📖 The Gospel of John — Unit 2: You Must Be Born Again

Introduction — A Ruler Comes by Night

There was a man named Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews — a member of the Sanhedrin, a teacher of Israel. He came to Jesus by night. Perhaps he came at night because he feared what the other rulers would say; perhaps because the night was the only quiet hour a busy man could find; perhaps because he wanted Jesus all to himself. He opened with a compliment: "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him." It was a generous thing to say. But Jesus did not answer the compliment. He went straight past it to the man's deepest need, and what He said must have stunned a ruler of the Jews: "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). Nicodemus had been taught all his life that to be a son of Abraham and to keep the law was enough. In one sentence Jesus tells him it is not enough. You must be born again. Maybe we are confused as Nicodemus was. How can a man know whether he has met the one requirement for entrance into God's heaven?

I. The New Birth Is Supernatural

Our Lord began with something familiar, for birth is a universal experience — every person listening has been born once. The word translated "again" carries a second meaning: "from above." Though every human being has been born naturally on this earth, if he means to see heaven he must be born a second time, a birth that comes down from above.

Let me tell you about the first birth — about my own. For some months I had been, you might say, scuba diving in my mother's womb. Everything was going well; the cord that fed me oxygen was intact; I was content. Then one day the water drained out of the tank and I was forced out of my habitat, grabbed and shaken — and that is how I arrived in this world, exactly as every one of us did. We did not choose that first birth; our parents chose it for us. But Jesus says there is a second birth, and this one is ours to receive. "Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:5) — the water, as I take it, pointing back to that first natural birth, and the Spirit to the second.

Nicodemus stumbled at it, as the natural mind always does. "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" He was thinking of flesh; Jesus was speaking of the Spirit. Here we meet the strange blindness of the sinner: a learned teacher of Israel could not see what a child can receive. The pagans had their imitations of rebirth — the rabbis called a Gentile convert a newborn child; the Greek mystery religions staged it with ceremony and blood — but those were only symbols. The rebirth Jesus means is no symbol and no ceremony. It is supernatural. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, and nothing less than God can accomplish it.

A man without Christ is a lost man. I have a friend whose house sits high in the mountains, and I have learned that the map on my phone simply gives up in that country; more than once I have had to stop and telephone him to find the way. That is the soul without Christ — no map that works, no sure road, no certainty of where the path even goes. Then a Guide appears. The Guide is Christ, and He leads the lost out of the dark and into the life of the new birth.

II. The New Birth Is a Radical Transformation

"That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). Flesh can only ever produce flesh; it cannot lift itself up into the things of God. Only the Spirit can give birth to spirit. Then Jesus reaches for the freest picture He could find: "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8). You cannot command the wind. You cannot see it. But you can hear it in the trees and feel it on your face, and you know it is real by what it does. So it is with the Spirit. We cannot manage Him or schedule Him; we can only open our hearts and receive what He works.

And mark this well, brother: did you think you became a Christian because one day you decided it on your own? You did not. "No one can come to Me," Jesus said, "unless the Father who sent Me draws him." The new birth is His work before it is ever our choice.

I remember my own second birth. I was a boy of eight, under deep conviction during some special services at our church. I went home and talked with my parents and grandparents, and we agreed I was ready. The hard part, in a Baptist church, was walking to the front during the invitation to confess it publicly, and at eight years old I dreaded standing up there alone. I need not have worried — three others walked forward at the same moment. Of all the decisions I have made in the long years since, not one has mattered as much as the one I made at eight.

What happens in that second birth is not a touch-up; it is a transformation from the inside out. Think of the caterpillar — earthbound, slow, bound to the leaf it crawls on. It spins itself into a cocoon, and inside that hidden place something miraculous happens, and what comes out is not a better caterpillar but a creature with wings. So is the man who meets Christ. He does not merely turn over a new leaf; he becomes a new creature. The old nature is put to death, and a new nature, alive to God, is given in its place.

III. The New Birth Is Essential

"You must be born again" (John 3:7). I once heard a woman on a talk show say, "I am a Christian, but not the born-again kind." I do not know what Bible she was reading. Jesus does not offer the new birth as one option on a menu; He lays it down as an absolute: you must. Truth has a way of being dogmatic. Two plus two is four — never three, never five. And so it is here: "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:5).

This is the most important requirement of your life, because there is an appointment none of us will miss. "It is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Amos put it plainly: "Prepare to meet your God" (Amos 4:12). Picture a closed door, and behind it the kingdom of God, and crowds standing before it longing to go in — but the door is locked, and there is only one key. The key is the new birth. Or think of a border: no one crosses into another country without a passport, and the new birth is the passport stamped by heaven. Without it there is no entry.

IV. The Serpent Lifted Up, and the Love of God

Then Jesus, still teaching this ruler by night, took him back to a story Nicodemus knew by heart. In the wilderness the people were dying of serpent bites, and God told Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole; whoever looked at it lived. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:14–15). There it is — the cross, foretold to a midnight visitor. The dying did not have to climb or earn or even understand; they had only to look, and live. So it is with the lifted-up Savior: look to Him and live.

And then comes the verse the whole Bible seems to lean toward: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life" (John 3:16). Hear that word — whoever. Not the worthy, not the Jew only, not the clean — whoever. The door is as wide as the word "whoever." "For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved" (John 3:17). He did not come with a gavel; He came with a cross.

Why, then, do men stay outside? "This is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19). The tragedy is never that the light is too dim; it is that men shut their eyes and love the dark. But the one who comes to the light is born of God. So I leave you where Jesus left Nicodemus — with the necessity and the offer in one breath. You must be born again; and whoever will come, may. Have you been born a second time? Not your church, not your heritage, not your good intentions — you. If the Spirit is stirring even now, do not marvel; open your heart and receive the gift of God.

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