John 3:3-15 (You Must Be Born Again)

The Shepherd's Church

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throughout the most recent sermon series that we've been going through, which was Christmas Child, we've been pointing to all different kinds of various births that are scattered in the

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Old Testament that all point to the single birth that is going to change the fabric of human history, and that is the

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Lord Jesus Christ, who came over 2 ,000 years ago, born of a virgin's womb to save his sinful people from their sins, but he came for more than just forgiving his people of their sins.

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We talked about that last week. The gospel and its primary focus is to glorify God. A consequence of the glory of God is that is that Christ forgives his people of their sins, and it has so much more than that, so much more that God wants to do through us through this thing called the new birth, so much more that he is going to do as a result of the new birth, and that's what

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I want us to talk about today. As we close out this series talking about all of these different births, the thing that I realized that we hadn't talked about yet was the new birth.

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What does it mean for us as Christians to be born again? So today I want us to take just a brief moment as we close out this year and as we prepare for the next year to really revel in what

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God has done for us and who he's made us as new creations, newly birthed people, because if we don't understand that, we can't really understand very much at all about the

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Christian life. So today, that's all I want us to accomplish. I want us to look at the new birth,

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I want us to understand it, look at what its benefits are, and then when we finish I want us to walk out of here into 2022 ready to live for him, ready to be light in this world, salt in a world that's decaying.

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So with that, let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for this text that you've given us this morning.

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Lord, thank you for the work that you've done in our lives and in our hearts, and Lord, thank you that all of this is meant to point to you and to your glory.

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We don't exist for ourselves, we exist for you. Christ came to the glory of God, ransomed us to the glory of God, empowered us, indwelled us, sent us out on a great commission to the glory of God.

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All of these things are for you. Lord, our life is for you. Everything that we do is for you.

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Our thoughts are for you, our hearts are for you, and Lord, how fitting that because we could not do these things ourself, you did these things to us in our new birth so that we could be a people who glorify you.

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Lord, we thank you, we praise you in Christ's name, amen. When we think about the new birth, we think of John chapter 3, and that's where we're going to be.

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John chapter 3 verses 3 through 15. So let's read this text. It's actually wonderful that we're getting to do this because I looked back on the

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John sermons, and we'll be back in John in the new year, but I looked back and I realized that the sermon on John 3, 3 through 15, did not cover what we're going to cover today.

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So this is not repeat material, everybody's like, oh we're back in John, we've already heard this before. No, no, no, this is good.

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So let's read and let's worship together. Jesus answered and said to him, truly, truly,

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I say to you, this is Nicodemus, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.

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Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?

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Jesus answered, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water in the

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Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the

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Spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going.

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So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus said to him, how can these things be?

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Jesus answered him and said to him, are you the teacher of Israel and you do not understand these things? Truly, truly,

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I say to you, we speak of what we know and we testify of what we have seen and you do not accept our testimony.

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If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the

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Son of Man. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the

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Son of Man be lifted up so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life.

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It's the perfect passage to end our time with because in it we see what the new birth actually is.

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And I want to begin by saying the first thing that we learn about the new birth is the new birth gives us new eyes.

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It says in verse 3, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

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So what we see here is that this kingdom that Christ has brought us into is altogether different than the kingdom of the world.

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The kingdom of the world can be experienced physically. It can be experienced with regular old natural corneas and irises and blue eyes and brown eyes and all of those things.

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It's physical. It can be viewed and experienced in that way but the kingdom of God cannot be seen through spiritual eyes, which means that we must have new eyes if we're gonna see it.

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If we're gonna view the things inside the kingdom, see the things that God is doing, if we're gonna view what

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God has told us to do and take hold of those things, then we have to have new eyes because we cannot see them with our physical eyes.

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We cannot experience those spiritual realities. That is the first thing that we learn about the new birth in this passage is that we have to have new eyes.

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Now what are the benefits of that? If you have new eyes, you can begin to understand the truth of God.

