December 28

December 28, 2008

The Gift of Eternal Life
a sermon on John 3.1-16
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama
When we baptize a baby, as we are doing today, there is always the danger that this child will someday be unable to pinpoint the moment of his or her spiritual birth. If you grow up outside the church, and you come to faith later on, and you profess your faith and are baptized, it is easy to know the time and place when you were born into the kingdom of God. And if you are baptized as an infant, and you grow up in the church, it is still possible to nail down the moment and describe it: a moment when you realize you do believe in Christ and you make a commitment to him. Yet it is also possible that a young person will grow up among us, always aware of God’s love, always trusting God’s promises, always loved by and in love with Jesus; and this person may as a young adult be perfectly confident in Christ—and fully committed—yet be unable to point to anything like a moment of conversion, a moment it all came together, a moment of spiritual birth.
But is this a danger? I think not. I think such a Christian is like a person who does not know her birthday. Imagine you were born into a culture where such things don’t matter—or the records were lost—or somehow you came to be an adult but you did not know the day, or even precisely the year, you were born—physically I mean. That may tax your imagination, but there are people who do not know their birthday, and through history certainly a lot of people. If you did not know your birthday, you would still be alive. You would know that you had been born, even if you did not know when. It is possible to be born spiritually like that, knowing with certainly that God’s grace has seized you and made you his own, even though you can never remember a time when that wasn’t the case.
Or you may be like me. I was not baptized as an infant, but as a child. I grew up Baptist and had to be old enough to ask for baptism myself. Yet I grew up in church, always knowing God’s love. And I point back, not to one particular moment, but to about four. One is the first time I learned about the cross. Another is my baptism. Another is when as a teen I committed my life to Christ. (We didn’t have confirmation class, but think of that sort of experience, leading to that kind of commitment.) And finally when I wrestled with my faith in college. When was I spiritually born? I’d be hard pressed to say. God’s grace was working from before my physical birth, and we trust he is working still because I am yet a long way from where he wants me to be. But I know his grace has claimed me and made me his own.
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God’s grace has claimed John Edward Hunter. We baptize him today, but do not imagine that what we do will change God’s mind about him, as if God were against him until this moment, but ever afterward God will be for him. God is for him now. God always has been. Long before he was born, before his parents and grandparents and generations of his ancestors were born, Christ died for him. There is nothing lacking in Christ’s sacrifice for John. We baptize John today. All that remains is for God to bring him to faith and bring him home.
Let’s make an assumption about our scripture reading this morning. I call it an assumption because most people don’t read the passage this way. For some reason we assume the opposite, but for the sake of argument let us assume that Nicodemus was not a dim-witted idiot. Let us assume he was a wise, intelligent, and cautiously prudent man, worthy of the position of authority he held. What little we know about him in scripture confirms this assumption. If he seems a bit slow in this passage, maybe the problem is not his mind but the difficulty of what Jesus was saying.
Jesus tells him that in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, you must be born—and the Greek word here is very important because it has a double meaning. The word is anothen. It can mean either “again” or “from above.” Of course it can mean both at the same time, as it does on the lips of Jesus. Jesus tells Nicodemus, “You must be born again/born from above.” Nicodemus latches onto only one meaning, and he fails to grasp even that. We shouldn’t blame him, though. Everything he has been taught points him in the wrong direction.
For Nicodemus, a first century Jew, being born into the right family was important. Abraham’s descendants are the people of God. Paul would later claim that belonging to Abraham’s family depends not on physical descent but on having faith like Abraham’s. That would, I think, be a new and difficult idea for Nicodemus. Yes, he would say, a Gentile can convert and come into Abraham’s family. So it was not exclusively a matter of biology. Yet the normal way into the covenant people of God was birth. And if you were born into that community, you were part of God’s people and heir to the promises.
Jesus says no. Physical birth is one thing. Jesus talks of being born “out of water and spirit.” We hear water and think right away of baptism, and we are not wrong to do so. But Nicodemus would not have thought that, and I think Jesus meant, “You must be born both physically (out of water) and spiritually.” Jesus went on to say, “What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of Spirit is spirit.” So physical birth is one thing, but spiritual birth is another. In order to enter the kingdom of God you must be born spiritually.
Spiritual birth into eternal life is what Jesus is talking about in this passage. That’s why we need both meanings of anothen. Spiritual birth is a second birth. You are born again. Not physically, of course, which was the mistake Nicodemus made. You are born anew
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as a new creation in Christ. The other meaning, and the more important one, is “from above.” You are born spiritually “from above.” It is God’s doing. It is grace.
