No One Can See
Pastor Zach Pummill • January 10, 2021
Sermon Overview
JOHN 3:1–15
No one can even see the kingdom unless they are born again. This statement from Jesus launches Nicodemus on a journey of faith where he is moved from confidence to confusion to Christ. We too take that same journey again and again as we move through this life of faith, where we lose confidence in what we bring to the table and begin to trust in Christ.
Sermon Transcript
Good morning. This side's alive, this side, you guys are...easy morning to be sleepy. But friends I welcome you this morning whether you're part of this church family, or just a part of the larger body, the larger family of Christ, I welcome you. It's a week which I think we could all use some good news. And I'm glad you're here so that we can hear the gospel through the story of Nicodemus.
And today we are beginning a new sermon series that we've titled, "No One Can." No one can. It's a bit of a weird title absolutely, but it really just comes from the teaching of Jesus. All throughout his ministry, Jesus has a number of these exclusive statements that he begins with those three words: no one can. He says, "No one can see, no one can enter, no one can come unto me, no one can take." And there are so many more. And each week in this series we'll look at one of these exclusive statements from Jesus. And the first one, if you saw it in our passage this morning, is that no one can see the kingdom. And also its phrased as no one can enter the kingdom. And it comes to us in this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus.
And it introduces Nicodemus to us he's a big deal. He's a Pharisee but it also tells us that he's a ruler of the Jews, which means that he was a part of the authoritative body called the Sanhedrin. He's an extraordinarily educated man. He has incredibly high status. He's reached the highest level of influence that one could possibly reach in ancient Israelite culture. He's respected, educated, and privileged but he's also completely unaware, because he has no idea what he's about to walk into in this conversation. He's about to have his life turned upside down and in the end, this conversation will result, in Nicodemus giving all of that up and leaving that life behind. This is a moment of life change for Nicodemus.
And so have you ever experienced a moment where you realize that what you thought was true actually wasn't? Have you ever experienced a moment where you realized that what you thought you knew you didn't really know? I know I have, on so many different occasions and I know how disruptive those moments can be and the ways in which after them, life really never looks the same. Life changes forever.
So I vividly remember how betrayed and how lost I felt when a friend informed me that professional wrestling was fake. It was a couple of years ago, I remember like it was yesterday. But I remember thinking, "How could it be fake? His name is Ultimate Warrior. You know, like, look at that, this is good versus evil here! How can these things be?" But alas, my Saturday mornings changed forever.
And I remember entering into college and I went into the Chemical Engineering program. Why? I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to go into the space program. But when I got to college, I very quickly realized the humbling reality that I am not nearly as smart as I thought I was. I was definitely not smart enough to go up against all of the 4.0 GPAs, all of those PhDs that apply to the program. And my 'C' in Organic Chemistry was a wake-up call as it threw my hopes and dreams in a dumpster fire. So my life changed and I thought I'll go into Mechanical Engineering instead. And so I did. And little did I know I was filling out the paperwork to switch majors, that I was actually being set up for another one of these moments.
Because when I switched my major, I met some Christian friends, great friends, friends still to this day. Closest friends. And we had developed a relationship over a couple of months. And I remember one night in particular, it was about 2 am where we were talking about faith and theology, solving the world's problems as college students are prone to do in the early hours of the morning after a Taco Bell run. We were talking about faith, theology the Bible and Jesus. And they started talking about the faith in a way that I had never heard before. It started roughing me up. I started getting a little bit heated. I turned it into a little bit of an argument. We started going back and forth. I kept getting more and more frustrated. And then David Boyd read Ephesians 2:8-10 to me. And I didn't have an answer for him. I did not have a single answer for those verses. And I remember it made me feel ashamed. It made me feel embarrassed, because here I was somebody that was raised in church. I had it all figured out at 20 years old, I was a hothead and yet I was rendered completely speechless. I felt embarrassed and I felt exposed and so I just stood up and I just yelled as I walked out the door, I said, "You know what, Dave, I guess I'd just like to think that I took part in my own salvation!" And I slammed the door and I walked out.
And yet I spent the next two months of my life in complete spiritual despair. I absolutely thought I had lost my faith. Those verses made me realize that everything I thought I knew, I didn't know. And if that's true, then everything that I thought leading up to that point, I had to reevaluate at all. I had never heard that before. And the funny thing is in the moment, I thought I'd lost my faith. But all these years later, I look back on that and I almost have to laugh because that wasn't true at all. Now I realize that's when my faith began, was in those very moments.
