Born Again

[Below are the live stream videos of today's worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, along with the message prepared for the day.]





John 3:1-17

​​”The law says, 'Do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, 'Believe in this,' and everything is already done.” 

With these words, Martin Luther describes the two ways in which God speaks and interacts with us. 

First, God speaks His Law to condemn us in our sin. 

God’s Law shows us that we are sinners who merit eternal condemnation for our sinful natures and sinful actions. 

God’s Word says of us, “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:29-32)

Of course, we all know God’s Law. We’re to love God and neighbor, worship God alone, love God’s Word, do and think only good things about our parents, presidents, and neighbors, and build others up, not tear them down. We do know God’s Law, His will for us. 

But people like us and everyone else who has ever walked on this planet–except for one–could be taught God’s Law continuously from dawn to dusk every single day of our lives and still not do God’s Law. In His Law, God says, “Do this” and because of who we are, it never gets done.

And that’s a problem because, as the apostle Paul reminds us in God’s Word, “...wrongdoers [literally, he says here, “unrighteous ones”] will not inherit the kingdom of God…” (1 Corinthians 6:9) 

To be righteous means to keep God’s Law perfectly. And righteousness is the baseline requirement for having life with God, now and in eternity. Yet, when God tells us to obey His righteous Law, it never gets done. 

What are we to do?

That was a question that occupied a man named Nicodemus a lot. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. The Pharisees lived under the misplaced confidence that they (and we) could behave righteously, do God’s Law, and so deserve life with God, life beyond the grave. 

Part of the Pharisees’ misplaced confidence resided in how they twisted God’s Law. Jesus once condemned them, for example, for teaching that people could get around God’s command to honor their parents by telling their parents that whatever money they would otherwise spend on their parents, they would instead spend on God. No wonder Jesus told the Pharisees, “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” (Mark 7:8-13)

The Pharisees, including Nicodemus, grew up believing that righteousness was about what human beings do. But they also gave themselves little escape clauses, humanly-created fine print to God’s Law meant to cover and deny the stench of human sin with the perfume of fake obedience. 

When a Pharisee asked about God’s Law, “What are we to do?” they were really asking, “What is the bare minimum we can get away with doing and still be considered righteous?” When they hit the low threshold of their own preferred version of righteousness, they let all the world know how good they were!

Nicodemus, with his confidence in his own righteous capacity to obey God’s Law was, in some ways, no closer to God than the modern-day atheist who thinks he can be a good person. Anyone who thinks they can rise above their sinful nature or if they’re inclined to believe in God, make themselves acceptable to heaven, is deluding themselves.

I believe this was just beginning to dawn on Nicodemus when he visited Jesus that night. He’d been living in darkness. In Jesus, he began to see a sliver of the One the Bible calls, “The true light that gives light to everyone…” (John 1:9) Because of Jesus, Nicodemus was starting to see that the Law hadn’t and never could make him righteous. 

And so, this member of the Sanhedrin goes to see Jesus. But soon, the teacher of the Law becomes the student of the One he already calls rabbi. Jesus tells Nicodemus, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3)

Now, Nicodemus should have heard these words of Jesus as the second of the two ways God speaks and interacts with us. Nicodemus should have heard that God saves us from sin, death, and darkness not by the things we do, but by what God does for us. Here, Jesus is telling Nicodemus, “There is a way to righteousness–to acceptability to God–that has nothing to do with rules or laws.” It’s about being born again–or born from above.

The image of birth itself which Jesus uses should tell Nicodemus that being ‘born again” has nothing to do with what we do or what we decide. 

Being right with God is nothing like what a high school classmate of mine described to decades ago when she told, “I decided to be born again.” Now, that's a silly statement on the face of it when you consider it!

When we are born is not a decision made by children when they are born. We are born when we are born. 

Just so, we are born again when God’s Word comes to claim us and it’s only by the power of that Word that we come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. 

Nicodemus hears Jesus’ words and wonders what he can do, what he must do, to be born again, as though he could be both the baby and the obstetrician at his rebirth. 

Nicodemus wants Jesus to give him a guidebook so that he can get busy obeying a new law. “How can someone be born when they are old?” he asks. (John 3:4)

Jesus clarifies matters for Nicodemus. 

Referencing Baptism, the Christian sacrament that infants and children have undoubtedly undergone since the first Christian Pentecost ten days after the crucified and risen Jesus ascended into heaven, Jesus says, “...no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5) 

Baptism, the apostle Paul tells us elsewhere, is like circumcision, the rite every eight-day-old Jewish boy underwent to initiate his life with God. 

