Billy Graham once told the story about a time when he was a young preacher with Youth for Christ and arrived in a town to preach. Having an urgent letter to mail, he began looking for the local Post Office but had gotten lost. He pulled his car beside a young boy walking along the road. Rolling down his passenger side window, Mr. Graham asked the youth, “Son, can you give me directions to the Post Office?”
Once directed and before driving away, Billy bade farewell to the lad with the following invitation, “Son, if you will come to the Baptist Church in the center of town tonight, I will give you directions to Heaven.”
The little boy replied, “Mister, you can’t even find the Post Office. How are you going to give me directions to Heaven?”
In John 3:1–6 (New International Version), we find a similar occasion when an important person, a religious leader, came asking for directions. His name was Nicodemus. He was a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jewish synagogue (v. 1). Without realizing the intent of his own question, he approached Jesus seeking directions to Heaven:
“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him” (v. 2).
From the text, we do not know what Nicodemus planned to discuss with Jesus under the cover of darkness that evening. But Jesus knew what he needed:
“Very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless they are born again” (v. 3).
It would be completely predictable that an unregenerated human mind, even a brilliant one by the world’s standards, might ask the obvious:
“How can someone be born when they are old?” (v. 4).
I remember when the Holy Spirit first began to penetrate my heart with prevenient grace as an early teen. In the 1970s, the biblical experience of new birth was often described as Jesus coming to live within one’s heart. I remember asking my Sunday School teacher, Johnny Cason, the local florist, how Jesus could fit in my heart.
Maybe I asked Mr. Cason because he had a large barrel chest and maybe I could imagine Jesus squeezing in there. But if so, how could he live in mine—or anyone else’s for that matter?
Thankfully, I was to discover in just a few months forward that Jesus could indeed get into my heart through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, and I would soon come to recognize him in others—now for fifty years, across the street and around the world.
Both Scripture and history tell us that Nicodemus made the same discovery, but we will get back to that in a few paragraphs.
The Necessity of the New Birth
Before we explore the nature of the new birth, let’s emphasize the necessity of it.
Couple John chapter 3 with John 14:1–6, where Jesus reminds his disciples during the last week of his earthly life that he is going to prepare a place for them to live eternally.
“You know the way to the place where I am going,” he said (John 14:4).
What a great setup Jesus made. He knew that they didn’t know the way quite yet, and he knew that at least one of his disciples would call him out on that. It was Thomas, the skeptical one:
“Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14:5).
About a decade ago, Kim and I had the privilege of “adopting” an international student at our local university into our home for holidays and special occasions. It has developed into a deep mutual friendship.
A Fulbright Scholar, this young man moved to our town to pursue his PhD in civil engineering. It necessitated his leaving home and his young bride in the Middle East to embrace this opportunity. Of course, the first question Kim wanted to know was about how they met.
It was an arranged marriage, like most in his country and many in Jesus’ day. She was a very young bride, who was required to bid her husband farewell after only six months of marriage. She was not allowed by their government to accompany him.
We then asked, “Where is she living?”
His response stunned me:
“Oh, she is living at my father’s house.”
You see, in the Middle East, now and then (Jesus’ time), when a couple get married, the husband will make space in his father’s house for them to live, often by building a new room.
Jesus reminded his disciples that he was “going to prepare a place” for them in his Father’s house (John 14:2).
So how do we get there, Thomas asks.
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Jesus said (John 14:6).
Those are straightforward directions.
The new birth is not an option or suggestion for persons who want to spend eternity in God’s presence. It is an imperative. There is only one road that leads to Heaven and no shortcuts. The idea that all religions lead to the same place is a hellish lie designed to deceive multitudes of people.
Our culture does not appreciate imperatives. It never has. Today’s Millennials or Gen Z, even Gen Alphas, are not the first generations to insist upon finding their own way in this world. Exploration and a demand for independence are bound into the human heart (Proverbs 22:15).
When grace overwhelms our hearts with prevenient love, we realize that the Holy Spirit leads every generation back to the same eternal address—and the same Person (Matthew 7:7–12).
Imagine the audacity of Jesus to say that there is no other way to God but through Himself. We don’t like exclusivity in our culture, either.
Perhaps the greatest and simplest apologetic for the authority of Jesus’ imperative in John 14:6 was the argument of British scholar C. S. Lewis. Once an agnostic who came to faith in Christ in his late twenties, Lewis said (paraphrasing):
“Jesus Christ is either who He said He was, the Lord God of Heaven, or one can take their pick between liar and lunatic.”
There are no other options.
Nicodemus, you must be born again.
That goes for every other person who ever has or ever will leave shoeprints in the dust of planet Earth.
The Nature of the New Birth
Physical birth is an awesome analogy of spiritual birth. The parallels are more synonymous than similar. Isn’t it interesting how God designed it that way before ever breathing life (ruach, breath or wind in Hebrew) into Adam’s lungs?
Adam was the only human being never to be born the old-fashioned way. Well, except for the Second Adam (1 Corinthians 15).
Attempting an explanation to Nicodemus about the mystery of the new birth, Jesus said:
“No one can enter the Kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5).
There are many reasons, biblically and historically, to support the practice of infant baptism. There is also honest interpretive disagreement in the Body of Christ, and among Wesleyans, about the practice. It is not our purpose to debate that here and now.
However, it is a misinterpretation of John 3:5, in my opinion, to suggest that the water to which Jesus refers is the water of baptism.