And I realized this week that I could actually tell the story of my life, through these very kinds of moments, where what I thought I knew, I realized I didn't actually know. And all the ways in which that has shaped the course and direction of my life. And this passage is that very moment for Nicodemus. He comes to Jesus, very cautiously, because he comes by night. He comes under the cover of darkness in secret. He's curious, he wants to engage and interact with Jesus, yet for a man in his position, he has to be careful because to be seen with Jesus like this people might get the wrong idea.
And since Nicodemus is a Pharisee, I think we have to recognize the fact that we often default to when a Pharisee kind of enters into the passage, we immediately think of him as the bad guy. Go get him Jesus! But that's not the case in this story. In order for us to get the most out of this passage and understand I want to invite you to think about Nicodemus as a friend, as though you went there with him that night. Look upon him with compassion. We need to see him as just like us, as one of us because we need to see this moment as the beginning of his journey of faith. And if we can understand his journey of faith, then we can understand what our journey of faith looks like.
So Nicodemus comes by night. He strolls into this life-changing moment with confidence, not arrogance, but he comes confidently. He thinks that he knows what he has seen and what he has witnessed in Jesus's ministry. So he says, "Rabbi, we've seen what you have done. And we know that you were from God because nobody could do the things that you do unless God is with him." He thinks he knows who Jesus is.
But then Jesus responds in verse 3. And he says, "Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born again, you cannot even see the kingdom of God." Now that's quite the response. "Hey, Jesus we know that you are from God. What you're doing is extraordinary." Fist bump. Jesus says, "No, Nicodemus. You can't even see the kingdom God, unless you are born again." He goes to work right away on Nicodemus.
And when Jesus uses the word 'again', there's a bit of confusion to it that Nicodemus would have experienced. Why? Because that word 'again' is actually a double entendre, it can mean two things at once. It can mean both 'again', or it can mean 'from above.' You must be born again, you must be born from above. The broader scope of what Jesus is saying is that he means both of those things at the same time, which is part of why his answer is so confusing. But Nicodemus, when he hears Jesus say that, he interprets it in a more literal, narrow fashion. And you hear it in his question because he asked, "How can a man enter back into his mother's womb and be born again?" You can hear it in his response. "Jesus, what are you talking about? That's crazy."
And Jesus goes further and he says, "Nicodemus, unless one is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." What He's saying here is He's using language that Nicodemus would have known well. This language of water and spirit are all throughout the Old Testament. And they're very closely related to one another. And we see them in this concentrated way in Ezekiel 36. And it's in that passage that God gives Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones. Just picture that in your mind, a valley filled with skeletons, lifeless skeletons that represent the spiritual condition of God's people.
And God tells Ezekiel that one day, he is going to come and bring water to his people that offers cleansing and renewal. And he will breathe on His people once again and they will come to life. The lifeless bones will become living people. He's giving a glimpse to Ezekiel, of this coming kingdom and how the Spirit will be that breath of God, that recreates, that re-animates, that regenerates God's people. If that, if you are one who professes the name of Christ, that has happened to you. That's an extraordinarily unseen reality. He says unless the Spirit comes and makes you alive, then you can't even see the kingdom of heaven, because skeletons don't have eyes.
The only way this can happen is that you must be reborn in spirit, by the Spirit of God.
And then Jesus goes even further. He says, "But there's a caveat. There's one more thing. The Spirit is like the wind, this life giving power blows wherever it wishes, you can see its effects but you don't know where it comes from, you don't know where it's going. You can't see it and you most certainly cannot control it. So if you want to enter into this kingdom of God, this is something that you cannot do, it's something that can only be done to you."
Now in saying all of this, what has Jesus just done?
Jesus is doing more than giving Nicodemus a little late night theology lesson, because what Jesus is telling Nicodemus would have had massive implications on his life, to the point where everything he said, just up-ended everything that Nicodemus thought was true. How so?
Well Nicodemus is a Pharisee. So he believes that as an Israelite, he was a child of Abraham. And as a child of Abraham, he was a part of the family of God, which very simply just means that, Nicodemus thought he was a member of the kingdom of God already. But Jesus says no. Being a part of this kingdom has nothing to do with the family you were born into. Entrance into this kingdom is not born of the flesh.
