying. Plastic surgeons make a lot of money in trying to make people look young. We don’t like the coming of death.
As a matter of fact we find people in our society fascinated with death as weird or strange. This current vampire craze is strange to many of us. Many of us that are middle aged and older find this current fascination with vampires and this cult that has grown up around the Twilight phenomenon as very odd.
Christ Trampled down death by death.
Our sinfulness is so serious that we have to die and be born anew. We have to be born of above.
ANSWER To our dilemma and Nicodemus’ predicament.
John 3: 14-16
14 "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; 15 so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life. 16 "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
Jesus is recalling a story from Numbers 21 when serpents bit the Israelites because of murmuring and they were dying in mass numbers. Moses was instructed to put a golden serpent on a standard and anyone that looked upon the serpent would live.
The interesting thing about that standard is that it was shaped like a cross.
The image is for us to understand- we have been bitten by the serpent – this serpent is Satan and the death we die is spiritual death.
We are to look to the cross and see Christ lifted up for us. He will be lifted up on the cross, he will be lifted up out of the tomb, and He will be lifted up to Heaven.
Paul tells us that he is crucified with Christ – it is no longer our life but Christ.
Sin is so serious that we must die and be reborn in Christ.
Baptism is a beautiful image of how that works.
We have faith, but just natural faith cannot do it.
We must die to self, God wants to put our old man to death through repentance and when we submit to God- when we come to him with the empty hand of faith God gives us what we cannot do and that is grace.
The work of Jesus on the cross saves us- look to Jesus, put the old man to death, bury that old man in baptism, just as Christ went into the tomb we go into the tomb of water, and through the Spirit we are raised and given new supernatural life.