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You can see things that you never saw before. For those of us who remember what it was like to bang our head against the wall and say, you know, where's my hope come from?

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Or how can I possibly be saved? And we don't understand those things as we're not a believer yet and then all of a sudden

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God turns on the light and then we can see and then we behold things that we've never held before and we see things going on in our life that we've never seen happen before.

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We see patients when we're driving in downtown Boston and we're like, where did that come from? We begin to see the majesty of Christ.

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Christ becomes beautiful to those who are his. Before he's just one among many different ways that people say that you can get to God, but when you have new eyes that are tuned in to the to the perfect frequency of who

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Christ is, he is beautiful to you. He is what you adore. He's what you long for.

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When you see that, you're never the same. You see the indispensable value of the worship gathering.

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When you become a newborn person, you no longer look at the gathering of the saints as just something else that I've got to do in a week.

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It is indispensable. You see its value. You see its beauty. You see that I am here with a people for a purpose to worship the living

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God. You begin to see and experience spiritual things with newfound spiritual eyes.

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That's the first thing that the new birth accomplishes. It gives you new vision. It gives you new sight.

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The second thing that it does is it gives you a new mind.

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We're talking about a new birth and we're talking about it giving us new things. Well, the next thing that needs to be replaced is our old mind because our old mind is not sufficient to know the things of God.

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You look at Nicodemus in this passage. He has questions that he cannot understand. It's because he doesn't have a new mind.

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He is the old mind still. Look at what he says. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old?

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He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he? It's a fascinating question.

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Obviously, it's meant to be rhetorical. Nicodemus has got sort of a scoffing attitude about this question. When he asked it, he's like, this is ridiculous.

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He can't enter again into a mother's womb. It's because he has an unregenerate mind. He doesn't have the new mind so that he can have new thoughts so that he can see those things.

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And let's just be honest, this is one of the most intelligent men in all of Israel. This is one of the most powerful men in all of Israel.

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This is one of the most well -connected and wealthiest men in all of Israel and he can't even answer basic questions about the kingdom of God because he doesn't have a new mind.

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The same is true for us. Before coming to Christ, we do not have the capacity to understand the things of God.

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We don't have any ability to understand something as glorious and as beautiful as who

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Christ is, what salvation is, or any of those things. We're incapable of seeing ourselves as a great sinner.

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We're also incapable of seeing our great need for a great Savior, who is Christ. The new mind has certain benefits that come along with it as well.

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When you get a new mind, you start thinking differently. You start processing the world differently. You begin thinking thoughts after God, having a mind that's conformed to the image of Christ, and you're like, where do those thoughts come from?

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Why do I feel guilty whenever I think about certain things and why do I feel this compulsion now to repent about the things that I used to do frequently that I didn't even care at all about?

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It's because you have a new mind. You have a new mind that was given to you as a gift by God. You have a mind that now, for the first time maybe in your life, longs to understand doctrine, that longs to understand who

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God is, who He's revealed in His Word to be. It says in the Bible, the basic command is to love the

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Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. We can't do that unless God gives us a new mind.

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He gives us a new mind so that we can see the snare of worldly philosophies.

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He gives us a new mind so that we can submit to the truth of Scripture. He gives us a new mind so that we can get answers to the questions that we have.

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He gives us a new mind as a blessing, if that is.

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That's the second thing. The third thing that He gives us is a Spirit -filled birth.

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It's not a natural birth. It's a Spirit -filled birth. It says in verse 5, truly, truly

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I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

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She cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Now all of us in this room have been born of water. All of us at some point or another, our mother's water broke and we were birthed into the world, but spiritual birth is different.

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No one can be born by the Spirit in that way. Spiritual birth is cast not on everyone.

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That's a difference. All of us in this room were born, if you're here, but not every person on earth has been born of God.

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It's a birth that God himself chooses for his people. It is a new nature that is imparted by the creative will of God.