And since Nicodemus thought he was already a part of the kingdom, he also thought that because of that he could be even more special. How so? Well, he could follow the works of the law. And through those works of the law he could gain God's favor. And as a Pharisee, it meant that he prided himself on his obedience to the law and that obedience to the law, secured the love and favor of God. But Jesus just said, no, not at all. Entrance into this kingdom is not about the family you were born into, nor is it about anything that you have done, nor is it about any of your good works. Entrance into this kingdom, can only happen when the Spirit comes to you and makes you alive. It has nothing to do with your last name or anything that you've done.
In only a couple of sentences, what has Jesus done?
He has completely re-shifted entrance into this kingdom from being something that Nicodemus could do, to being something that only God can accomplish. And all he did was use one chapter from the very book that Nicodemus thought he had mastery over.
Now, it's easy to preach on this passage and then we just kind of end it right there and think that we've really kind of done the legwork of this passage. We can end it there, as though Jesus is simply just doing this little doctrinal lesson on how salvation operates. And we say, "See, salvation can only come from God." And yes, that's true. We believe that, but there's so much more going on here, because what do you do with that? What do you do with that? What do you do with this teaching from Jesus that says you can only enter into this kingdom if the Spirit makes you alive? Are you alive? How do you know?
This is more than just simply some facts, and it's easy to preach the passage and end there. But instead, I want us to look a little bit deeper. I want us to ask, what is Jesus doing with Nicodemus? I want you to see how Jesus just assaulted everything that Nicodemus knew about life because he just pulled the rugs out from everything that Nicodemus had built his life upon. And so how silly to think that like, Nicodemus would just walk away from this saying, "Oh Okay. Well, now that I understand that one must be born again, therefore I'm born again." Hardly. This is more than just about getting the right information because think about this, how does Nicodemus trust in the words of Jesus even just a little bit and go back to the same life? Doing the same things, offering the same sacrifices, obedience to the same laws, teaching the same things that he did, he can't.
Because if he believes in the words of Jesus, then he has to realize that what he thought was true, was not true at all. And that changed everything. And that brings us to a very important inescapable reality of Jesus's teaching. Which is that if it doesn't challenge something, if it doesn't confront something, if it doesn't require something to change in your life, then we haven't really understood or believed in the teaching of Jesus. Because what does Nicodemus do with this? How does he walk away from this conversation? Don't you think that at some point, even if he just trusted in the words of Jesus, just a little bit, then at some level he would have thought, "Then how can I enter into the kingdom? How can I be a part of this work? If there's nothing that I can do, then what hope do I have? How can this be true of me?"
And you can hear that in his next question because he just asked Jesus, "How can these things be?" How can these things be? How then is it even possible to enter this kingdom? How can I know? And that's a different Nicodemus than we saw show up at the very beginning, isn't it? Nicodemus who thought he knew what was going on, now we see Nicodemus brought to a different place. Nicodemus the confident one has now been brought to a place of complete and utter confusion. And that's exactly where Jesus wants him. He doesn't want Nicodemus just to walk away, with a new set of facts. He's doing something far greater than that.
I said earlier that we need to see this as the beginning of a journey of faith for Nicodemus and the way that Jesus deals with Nicodemus, helps us understand our own journey of faith and what that journey of faith actually looks like and how it operates. Because if we look with a broader perspective and step back and look at what Jesus has done here, then you actually begin to recognize and see this movement where Jesus leads Nicodemus from a place of confidence to confusion. From confidence to confusion and he disorients him. He turns his world upside down, he has Nicodemus drinking from a fire hydrant. And Nicodemus has no idea to the point now where he's asking these new questions, Jesus has brought him from this place of confidence to confusion. And He brings Nicodemus to a place where he has even more questions than when he began, why? Well, that's exactly where Jesus wants him.
Nicodemus asked, "How can these things be? How can I participate in this kingdom? How can this new life comes to me when there's nothing that I can do to make it happen?" But here's the thing, the reality is is that it is happening, right in front him. The process of the Spirit awakening him, is happening in this moment. He is being reborn through this movement in his heart where he's now lost confidence and he's brought to this place of confusion. Where the truth has now unlocked, all sorts of implication and meaning for his life to the point where he is left to search and wonder, and out of that confusion he brings his questions to Jesus. And that is exactly where Jesus wants Nicodemus. And that's exactly where He wants you.