If we had read the Gospel of John straight through to this point, we would still have ringing in our ears this line from chapter 1: “To all who received him [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” [vv. 12-13].
Nicodemus learned spiritual birth is what really counts. We knew that already. Yet it is a good reminder as we baptize John. Just because he is born into the church does not mean he will necessarily come to faith. We can’t guarantee that he will, but we can do two things, and we absolutely must do them. First, we must love him, teach him, set an example, and live the faith before him in a compelling way. Woe to us if this little one finds nothing attractive in Jesus because we reflect our Lord so poorly! Second, we must pray for him and trust God to work in him. Spiritual birth is God’s doing. That’s the lesson for us. It is also the reason we baptize infants, in order to testify to the primacy of God’s grace. Nothing we can do for John or John can do for himself will make him worthy of God’s love or the gift of eternal life. Only God’s grace gives him these gifts. And they are gifts. Eternal life is a gift God gives us. We have no right to it, no claim, no entitlement. God gives it to us because he wants to and because Christ died for us.
Spiritual birth into eternal life comes from above. It is God’s doing and God’s gift. It comes to us by faith, yet in a sense even faith is God’s work in us, not just something we do. There is a right response to the grace of God: baptism is part of it, so is faith. So are repentance and giving your whole life, your whole self, to Jesus Christ. He demands a commitment from you. “Follow me,” he invites us. “Take up your cross and follow me.” And he expects us to do just that. But when he uses the image of birth to describe the beginning of our new life in him, he alerts us to the fact that we when we make that commitment we are not giving spiritual birth to ourselves. That doesn’t even make sense! How could a person give birth to herself? We are born anew from above. Your profession of faith, your commitment to Christ—these are like the first breaths a baby takes when he is born. They are that first cry, that first gasp of air—in the case of spiritual birth, breathing in the pneuma, the breath, the Spirit of God. Pneuma is a Greek work that can mean breath or wind or Spirit. Jesus plays with its meaning in our scripture reading as well. You are born anew from above, and being born means starting to breathe. And in spiritual birth, what you breathe is the Holy Spirit of God.
So you have something to do, oh yes. Jesus has never tolerated spiritual slackers. In a way, an apathetic Christian is the worst of all possible creatures. To have tasted the grace of God, to have felt his love, and then to live as if he doesn’t matter very much—this is worse than being a pagan. It’s like being born then choosing to waste away rather than grow. We have something to do. But we do not give birth to ourselves. We are born anew, from above, by the will of God.
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What we are born into is eternal life. I had a friend once who was a Christian, but he had some reservations about this “eternal life” business. Even if you had everything you could possibly want—even if you are happy—isn’t eternity too long? Wouldn’t you eventually get bored? We know that people who have it all here on earth are usually not happy. After about a 100 trillion years, wouldn’t even the best life get wearisome?
I think my friend was on to something. If you or I were to go on living forever just as we are now, I don’t think it would take more than a couple of thousand years for existence to become a burden. The good news is, eternal life does not mean we just go on living forever as we are now—or that after we pass through the doorway of death we emerge on the other side pretty much like we are now, then we go on living forever. Eternal life means much more than this. It means nothing less than sharing God’s life. We are reborn spiritually into God’s own life.
Do you think God gets bored? I suspect that is impossible. You can do something God cannot. You can be bored. I don’t think God can be bored. Why not? Because God is love. The Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Father; the Spirit loves the Son and the Father; and so on. Love is an unfailing antidote to boredom.
When we enter the glory God has prepared for us, we will love perfectly, just as he does. And hence no boredom. We will see him as he is, and no one can see God and be bored. God is more than an earthquake, a lightning strike, the rush of a mighty wind.
My point is, this gift of eternal life God gives us is wonderful. Eternal describes not only its duration but also its quality. It is God’s own life we are given to share. At our resurrection, we will be like the risen Jesus is now. No gift compares to this. Our Lord Jesus gave his life for us (on the cross), so that he might share his life with us (the divine life he shares with the Father and the Spirit).
Although the fullness of this new eternal life awaits our resurrection, it actually begins the moment we are reborn spiritually (whether we can pick out that precise moment or not). Life in God. Living with Jesus in me. That’s the essence of eternal life on this side of death. This is the reality baptism points to. Baptism is the signpost. Life in Christ is the reality it points to. All of this is from God. For we are reborn from above—“not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
rev_mauldin@yahoo.com