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It imparts new loves, new passions, new affections, new behaviors, new thoughts, new actions, and you ask yourself, how do

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I have this? Can I choose it? No. That's one of the similarities from the old birth and the new birth is that we don't choose it.

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You think about the new birth, or you think about the old birth, when you were born, you didn't choose the moment you were conceived, you didn't choose how you would develop in the womb, you didn't choose any of that.

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You didn't even choose when you would be cast out into the world. You didn't say, okay, I think I'm ready now. Those are external powers that work upon you that thrust you out into the world.

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In the same way, your spiritual birth is the external power of God working and moving.

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Now when you think about it, you will make a million different decisions in your lifetime, but the one decision that you and I would say that matters the most is our salvation.

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And just like our old birth, we can't make it. It's made for us by the living God who awakens us, who acts upon us with this infinite and wonderful, beautiful gift of grace.

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And we're gonna talk a little bit more about the difference between the old birth and the new birth in just a moment, but I just want us to understand right now, right off the bat, that new birth from God gives us new spiritual eyes, it gives us a new spiritual mind, and it gives us a spiritual life that imparts to us affections that we never had before, passions that we never had before.

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We are a new creature. Yeah, creature. That's the way you accent your syllables.

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We get new answers to our nagging questions. The new birth also grants us membership into God's kingdom.

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It says in verse 5 again, "'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.'"

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The first thing he says, you can't see the kingdom of God, so you need new eyes. Now he's saying that unless you're born again, you can't enter the kingdom of God, which means that you need a new citizenship if you're gonna be a part of his kingdom.

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Now I want to describe just for a moment the difference between what is going on here on earth and what is going on in heaven.

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As Christians, we've been brought into the kingdom of God, but the kingdom of God is here. Jesus said, the kingdom of God is in your midst.

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He said, the kingdom of God has come. But we know that's not the fullness of the kingdom. The kingdom is still future for us as well.

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The kingdom is an eternal reality where we enter into heaven with God. So what we experience here today,

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I'm gonna call the visible church. The visible church is everyone who raises their hand and says,

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I believe. Everyone who comes to church on a Sunday. Everyone who gets in line and takes communion. Everyone who's baptized and says, yeah, at some point

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I trusted in Jesus. But we know that not everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved, because in that day

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Jesus will look at them and say, Lord, Lord, didn't we do many miracles? And Jesus will say to them, I don't even know you.

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So there's a number of people who claim to be Christians, and then there's a number of actual Christians who only

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God knows. That's the invisible church. Now the reason why this is so important is because when we get a new citizenship into the kingdom of God, it happens now, but it also happens into eternity.

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There are benefits for being in the visible church of Christ on earth. There are benefits, even if you're not a believer.

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If you come to church every day of your life and you're not a believer, there are tangible benefits for being with the people of God.

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You're with a people who are righteous. You're with the people who are striving to love the Lord God. You're with the people who are trying to be honest and trying to love one another and care for one another.

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You can't find that everywhere on earth. So there's some sense of benefit to being a part of the visible church.

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It says in Matthew 18 that where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst. Where else on earth can an unbeliever come to be in the presence of God than to come and sit in the seats of a church?

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There's some benefit, but the unbeliever cannot be granted access to the kingdom of God eternal, to the invisible church that will dwell around the throne of God for all of eternity.

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I think that's sort of the focus of what Jesus is saying, is that we live in the kingdom of God today.

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We have a new citizenship today, and that affects the way that we behave, that affects the the laws that we keep, that affects everything about us.

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But more specifically, we gain access to heaven.

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We gain access to an eternal relationship with Jesus that only those who have the new birth are granted.

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If you don't have the new birth, you can come to church and you can get some tangible benefit, but you cannot be unborn and enter into the kingdom of God eternal.

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You think about the joy. That part's hard, because we pray for people to be saved.

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We pray for those who do not know Jesus to profess faith in Christ and to be known by him, and that the new birth we poured out on him.

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I think about how many in this room have family members or friends or someone in their life who does not know

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Jesus, and how many hours have you poured out in prayer for those people?