It's through this story, we see a picture of the blueprint of this journey of faith. We see how being reborn of water and the Spirit, occurs through this process of being moved from confidence to confusion. Because part of being reborn is losing confidence in what you think you know. Part of being reborn is losing confidence in what you think you bring to the table, losing confidence in what you think you've done. And when we lose confidence in those things, and the legs are knocked out from underneath those things, we become confused. It's disorienting, it makes us reevaluate life and we begin to search.
And in that search, we begin to ask questions that try to understand how the teaching of Jesus can be true, not just out there somewhere but for me here now. How can these things be? And so how can you know that the Spirit that you can't see, you can't control and you can't coerce, is blowing upon your life? It's when Jesus brings you to that place of confusion and you have questions and that's a good place to be.
Some of you come from a tradition or a past that you weren't allowed to ask questions, some of the most common things I hear from people. They come from a past where questions about God and His work weren't allowed, they were off limits. You were made to believe that real faith means that, you don't have questions. Real faith means that there's no struggle with doubt, real faith means that you have to lay those questions aside and just "just believe". What's the subtext of that? The subtext is that if you do have questions, then you don't really have faith. And my friends, if that is you, then I just want to say, as bluntly as I possibly can, that is patently completely unbiblical. Categorically.
Your questions and your confusion are not a lack of faith, they are the very evidence of it. And Jesus is working in your heart, that's why you have them. And there's a part of you that struggled with that. You might say, "You know, what about like Romans 9 where it says, yeah but "the clay is not supposed to say to the potter why did you create me?" The context of that is about declaring God in the wrong, where you shake your fist at God and say, "How dare you, I know better." But is that what's going on here? No, Nicodemus isn't doing that.
He has been brought to a point of complete vexation where he gives voice to his confusion and gives voice to that vexation in his questions. Why? Because he wants to understand. He wants to know more. How can these things be? And it was Jesus that brought him to this place. If you have many questions from the life of faith, you have to completely ignore the biblical story. You see these questions all throughout the Bible, question after question because every serious disciple has questions. You see it over and over again. Why? Because God moves every disciple from a place of confidence to confusion. And in that confusion, that's when you cry out to God with those very questions, that's when faith starts seeking understanding when things don't make sense and following God is hard.
Moses, "How am I supposed to lead these people and go speak to Pharaoh? I stutter."
David, "How long will you hide your face from me?"
Jeremiah, "How long will you let this happen to your people?"
John the Baptist, "Are you really who you say you are?"
Mary and Martha, "Where were you? Why weren't you here?"
Paul, "Why won't you remove this thorn from my flesh?"
Jesus, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Even Jesus had questions. And seeing these questions, you have to recognize that to God they are precious and they are beautiful because these are the questions of faith. These are the questions that seek understanding and seek more of God of how His promises not are untrue, but how are they true for me right now, here in this situation and in these circumstances? I want to know more. Why would God ever reject one who comes with those kinds of questions?
Far too often, we think of the life of faith simply as a moment of decision and then we just believe in a set of facts after that. And we can easily forget, that the life of faith is this constant rhythm of losing confidence in ourselves and losing confidence in our own ability and losing confidence in what we think we know and understand. That's not just a one-time thing, that's something that happens over and over and over throughout the life of faith. And it's in those moments where Jesus is speaking to you, moving you from that place of confidence to confusion. And in that confusion, you have questions.
You have questions when you thought you understood marriage and then you got married. Amen. You have questions when you thought you understood the cost of love until love cost too much. You thought you understood forgiveness and friendship until you were betrayed. You thought you understood poverty, until you walked the streets of the Kalighat. You thought you understood parenting but then you have no clue how to relate to your child. You're confident that hard work would open doors of opportunity for you, but you kept getting passed up for that promotion over and over and over again. You were confident that you would grow old until you got that diagnosis. You were confident that you understood how the world worked until March of 2020.
And in that confusion, you have questions. God, why did this happen? God, why did you allow this? Why didn't you do anything? Why did you take them from me? Why won't you change this? Why are you silent? What are you doing in me through all of this?
I don't want the answers, "Well God's sovereign. It's just God's providence." No, I want more than that. I want a deep satisfying encounter with that kind of Spirit because it's these type of questions that want more of God, not less. It's these types of questions that are the questions of faith, because they reject simple answers that we sometimes so easily give. Your questions are precious.