Our lives with Christ are meant to be initiated in Baptism. That’s what’s what will happen to Sofia and Leo today and will happen to Alina in less than two weeks. 

But even if, as sometimes happens, because our God is a big God out to free all of us from the condemnation of sin and death, God’s grace comes to us before we’re baptized, we’re still not saved by what we do or what we decide. Our salvation is still not our doing!

We apprehend Christ’s victory over sin and death for us by faith. And even our faith is His gift to us! It’s all God’s work. 

As Paul tells us in Ephesians: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2:8) 

Our call from day to day is to turn in trust away from our sin, including our sinful reliance on our own goodness or good deeds, and turn to Christ Who died and rose to shield us in His righteousness.

Jesus’ words to Nicodemus are His words to you again today: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:16-17) 

“The law says, 'Do this,' and it is never done. Grace says, 'Believe in this,' and everything is already done.” 

God’s Law condemns us. 

But God’s Gospel saves us. 

Friends, you can trust in what Christ has already done for you to make you righteous, fit for life with God, now and forever. Amen

[Below are pictures from today's Baptisms at Living Water.]

Holy Baptism (Back to Basics: Revisiting the Catechism, Part 4)

[This week's online Midweek Lenten worship from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, focuses was on Holy Baptism, part of our series, Back to the Basics: Revisiting the Catechism. Below is the video and the text of the message.]



In Holy Baptism, God saves us from sin, death, and separation from God. 

This is what God’s Word teaches us in 1 Peter. Recalling the global flood of Noah’s day, Peter says, “only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water [the water of the flood] symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ…” (1 Peter 3:20-21)

Some Christians, confronted by the words of Jesus’ apostle, shake their heads in disbelief. “Wait a minute,” they say. “Baptism saves us? Don’t I have to do something? Don’t I have to decide to follow Jesus? ” 

Listen: Scripture teaches that all human beings are born with sinful natures (Psalm 51:5). 

Ephesians 2:3 tells us that, “we were by nature deserving of wrath.” 

I would have an infinitely greater chance of deciding to look like Matthew McConnaughey than I have of deciding to be saved or deciding to follow Jesus. 

If you were suddenly dumped into the Pacific Ocean, your capacity to yell for help, swim, or even cling to a piece of sinking flotsam could only take you so far. You could not save yourself! 

In Baptism, it’s God Who does the deciding and God has decided through Christ to save the baptized. 

At least that’s what God’s Word teaches.

So, Baptism is life-saving, life-changing stuff! Jesus tells Nicodemus in John, chapter 3: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again…[and] Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:3, 5)

In Holy Baptism, God remakes us as human beings. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “... if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” 

When God’s Word and His Holy Spirit assault chaos, including those born into the chaos of sin, new life happens. 

This has always been so! 

In Genesis 1, the Spirit moved over the waters of chaos and brought the universe into being. 

At the beginning of His earthly ministry, Jesus went to the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptizer. “When all the people were being baptized, Jesus was baptized too. [the Bible tells us] And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” (Luke 3:21-22) 

This is what happens when we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God opens His kingdom to us and He sends us the Holy Spirit, the One Whose word brings the benefits of Jesus’ death and resurrection to us and we become children of God.

But how, Luther asks in the Catechism, can water do such great things? “It is not the water [the Catechism says] that does these things, but the Word connected with the water and our faith which relies on that Word. For without the Word of God it is simply water and not Baptism. But when connected with the Word of God it is a Baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of regeneration in the Holy Spirit.” 

Luther then quotes Paul’s New Testament letter to Titus: “[God] saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life. This is a trustworthy saying.” (Titus 3:5-8a)

In Holy Baptism, God’s saving Word about Jesus comes to us and remains with us, tenaciously refusing to leave us or give up on us even when we turn away from Him, when we stop worshiping God with His people, even when we cease to believe in Him. 

God will not force the baptized to believe in Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

But, through the indelible commitment that God makes to us when we are baptized, He will keep bringing His saving Word to us so that we might believe in Jesus and be saved. 

This is what happened to me. I spurned God and claimed atheism as my religion for ten years. But God kept pointing me back to Jesus. God refused to give up on the commitment to be my Father and Lord and Savior that He made when I was born from above at the Baptismal font!  