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You know the brother of Jesus, his name is James, they called him old knobby knees at the end of his life because he spent so much time praying his knees were mangled.

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I know people in this room have prayed like that for the ones that you love, and we trust that God is sovereign over those things because he is the one who authors the new birth, gives the new birth, produces the new birth, but I also want us to recognize that there's a ton of joy that we can have right now, because our identity is not rooted anymore in this world, it is rooted in heaven.

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It says that we are citizens of heaven. It says that in Philippians 3 20. We're citizens of heaven right now, which means that our identity is not tied in how well our nation is doing.

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It means our identity is not tied in what state we live in. It means our identity is not tied in what city we live in, or what neighborhood that we live in, or how the external features are going on around us.

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Our citizenship is in heaven. We serve a better King who we will live with for eternity.

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We are a people who will have better feasting, better joy, better fellowship, and we look forward to a true and brighter future all because of his gift to us.

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Nothing that we've done to earn it. That's the third or fourth thing I lost count.

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Normally I put numbers, but today I was being brave. We'll go with four.

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The new birth also brings new affections. It means we get a new heart. It says that Nicodemus was amazed.

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It says in verse 7, do not be amazed Nicodemus, you must be born again.

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He was amazed because he didn't have a new heart. He was amazed because he could not possibly understand what was going on in front of him or what

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Jesus was saying. He had this sort of astonished bewilderment and shock and even annoyed confusion that happens when we can't wrap our mind around something that's really important, and he couldn't because he didn't have a new mind.

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And his heart, because he didn't have a new mind, was perplexed. You see, there's two kinds of amazement that you can have, and this passage points to one of them.

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The first kind of amazement is a worshipful amazement. That's an amazement that's rooted in belief, and it's shocked at how good

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God is. But then there's an unbelieving amazement that begins with doubt, and it's shocked in their confusion.

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The worshiper exclaims, how can these things be? The doubter exclaims, how can these things be?

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Same words, and yet it comes from the heart if you're a worshiper or if you're not.

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Nicodemus at this point is not worshipful. He's agitated and confused, but he's not going to stay that way.

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And that's why I love the story of Nicodemus, because at the end of the Gospel of John, you see that this man gets a new heart.

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He had such affection for Jesus at the end of his life that he's the one who grabbed the body.

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He's the one who prepared Jesus for burial. He's the one who put him in the tomb and wrapped him with linens and put the spices that were...that

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takes an act of love for a Pharisee to grab a dead body and defile himself according to the temple regulations and do everything that was involved.

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That is a beautiful act of love, because now he has a new heart. He has such an affection, not just for God and not just for Christ, but for God's people, that history tells us that Nicodemus actually ended up seeing the resurrected

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Christ in some of the post -resurrection appearances. He's with God's people.

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There might be evidence that he was in the upper room waiting for the falling of the Holy Spirit to come.

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This is a man whose entire heart was changed. He had a heart of stone that was drunk with religion, and yet then at the end of his life, he has a heart that is filled with the glory of Christ.

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It changes everything about him. He's been reborn. He endures the mocking and the shame of the

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Pharisees. You think about how high up this man probably was.

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Jesus calls him the teacher of Israel, and you think about all of his associations that he built over a lifetime are now gone because of his proximity to Christ, and yet he doesn't care.

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He has no regret, no shame, no doubt, no frustration, no disappointment. He is so in love with Christ, and it changes everything about him that he doesn't care about those things anymore.

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He has a new heart. He has new affections. He has a new love for the

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Word and for the church and for worship and for prayer that he never had before. In the new birth, I think

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Paul Washer said this one time, the sin that we once loved we now hate, and the righteousness that we once hated we now love, and we want to live in.

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That's new birth. We have to get it out of our hearts and minds that we can be good, and that we can be better, and that we can just somehow be righteous if we just try harder, work harder, and just grind the axe against the stone of religion just a little bit more.