I had a professor in seminary that Marq and I both had. His name is Dr. McCartney. He taught us the New Testament and he told us a story about a student of his, that at the end of his seminary career or a seminary education, he was walking down the hall and he stopped off in Dr. McCartney's office and he just knocked on the door and he said, "Hey I just want you to know, I'm getting ready to graduate but I wanted to thank you. You've just been so influential and important to me in my education. So thank you." Dr. McCartney said, "Why don't you come on and sit down." And Dr. McCartney asked him, he said, "Well, as you're graduating how do you look back on the last four years of your seminary experience?" And the student just opened up and he was honest. And he said, "Honestly, I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated." Dr. McCartney said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, I'm frustrated because I came into seminary thinking I would just have so many more answers. And yet here I am at the end of seminary and all I have is more questions." And then Dr. McCartney he said, "That's amazing, praise God for that." And the student's like, "I don't understand." Dr. McCartney said, "Son, seminary was never about teaching you all the right answers. Seminary was about teaching you how to ask the right questions. Because if you have all the right answers then you won't think that there's anything left for you to learn. And if there's nothing that you have left to learn, then you aren't ready to be a disciple. Your questions are a gift."
And friends so are yours. Do not fear your questions because it's in those questions that Jesus is actually at work in you because he's saving you from placing confidence in all the wrong things that don't work. And he is undergoing this process by which he is making you alive and into something new. And those places can be scary because we don't like those questions because God just doesn't operate with answers as soon as we ask the question. He does make us search.
And the very context of the confusion we were talking about is disorienting to life. And so it can be scary to move towards Jesus in those places. It's oftentimes, I'll be just find something else to take confidence in, instead of moving toward deeper answers. But you don't have to be afraid of that confusion and those questions because Jesus will not leave you in your confusion because he did not leave Nicodemus in his. He had one more thing to tell him.
Nicodemus asked him, "How can these things be?" And Jesus tells him one more thing. He says, "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the son of man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him, may have eternal life." Just like when that plague of venomous snakes came upon Israel in the wilderness and Moses had to lift up the serpent on the pole and all anybody had to do that was poisoned, is look at that serpent and they would live. And so you too Nicodemus, you have to look for me, lifted up on the cross. You have to find me, you have to watch me. Look to me and you will find the life that you seek. You have to see me lifted up and only then will you find your answers.
And it's that statement that Jesus teaches us one more thing about this journey of faith. It doesn't end with confusion. He moves us in the same way he did Nicodemus, He moves us from confidence to confusion to Christ.
And you have the opportunity to be like Nicodemus, because what happened to him, where he continued to look to Jesus in those questions? John keeps telling us a little bit about Nicodemus and his journey of faith, he comes by night in John 3, but then in John 7 he stood up for Jesus in front of the entire Sanhedrin. And he said, "No, we cannot falsely try him, let's give him a chance to come and to make His case."
Why? Most likely, because he wanted them to hear what he heard. And faith is starting to break into his heart. He's getting a little bit braver and he is being reborn.
And then in John 19, Nicodemus, we see him once again, he comes not by night, but he comes right in the middle of the day for everybody to see. He comes to take the dead body of Jesus off the cross. He is one of two people that took Him down and he brings spices and myrrh and he personally tends to the burial of his God. He saw the son of man lifted high and it changed his life. And he evidently saw something, something slammed into his heart when that happened because he just chose the disgrace of Christ over the privilege of this world. And what did that feel like? What happened in his heart? What realizations did he have? I don't know. That was his journey.
But I know this, he lost his job, he lost his status, he lost his entire life, and evidently that was okay because he found life itself, when he gazed at the Son of Man lifted up.
So what are your questions this morning? And where are you taking them? What will you realize and come to know if you choose to seek Jesus no matter what, and you continue to pursue Him in your confusion, in your questions? I don't know that either. That's your journey, but I know this, you have to look to him and don't stop. You have to pray, you have to read his promises. You have to wrestle with him like Jacob all night and say, "I won't let you go until you bless me." You have to struggle. You have to talk to him. You have to watch him. You have to ask him. You have to follow him. You don't just walk away, regurgitating, that one must be born again and assume that it has happened to you because in that he gives Nicodemus and you the greatest invitation you will ever have to come and find life.
It may not be the answers you were looking for, but whatever answers you do get will be better than the ones you originally came wanting him to give you.
Have you ever had a moment where you realized everything you thought was true, actually wasn't? I certainly hope so. Because that is the Spirit of God blowing across your face. That's Jesus drawing you unto himself so that you may be reborn and have life.
And who could possibly take that away from you? No one can.
Let's pray.
