What Does 'Ye Must Be Born Again' Actually Mean? A Plain Sermon on John 3

Announcer: Welcome to Gospel Sermons from Kingdom Gospel Ministries. Every week, Pastor Cole opens up the good Word and lays it plain, one passage at a time. The message you're about to hear is dramatized and inspired by true accounts. Now, here's Pastor Cole.

Pastor Cole: I want to tell you about a house. There was a fellow — good man, worked hard his whole life — who bought an old farmhouse out on a county road. And the thing he loved most about that place was the front porch. So he went to work on it. Sanded it down to bare wood. Filled every crack with putty. Two coats of good paint, the expensive kind, and a new rail he cut himself. And when he finished, friends, that porch was beautiful. Folks slowed down driving by just to look at it. Then one Saturday in the fall, the whole family came out. Grandkids. Sweet tea. Everybody standing on that porch at once. And it went. Dropped straight through. Because the joists underneath — the beams holding the whole thing up — had been rotting for twenty years. Paint is a covering. It is not a foundation.

Pastor Cole: Now there was an old preacher, near three hundred years back, who said that harder than I know how to say it. He said a man outside of Christ walks his whole life on a rotten covering. Thin boards laid over a pit. And there is not one place on it that would bear his weight, and he cannot see which board is giving way, because it is all covered over. Hear the difference, because it matters. He is not walking toward the drop. He is standing on it. My porch is just the county-road version of his pit. Same idea, smaller words.

Pastor Cole: So hold onto that. Because I want to take you to the third chapter of John. Nighttime in Jerusalem. A man comes to Jesus after dark. "There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night." A ruler of the Jews. Which just means this was no fella off the street. This was a Pharisee, a member of the ruling council — a Bible scholar, a religious professional. If somebody had made a list of the finest men in that city, his name is on the top half of it. And Jesus does not compliment him. Jesus doesn't say, well now, you're most of the way there. He says this. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

Pastor Cole: Cannot. Not will have a harder time. Not is missing a couple things. Cannot see it. And here's the one thing I want you carrying out of here today. If you forget every other word I say, keep this sentence: You do not need a better life. You need a new one. And only God can give it. That's the whole message. Everything else is just me walking you around that sentence so you can see it from every side.

Pastor Cole: So let's start honest about what reform can and cannot do. Nicodemus had reformed. Understand — this man's life was cleaner than yours and mine put together. He prayed. He fasted. He gave. He knew the Scriptures by heart, and I don't mean verses, I mean whole books. He had, as that same old preacher put it, reformed his life in many things, and kept up a form of religion in his family, and in his closet, and in the house of God. And the Lord Jesus looked at all of it — all that discipline, all that decency — and told him he had to be born again. Because here's the trouble with reform. Reform works on the outside. It sands, and it fills, and it paints. But the Book does not say our problem is that we're dirty. It says we're dead. "And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins." Quickened just means made alive. And you do not make a dead man alive by improving his manners.

Pastor Cole: I think about a man — call him a fellow from any town in this country. Forty-some years old. He'd made a real mess of things for a while there, and then one day he got sick of himself. So he quit the drinking cold. Started showing up. Got the truck paid off, coached his boy's ball team, joined a men's group on Thursday mornings and never missed a one. And I want to be clear — every one of those things is good. Every single one. I'd tell any man alive to do them. But he said something once, late, when his guard was down. He said: I am better than I was. And I still don't know if God has me. Because he had painted the porch. And he could still feel the joists. So let me ask you plain. What's your paint? Is it your attendance? Your giving? The fact that you're not like your brother-in-law? Take an honest minute today and name the one thing you have quietly been counting on to make you safe with God. Say it out loud in the truck. Because you cannot lay down a thing you won't admit you're holding.

Pastor Cole: Which brings me to the hard one. Your good works have no power to save you. None. Hear the King James: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." Let me lay that out plain, a piece at a time. By grace — that's kindness you never earned. Through faith — that means you receive it with empty hands. Not of yourselves — you did not manufacture it. It is the gift of God — He hands it to you. And then that last clause, and I love it. Lest any man should boast. God arranged salvation on purpose so that not one soul in glory will ever be able to stand up and say, well — I helped.