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We can't. It took Christ dying, and it took him giving us his righteousness for God to look at us and call us righteous.

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Even now we're not righteous. Even now we're not good. Paul says that we do the things that we don't want to do, and we don't do the things that we want to do.

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The only way that God can look at you and I and say that that person is righteous is on the basis of Jesus Christ.

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The only way he can look at us and see that that person is mine, and I love them, and I'm gonna pour out my love on them is because he's looking through Jesus on us because we've been clothed with the robes of Christ.

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In the new birth we get a new heart. That's the fourth thing.

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The fifth is that the new birth is not our work. It's done to us, on us, by God.

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It says in verse 7 through 8, Do not be amazed that I said to you that you must be born again.

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The wind blows wherever it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it is going.

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So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. Jesus uses two analogies in this particular passage to get through to us that the new birth is the work of God and not our work towards him.

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The first is the birth metaphor. The second is the wind metaphor. Let's take the first one.

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We've talked about this a little bit, but in order to be born, external power has to come upon you.

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We don't choose our gestation in our first birth. We don't choose how our body is going to develop in our first birth.

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We don't choose when we're gonna be thrust out into the world in our first birth. All of those things are chosen by God, who takes an active part in weaving us together in our mother's womb for his glory.

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We have no choice in the first birth, and we have no choice in the previous birth as well.

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Now I was thinking about this this week. Life doesn't begin at birth. We know that as Christians.

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Life begins at conception. Isn't it interesting how the metaphor works, that God knits us together in our mother's womb, and then eventually at some point nine months later, 40 weeks, that's like almost 10 months, at some point then we're born.

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Life didn't begin there. Life began even before the child was born. I was thinking about all the ways that before I even said,

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Jesus we be my Savior, how he was producing things in me, and working things in me, and doing things to me, and knitting me together to prepare me for the moment that I would cry out,

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Dear Jesus, save me. Before I was even technically born, you think about the earliest moments of fetal development when you begin hearing a heartbeat.

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That's before the child is born. It gets a heartbeat. Think about the Bible says that we've been given hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone.

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I wonder. This is just me wondering. But think about that heart of flesh being given to us before we even cry out,

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Dear Lord, save me. How could we cry out without a new heart? He gives it to us first. He gives it to us first.

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He doesn't wait for us to say, Dear Lord, save me, and then he gives us a heart of flesh. How could that be?

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How could we cry out to him with a heart of stone? We were dead in our trespasses, so he gives us a new heart that points us towards him so that when we cry out, we already have a beating heart.

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You think about a child living ignorantly in the dark. They're alive in the darkened womb.

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They're alive for nine months. You think about us living in the darkness for so long.

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God drawing us. You think about the child that can hear sounds, muted noises from their mother and from their father.

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And the child's heartbeat even is affected by this. When she or he hears the voice of his or her mother, the child immediately, the heartbeat starts rising because she knows that this is the one who

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I'm supposed to love. This is the one who's supposed to love me. And you think about even before we were a Christian, there's moments where we hear muted sounds of grace, where we hear muted presentations of the gospel, and we're like, there's something about that.

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I'm not sure quite yet, but there's something true about that. It makes our heart skip a beat a little bit. There's things that are happening even before we are converted where God is using them and drawing us to himself that aren't us.

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He's doing those things for us, to us, so that we would be drawn to him. You think about the child.

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They've even proven that you can take a really powerful light and shine it on a mother's belly, and the child's face will turn towards the light.

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And you think about you and I before we were a Christian, living in darkness, and the light of Christ shone in such a way that that pulled our faces towards him and moved us towards him and drew us towards him, even before we cried out.

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How can we take credit for that? How can we say that I decided to be saved when so much work that God has done even beforehand to bring us to himself?

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All these things happened to us even before we were aware of it. If you think about a child in the womb, the child's not having metaphysical conversations with itself, like, you know,

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I think, therefore I am. I see that light there. Let me decide whether I'm gonna respond to it.