Holy Baptism is the saving Word of God, embodied in the element of water. Just as I had no control over when I was born, I really have no control over when I am born anew in Holy Baptism. If we are baptized as infants, we cannot be unborn even if I walk away from God. And if a person is baptized as an adult, it will still be God Who calls them out of the darkness of sin and death into the light of His loving grace and will cause them to crave Holy Baptism. (In The Large Caetchism, Luther says that if a person comes to faith without having been yet baptized, they will "not despise" the sacrament!)

In the New Testament book of Acts, we read accounts both of individual adults being baptized after coming to faith in Jesus and of whole households, including the children, being baptized. 

In the entire New Testament, nobody says, “Before you can be baptized, you have to understand things.” 

And it doesn't say, “Before you are baptized, you have to reach a certain age.” 

Instead, the apostle Paul compares Holy Baptism to circumcision, the Jewish rite by which boys eight days old, were initiated into the faith. This happened long before they could know Who God is, long before they could understand the faith.

The evidence suggests that because God wants to give us new life and unleash His saving Word in people as soon as possible that the early Church baptized infants and children. They took Jesus’ words seriously, as we do, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:24)

In Holy Baptism, God gives all the baptized a share in Jesus’ victory over sin and death. On this point, Luther quotes Romans 6:4: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

As good Lutherans, we know that we can only be saved by grace through faith in Christ. 

That leaves the question of whether, like the man thrown overboard in the Pacific Ocean, we will stop striving and struggling and trust in Christ. 

And how do we do that? 

We don’t. We don't do anything!

The God Who comes to us in Holy Baptism sends us His Spirit to empower us to believe. “...no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit,” 1 Corinthians 12:3 reminds us. 

And the God Who comes to us in Holy Baptism keeps sending the baptized His saving Word: “...faith comes from hearing the message [that is, the Good News of Jesus], and the message is heard through the word about Christ,” Romans 10:17 teaches.

The Small Catechism reminds us that Christ has commissioned His Church to baptize. “...go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus commands us, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” (Matthew 28:19) 

It also reminds us that Jesus tells us why we need to baptize. In Mark 16:16, Jesus says, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” 

However God creates faith in Christ within us, we are saved. If you've already been baptized, it is Holy Baptism that is the primary engine by which God moves us toward faith. And if you've come to faith without baptism, you will surely want to be baptized, a holy desire God will create within you. (As He did in the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts.)

Jesus commands us to baptize so that people who cannot decide to follow Him by the power of their own wills may be reborn and so that, by the power of the Holy Spirit unleashed in our lives each day, we will come to saving belief in Jesus and we will be sustained in that belief. 

That’s why Holy Baptism is so important. 

Our series ends next week with a look at Holy Communion.

Jesus: The Light of God for Our Darkness

[This message was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday.]

John 3:1-18

A man I know lost his wife at a young age. It was devastating for him. 

We lived in the same city at the time and I did my best to be there for him. There were times though when I prayed for him that I wondered whether the darkness that enveloped his life would ever go away. 

We both later moved and largely lost touch with each other. 

But then, unexpectedly, I ran into him at a conference. I could hardly believe it. The darkness in his life had given way to the undeniable light of God’s love given to believers in Jesus Christ even in a world that can be tragically dark.

As followers--disciples--of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, we are as prone as anybody else to fall into the darkness that can fill our lives as human beings: the darkness of sin and doubt that lead to things like self-pity, fear, the denial of realities we don’t want to face, and the demonizing of those with whom we disagree. 

Of Jesus, we confess with the apostle John: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5) 

And yet, we can often be like the first-century world--Jewish and Roman--that nailed Jesus to a cross, of which John writes, “...though the world was made through [Christ], the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 1:10)

Why is that? Why did the world reject Jesus? Why is the first impulse of every human being to reject Jesus or our need for Him?

Jesus tells us the answer to those questions in John 3:19: “This is the verdict [He says of the human race]: Light has come into the world [Jesus has come into the world], but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” 

When we are honest, we must admit that we do prefer darkness. We wouldn’t say so overtly, but there are parts of ourselves that we like to keep tucked away in the darkness, places that we think are out of God’s sight. 

But it’s no good. To God, Jesus says, “...there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” (Luke 8:17)

Our Gospel lesson for this morning, John 3:1-18, tells us that a teacher of the Jewish religion, Nicodemus, went to see Jesus...at night...a time when it would be less likely that his peers or the peons he was supposed to be qualified to teach could see him. 

You see, by the time Nicodemus makes his visit to Jesus, associating with Jesus was starting to be suspicious, even dangerous, stuff. 

If you wanted to have others’ respect...if you wanted to get ahead in the world, you didn’t have anything to do with Jesus. 