Pastor Cole: Now that old preacher had a picture I have never been able to shake, and it starts with weight. He said sin makes a man heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell. Downwards. With pressure. That's not a man drifting. That's a man being pulled. And then he says your health, and your own care and prudence, and your best contrivance, and all your righteousness — all of it — would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock. A spider's web. Against a falling rock. Now a web is a beautiful thing. Walk out early some morning when the dew's on it and the sun catches it just right — looks like somebody spun it out of silver. It's intricate. It took real work. It just cannot hold weight. And that is what we do, friends. We spend our whole lives spinning. A little decency here, a little religion there, a net woven out of our own selves — and we whisper peace, and safety, standing on thin air and empty shadows. So here's your next step, and it's a strange one. Quit spinning. Not quit doing good — you do good until the day they bury you. But quit trusting it. Before your head hits the pillow tonight, take the weight of your soul off your own record, and put it somewhere that can actually hold it.

Pastor Cole: Now Nicodemus asked exactly the right question. He said, "How can a man be born when he is old?" And that's fair! You cannot birth yourself. Not one person in the history of this world arranged their own birth. Somebody else did that for you. So Jesus tells him how it gets done. He takes the old scholar back to a story he'd known since he was a boy — how the people out in the wilderness were dying of snakebite, and God told Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole, and every man who simply looked at it lived. And then Jesus says: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." He was telling that man, in the dark, that He was going to be lifted up on a cross. That is how the new birth gets paid for. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, went to a Roman cross and took the death that had your name on it — "for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" — and on the third day He walked out of that grave alive. And the dying folks in that wilderness didn't have to climb the pole. They didn't earn the look. They just had to look.

Pastor Cole: So what actually happens when a soul is born again? I'm going to hand you the old preacher's words again, because in thirty years I have not improved on them. He said what a man must have is a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls. A great change of heart. Not a change of habit. Not a change of company. The heart — and not by your power. By His. And then he looks out at the congregation and says it to the ones sitting there in their Sunday clothes: all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life. Before altogether unexperienced. Chew on that. He is saying there is a light and a life you have never once tasted, not on your best day, not in your best moment — and that is the thing you're missing. Not more of what you've got. Something you have never had. And Jesus said you can't chart it. "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh." You never see the wind. You only ever see what it moves.

Pastor Cole: And now I have to say the hard thing, and I'd be a coward if I dressed it up. Same chapter. Same night. Same conversation. Jesus says: "He that believeth not is condemned already." Already. Not will be condemned. Not might be, someday, at the far end of things, if it goes badly. Already. That is present tense, friend. That is right now, in that chair, with the coffee in your hand. Because a man on a rotten covering does not fall when the boards break. He was over the pit the whole time. The breaking is just when he finds out. I don't say that to frighten you. I say it because nobody gets rescued from a danger he has talked himself out of being in.

Pastor Cole: But hear what happens on the other side of that word. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." A new creature. Not a repaired one. Not a spider patching his web. A dead man with the light flooding in. Now hear me carefully — new does not mean finished. You will still have your temper and your Tuesdays and your regrets, and anybody who tells you different is selling something. But something at the root will have turned. You'll find yourself wanting what you used to run from. You'll grieve over sin you used to enjoy. And if you cannot find one solitary thing in your life that only God could account for — don't sit there and argue with me about it. Take it to Him. Ask Him tonight, honest as you know how: Lord... am I painted? Or am I alive?

Pastor Cole: So let me put that sentence back in your hands. You do not need a better life. You need a new one. And only God can give it. Which means what I'm calling you to today is not a resolution. I am not asking you to try harder. You have tried harder. That's why you're tired. I'm asking you to quit. To come down off that porch, and say it: God, I am not able. I have been spinning webs my whole life and they will not hold me. I believe Your Son died on that cross for my sin and rose again on the third day, and I am done trying to pay for what He already paid for. Make me new. You don't need fancy words for that. He is not grading the speech.

Pastor Cole: And I know you know how that other story ends. But don't rush it, because the ending only weighs what the middle weighs. That boy does not start on the road home. He starts in a pig lot. The Book says there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. He hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him into the fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. Husks. That's what the far country pays a man. Hollow on the outside, nothing in the middle. And nobody would even hand him those. And down in that mud he came to himself — and the first thing he did was write a speech. Rehearsed it the whole way home. Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son... make me as one of thy hired servants. You hear what he's doing? He is negotiating. He's going to work it off. Put me on the payroll, put me in the bunkhouse, let me earn my way back onto this place. Not a son. A servant. Because a hired man can look you in the eye. A son who wasted everything has to be forgiven — and that costs more than labor. He'd rather work than be forgiven. And he never got that last line out. While he was yet a great way off, his father saw him — which tells you the old man had been watching that road a long while — and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. Rags. Smell. Husks still on his hands. And before the boy could get to the hired servant part, the father was already hollering for the best robe. Received him, the Book says, safe and sound. And there was music, and there was dancing — in a house that had been quiet for a long time. That is not a man improving himself. That is a dead man made alive. Come on home. He is already running.

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