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Oh, I hear that sound. That must be my mother. But before the child even recognizes what it's doing, it responds naturally to those things.

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Before we even understand who Christ really is, he's doing things to us that our soul is coming on live and just naturally being pointed to him.

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Eventually, after however long it is, maybe it's 15, 20 years, maybe it's 40 years, maybe it's just a season, like a summer where God opens your heart and your mind, at some point, and it's different for everybody in this room, at some point

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God causes you to be born. And you think about that period of your life where your soul is being contracted, where your heart is racing, you're being pushed and squeezed, convicted of your sin.

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You feel some sort of spiritual pain even over your sin. I don't know of a single conversion that doesn't at some point begin with agony over our sin.

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And you think about the child being squeezed out of its mother, and you think about us being squeezed out of the world, and the sin that we once loved now we hate because there's this pain, then we come into the world and the first thing that we see is not our mother, we see

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Christ in our new birth. The first thing that we see is Jesus Christ and we fall in love with him and we are saved.

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Again, these things are not choices that we made, these are things that God by his infinite grace did to us.

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And like a baby, I can't help but grow. I've never met a day one baby who says, you know, this week

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I think I'm gonna grow 20 % body weight, next week maybe 15.

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I don't want to push it. They're just fed with milk and they grow.

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I've heard a lot of sermons and I've heard a lot of pastors say, we don't preach spiritual milk.

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I think that's the wrong phrase. We don't want to water down the gospel, but milk is good for babies.

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Milk is exactly what they need. It says that the gospel is the pure milk, and they grow when they hear it.

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They're not supposed to stay there. If every adult in this room bought a bottle and a pacifier for themselves, we would have a problem.

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But it's good for them in that season. We're supposed to grow up. We're supposed to learn like a child.

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Addison, I can't keep her out of the refrigerator at times. She's learned now how to climb up the drawers and get to the things that she wants.

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She's got this beautiful little independence at three years old where she's like, I don't need mom and dad to do everything for me anymore,

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I'm gonna start doing things myself. And you think about what spiritual maturity looks like, where we grab a Bible for the first time and we're like,

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I'm gonna read this on my own. And then we adopt like six heresies because we make a mess out of everything. And that's okay.

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If you're preaching heresy, that's a problem. If you're a spiritual newborn or if you're a spiritual toddler and you're wrestling with the text, praise

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God. Do you not think God looks down with a ton of grace on someone who's excited to learn the Bible and doesn't have it right yet?

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Amen. Eventually we grow up and we become spiritual adults.

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And what's the thing that we're supposed to do as adults? We're to the younger generations. If you're a

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Christian and you would consider yourself mature, but you're not pouring into anyone and you're not giving anyone the pure milk of the gospel, then challenge yourself to say, am

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I really as mature as I think I am? Or am I just the one who's consuming? Because adults don't consume anymore.

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They look after the needs of their family. If they don't feed their children, no one else will.

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Well, think about our church. If there's people who are spiritual babes in this congregation, praise

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God for that. We don't look down our nose at that. We don't have this view of maturity that says everyone needs to be mature or there's something wrong with them.

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Infancy is a natural stage of development. What's not natural is for all the adults to go eat and glutton and be gluttons on steak while the baby starved to death.

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That's not natural. So it's upon us who have been given these wonderful, beautiful truths of the gospel to pour into other people so that they can grow up into Christ.

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That's the first analogy that he gives us, the birth analogy, and I think it's such a beautiful analogy because all these things are done to us and for us by God.

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And at some point, we begin to participate, right? We don't choose our justification, but at some point along the way we get to begin to participate in our sanctification.

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The other analogy that Jesus gives is the wind. The wind blows wherever it will.

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I think that's such a beautiful analogy as well. When I stand outside and the wind is not blowing, I can't look and say, you know what?

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I'd like a nice little breeze today, and then it just responds. I can't choose the type of wind, the degree of the wind, wouldn't that be something?

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I can't choose when it will blow, how it will blow, where it will blow, and even why it will blow. But God can.