Isn’t that still true today? 

How often have you wanted to tell a friend living in darkness about Jesus but kept quiet? 

How often have you wanted to pray with someone in Jesus’ name when you were in a public place but didn’t offer for fear that people might think you weird? 

How often have you wanted to tell people at the office that a decision being contemplated is more filled with the darkness of sin than with the light of God’s love, but clammed up? 

Then you know why Nicodemus visited Jesus at night. 

He knew that Jesus wasn’t just some preacher, that there was something more to Jesus than that. Still, Nicodemus wanted no one else to see Him fraternizing with Jesus.

How often do we justify dwelling in the shadows, hiding our faith from others, hiding our lives from God, by saying that faith is a private matter or that we don’t want to offend others? If Jesus is our Savior, our faith is not a private matter. It is a deeply public matter. 

After Jesus had died, risen, and ascended back into heaven, the apostles Peter and John told temple leaders who had ordered them to never again speak about Jesus, “...we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard." (Acts 4:20) They refused to conceal Jesus, the light of the world, from others!

So, in our lesson for this morning, we go with Nicodemus to Jesus under the cover of darkness. Even in the dark though, Jesus sees Nicodemus for the man cowering in the darkness he truly is. Nicodemus, Jesus sees, is a man afraid of being seen by his friends, of losing his position, of having his self-righteous religious belief exposed by Jesus, to seek out Jesus. 

So, Jesus tells him, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” (John 3:3) 

The word translated as again that John uses to quote Jesus here is anothen in the Greek in which John wrote his gospel. It can mean again, but it also means above. And, as is typical of John, it’s safe to say that he has both meanings in mind here. 

• We must be born again if we’re to have life in God’s kingdom. We are born sinners. The sinner must die to sin and rise to newness of life through repentance and faith in Jesus. 
• We must also be born from above. It’s God Who gives us new life. We have no control over it. And in the final analysis, when we are reborn matters less than that we are reborn. Listen: Even if you don’t have your birth certificate, your existence proves that you were born. Just so, the fact that you can confess that Jesus is your Lord, tells you that even if you don’t remember the time or the place it happened, Jesus has given you new life, you are born again, born from above.

Jesus underscores that being born again is God’s work and not ours when He tells the incredulous Nicodemus: “...no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” (John 3:5) 

Your salvation, your born again life, your birth from above, is God’s work. 

It’s a gift that came to you when you were baptized when the Holy Spirit moved over the waters of Holy Baptism and you were made God’s child. 

Just as you had no control over when your parents conceived you, you had no control over when the Spirit moved over your baptismal waters to give you new life with God. 

This is true even if you were baptized in later childhood or adulthood. Only the Holy Spirit would impel you to believe in Jesus and want to be baptized at that point. 

After the lay evangelist Philip explained the good news of new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Jesus, an Ethiopian eunuch spied a desert wadi and asked Philip, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" (Acts 8:36) 

It was the Holy Spirit who caused that man to be born from above, born again, not his own decision, not his ethnicity, not reason, not emotion, not an experience, not his parents. 

“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” Jesus tells Nicodemus in our Gospel lesson. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8) 

Left to our own inborn devices and impulses, we will always choose darkness, choose life without God, which is death, over life with God. 

We are so mired in ourselves, in our inborn desire to exercise power over our own lives, that we wouldn’t even think to turn to God. The desire we inherit from Adam and Eve--to 'be like God'--is integral to our characters and personalities. 

But when the gospel--the good news of new life for all who entrust themselves to the crucified and risen Jesus--comes to us, the Holy Spirit batters away at our defenses. 

He tears down the walled cities we erect around our hearts, minds, and wills. 

He floods our lives with light so that we first, see our need of God’s forgiveness and grace, and second, see Christ not just as the light of the world, but as the way to eternal life with God. 

Jesus becomes our light and we confess that what Jesus says of Himself is true: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

In the Bible’s most famous verse, Jesus tells Nicodemus today, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) 

Friends, if you believe in Jesus, imperfect though you may be, imperfect though your faith may be, you have been born from above. 

The Holy Spirit has done His work in you, creating faith in Christ within you. 

So, no more quaking in fear. 

No more hiding in the dark. 

Live in the light of God’s love given through Jesus, because all who can confess their faith in Jesus belong to the Kingdom of God. 

You belong to Jesus now and forever. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

[The photo above shows sunrise on an ocean body. It's a NASA satellite image. Jesus is the Light Who banishes the darkness of sin and death for all who believe in Him.]