John 3:1-17
Many of us live our lives based just on the bottom line of things, events and money. Charlie Brown says to his sister Sally, “I’m going to try to sell Christmas wreaths from door to door.” Sally responds, “So you are getting on the ole commercial bandwagon, eh? Going after those big holiday bucks, huh?” Charlie leaves the house to start selling and Sally comes out to the porch and says to him, “Need any help?” Charlie must have decided he needed help because Sally and Snoopy go out door to door trying to make sales for him.
When we look at our ledger book of life on the pages of wants and needs, how do we resolve the issues of the difference between our wants and needs? The decisions we make about these wants and needs will determine how we use our freedom. We need to use our freedoms in such a way that we have the capacity to experience joy in what God gives us to do.
In the scripture lesson in John, Jesus meets a man named Nicodemus. The man Nicodemus was a Jewish religious leader who was a Pharisee. He knew the laws of God from his studies. He had heard Jesus speak and he knew this message was offering him something he did not have. He wanted to meet Jesus. Nicodemus had unanswered spiritual needs in his life. But he was asking himself how it would look if an educated religious leader went to this Jesus for help with his needs. Nicodemus decided that the bottom line for him was to set up a meeting with Jesus. The meeting was set to take place at night so no one would know about him meeting Jesus. Nicodemus said to Jesus, “Rabbi, we all know that God has sent you to teach us. Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you.” Nicodemus is like us. He was living his life his way, but his religion was empty of the joy of being alive. His wants drove him to seek out Jesus. In his life he needed the joy he saw in what Jesus did and said.
Jesus outlined for Nicodemus what he wanted that would meet these spiritual needs. Jesus told him, “I tell you the truth unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Nicodemus did not understand what Jesus was saying about being born again. Jesus gave him the answer to being born again. This would answer his wants and needs in his spiritual life. Jesus tells Nicodemus, and us, “No one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of the water and the spirit.” Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life.
In Nicodemus and our human way of life, we sin. When we awaken to the broken life caused by our sin in the mess we make of our God given life, we want and need a way to begin a new life. The Holy Spirit calls us to repent and seek God’s forgiveness. When we respond to God’s Holy Spirit and power, we come to know the joy and grace of forgiveness. Nicodemus wants to know how the new life is possible. Jesus told him this, “So don’t be surprised when I say you must be born again. The wind blows wherever it wants, just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where is comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the spirit.”
We humans cannot fully understand the power and what the Holy Spirit can do for us. It calls for faith and belief in the God we meet in Jesus. It is in that faith we are given a new spiritual life that changes the way we live our human lives. Our sins make our human lives into a train wreck. In the aloneness and the dark alleys of our lives, we find God’s Spirit working in us and awakens us to our need of a new life born of faith in Jesus.
The new spiritual life is formed by our repentance and God’s forgiveness. In belief we receive God’s life-giving love. Oswald Chambers wrote, “The counterfeit of obedience is a state of mind in which work up occasions to sacrifice yourself. It is a great deal better to fulfill the purpose of God in our life by discerning His will than to perform great acts of self-sacrifice.” In other words, our attempts to be religious is just another one of our counterfeit human plans. Without having God’s love to give us a new changed life, we remain in the dark alley of the world.
Renee Hermanson in her book, “Raspberry Kingdom”, wrote about what God’s love did for her, and us, “There he reveals me to myself and shows me also what I am able through him to become. He speaks to me in a small sign over the kitchen door that says ‘Willing servant, help me do my tasks willing and lovingly.”
It is in God’s love that we find our wants and needs become one. In that love we can spend our life and the tasks given us each day in a joy of being loved by God and belonging in His family.
The new life came out of the heart of God’s love for us. When people believe John 3:16, they know God’s love which gives salvation and a new life. In this new life that love supplies all our wants and needs.