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By the creative will of God, he chooses where the wind blows and where it doesn't. Why do we struggle so much to see that by the

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Father's plan, intention, and will that he chooses where his spirit is going to blow into and enliven and awaken?

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It's the analogy Jesus gives. What's even more fascinating about it is the word he uses there is panuma.

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It's a breathy word, panuma. That's the word for spirit, wind, and breath.

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So when you translate this passage, you can translate it as the wind blows wherever it will, but you can also translate it as the spirit blows wherever it wills.

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It's sort of a double meaning there, strengthening the fact that the

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Spirit of God chooses who he will awaken, chooses who he will breathe new life into, and how does he choose that?

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By the sovereign plan of God. Now we have to interact with the free will debate just for a moment because there's many who will say, but God's not gonna violate my will and my choice.

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God's a gentleman. God's not gonna choose something for me that I don't choose for myself, and I just need to say this, you better hope that he does.

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You better hope that he chooses against your will. You better hope that he violates your freedom because you're dead and you're trespasses.

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You're living the old birth, you're living as an old man with all the free will that you can stomach, and it's not enough to rebirth yourself in Christ.

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Listen, I say thank God Almighty that he violated my will, my wretched, ugly, stinking, festering, dirty, filthy, rag will that would have never chosen him in a million years.

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Thank God that he violated my will so that I would choose him because I never would have without him. Again, he gives us two analogies that point us to who he is and what our salvation is, and when we realize what our salvation is, that we didn't choose it, we didn't earn it, we didn't do anything, what's left but to praise

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God? What's left but to praise God? If it's something that I earned,

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I can take some credit for it. When I go to work here at the church, whatever wages that I get,

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I've earned. I take those home and I spend them however I want. It's not so with Christ. I don't get to live my life any way that I want.

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I don't get to do anything that I want because I didn't choose this, it was chosen for me, which means that every square inch of my body, every molecule of my being is now under his lordship and under his command.

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If I chose it, I have some freedom to choose against it. If he chose it, I'm a slave and he's my master.

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And what a joyful master he is, and what a wonderful opportunity it is to be called Christ's slave.

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We've seen so far that he gives us new eyes, new answers with a new mind, new affections, a new spirit -filled life where the whole triune

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God is involved. If you think about that, that the triune God's involved in your salvation, in American Christianity we're a

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Jesus -centered culture as Christians, and I love that because the Bible is a

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Jesus -centered book, but the Father was also involved in your salvation and so was the Spirit, and we need to know that.

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We read earlier in Ephesians 1 that before the foundations of the world, he chose you. Two thousand years ago,

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Christ died for you, for all your sins, past, present, and future. That means the sins you're gonna commit today have already been paid for, the sins you're gonna commit tomorrow have already been paid for, and yet it's not just the

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Father and the Son, it's the Spirit who chooses where he will go by the will of God and awakens you.

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You have the triune God saving you, electing you, drawing you, wooing you, making you more in love with him, which leads us to our final point.

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Now this passage focuses primarily on Christ's involvement in our salvation.

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That's where we're gonna end. There's some passages, like we said, that focus on what the Father has done. There's some passages that focus on what the

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Spirit has done. We're gonna end with what Christ has done because that's where this passage ends, so turn with me to verses 13 through 15, and this is how the passage comes to a close.

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No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the

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Son of Man. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the

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Son of Man be lifted up so that whoever believes in him will have eternal life.

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Now I've never done this before, but I don't have time to exposit the beauty of this text, so I did preach a sermon on this, you should check it out.

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This passage is amazing. It's probably my favorite sermon I've ever preached. The Old Testament realities in this passage are glorious, and when you see what

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Jesus is actually claiming, it is unbelievable, but we're only gonna be able to summarize it here today.

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Jesus knew that he was gonna be lifted up on a cross. He descended to the earth because he knew he was gonna be lifted up.

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That was the intention of God's will, was to send his Son to be lifted up on the cross in shame.