In the next verse, Jesus continues the analogy and makes clear what kind of water he is referencing:
“Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to Spirit” (John 3:6).
There is a bag of water, called the amniotic sac, that surrounds a baby in utero until the time of physical delivery. Kim and I were in the grocery store when hers burst before delivering our second child. That is the water of physical birth.
Just as one is born of water, one must also be born of the Spirit. The flesh produces the first kind of water; the Spirit of God produces spiritual life. One cannot produce the other.
And the Church, as vital as it is to our nurturing as newborn babies in Christ (1 Peter 2:2), as well as mature adults (Ephesians 4:11–16), cannot confer salvation upon an individual, no matter how beautiful the ceremony or meaningful the ritual.
Flesh and blood cannot reveal this reality to us, only our Father in heaven (Matthew 16:17).
Now, let’s qualify here: God can and often does use the sacramental practices of a vibrant church as a spiritual midwife in the process of new birth. But no church should presume to believe that it can do the Holy Spirit’s work.
That takes a lot more audacity than Jesus proclaiming to be the only way to the Father.
There is no human or ecclesiastical assembly line to life in Christ. Conception and birth take place in God’s timing.
One reason, among many laudable ones, we like rituals in church life is because they give us a sense of control over things. But God’s birthing schedule cannot be controlled.
Therefore, we must learn to trust people with the Holy Spirit and trust the Holy Spirit with people when it comes to the timing of grace.
Just as a baby is conceived in its mother’s womb in an intimate moment of loving expression, the Holy Spirit conceives Jesus in us through what John Wesley called “prevenient grace,” the grace of God that precedes our spiritual conversion.
It is an intimate and holy moment when a soul is conceived, when an individual, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, as Luke chapter 1 said of Mary the virgin mother of Jesus, is longing to do something in us that has eternal ramifications.
Like Mary, we have a choice to make. If, like Mary, we respond (paraphrasing again):
“Yes, Lord, have your way in me. I will do whatever you want; all I want is to be yours” (Luke 1:38),
then we are on our way to spiritual birth.
We are then propelled through the Holy Spirit’s birth canal into new life in Christ (1 Corinthians 5:17).
With all due respect, when a church tries to make a baby through ritual observances and sacraments alone, the offspring is always stillborn.
And stillborn babies grow up to be loyal church members who sit in pews and secretly wonder why worship is so boring to them. They have a form of godliness but no spiritual power (2 Timothy 3:5).
Please hear my heart in writing these words. I love the local church. When it works the way God designed it, there is spiritual life abounding.
There is no joy like that experienced by a Sunday School teacher, youth leader, or children’s ministry volunteer participating in leading a person to spiritual birth and subsequent growth.
Sometimes God anoints a confirmation class in such a way that leads an entire group of youth into life-altering encounters with Jesus that spark revival in a congregation or community.
At other times, there is the one quiet teenager who seldom gets noticed in the crowd but is genuinely born again while others go through the motions and give assent to the Catechism.
We are right to value the processes that help us ritualize the reality of life in Christ and practice them.
But, if you are a church leader or pastor, don’t confuse the process with the product. The consequences of that mistake are just too eternally tragic for the people in our care.
And (respectfully), for God’s sake, let us proclaim to our people the plain truth: Only God can do for us and in us what nothing or no one else can do.
Preach the necessity of new birth in Christ for everyone—yes, even to those who assume themselves to be children of God by virtue of being active in church, and much more so to those in our communities who are far from God.
Have you, the reader, been born again? How can we know?
It is not because we have a church certificate, but because the Holy Spirit convinces our own spirit that we are a child of God (Romans 8:15–16).
The flesh/Spirit analogy works well here. How do we know that we are physically alive? There are many signs, but here are three: we breathe, our heart beats, and we get hungry every day.
We can know for certain that we are spiritually alive in Christ because he becomes our breath, our reason for being.
We can know we are spiritually alive because our heart is changed; it beats with the rhythm of God’s heart. What God loves, we love. What offends God breaks our tender new heart.
We can know we are spiritually alive because we hunger for his presence and his Word every day and can’t get enough to eat.
So now let’s circle back to Nicodemus, the man who came to Jesus at night.
Like a future Oxford scholar and son of a prominent Anglican clergyman in England, who would also have his heart strangely warmed by an evening encounter with Christ seventeen centuries later (May 24, 1738), if anyone could gain salvation through religion, it would be Nicodemus and John Wesley.
No, Nicodemus could not find his way back into his mother’s womb. But that night, prevenient grace conceived something in his heart.
We know from Scripture that he helped provide a place for Jesus’ burial (John 19:38–42). More than sympathetic to the cause of Jesus the Christ, Nicodemus had likely been born again.
Oral tradition and some credible church history recounts that he was removed from the Jewish Sanhedrin after the death of Jesus and may have later been martyred.
Surely, Nicodemus was aware of what Jesus had spoken to a grieving family at the tomb of a good friend:
“He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And he who believes in me will never die” (John 11:24–25).
In fact, it was the resurrection of Lazarus that caused the Jewish rulers to plot the death of this Rabbi Jesus who had gone too far (John 12).
The world says, “We live, then we die.”
But God’s Word says, once we’re born into spiritual life, we never die.
For the Christian, death is not the end of life or the beginning of another life. It is a change of address—the address of the Father’s house.