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We were the ones who were diseased and barreling towards hell, ready to fly off the edge of the cliff in a moment into the lake of fire, and Christ came down to be lifted up so that we could follow him and be lifted up with him.

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Without that, we are plunging into the depths of hell. With Christ being lifted up as the firstfruits of our salvation, we will be lifted up.

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It says that he was lifted up. Why? So that we would look at him. In the Old Testament, there's this really fascinating scene where snakes attack the people of Israel because they're complaining and they're angry and they're frustrated at God, and God unleashes an army of serpents to go into the camp, and they bite the people of Israel, and they're poisoned, and they're getting ready to die.

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And what does God say? If you want to live, Moses is gonna build this bronze serpent.

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He builds the image of the thing that crushed them to be the thing that they look at to find healing.

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Moses builds a bronze serpent. He puts it on a pole, and if you were bitten by the snake, all you had to do was look at that bronze serpent, and you'd be healed of the poison, and your life would be spared.

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Jesus is saying, that is me. I'm the one who triumphed over the serpent.

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I'm the one that if you want to be healed of your sins, if you want to be saved, you have to look to me. You can't look at anything else, because nothing else will heal you if you want that to be saved.

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If you want to be healed, if you want to know God, you have to look to me and me alone. And when you look to him, he will remake you, and he will change you, and he will shape you, and he would justify you, and sanctify you, and glorify you.

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He'll give you new eyes, like this passage just told us. He'll give you a new mind. He'll give you a new heart.

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He'll make everything about you new if you look to him. You can't look at anything else, because nothing else will save you, will leave you poisoned and in death.

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If Christ gives you new eyes, you look to him, and that's where I want us to end. If you're not a

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Christian here, or if you're not a Christian listening online at some point in the future, look to Jesus Christ.

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I want to tell you that if you have a heart to look to Jesus, he's already been doing work in you for a long time.

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He's brought you to this building today, or he's brought you to our podcast. He's brought you to the place where you can hear the gospel of Christ, and all you have to do is look at him.

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Look at him. And when I say look at him, I mean orient your whole life towards him. Turn from what you were doing, and turn to Christ.

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Have every facet of your attention focused on him, and you will live. This passage is so relevant to the

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Christian as well, because we tend to treat Jesus like a one -time glance. Yeah, I saw him.

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He healed me. Drive by, caught him out of the corner of my eye.

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I'm saved. We need Jesus every day of our life.

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We are constantly assaulted by various temptations, like those snakes that bite our ankles, and we need

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Jesus every day. We need to look to him. We need to glance at him. We need to stare at him.

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We need to worship him. We need to have our eyes, and our soul, and our minds, and our bodies, and our hearts, and every part about us, drawn to a

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Christocentric life where he is the thing that we look at more than anything. And when that happens, we will worship.

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Sin has no power when you are looking at Jesus. Sin has no power when you're worshiping. Have you ever tried to sin while you're enthralled with Jesus and worshiping him?

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It's really almost impossible. When your heart is captivated by Christ, it's really difficult to want something else, because you see, my prayer for this church, my prayer for you, is that you would look at Christ today, tomorrow, and forever.

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Let's pray. Lord, thank you. Thank you that our old man, our old woman, was reborn in Jesus Christ.

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Thank you that that's not something we can earn, because if we could earn it, we could lose it. I think about men and women throughout history who've earned tremendous fortunes, all for just a single plague or famine to take it all away.

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And yet, Lord, what you have earned cannot be lost. Lord, I pray that we would cherish the gift that you've given us.

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But Lord, I also pray, especially thinking about the season of Christmas that we're in, I pray that we would not become so enamored with the gift that we forget to look at the giver.

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Lord, I pray that the gift would just be the thing that lifts our eyes up to the smiling face of God and that we would worship.

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Lord, I pray that we would be a people who look to Christ in all things. Lord, I pray even as we continue and close out the service, that we would look to Christ and that in him we would be satisfied.