How Can This Be?

Thursday, September 28, 2023

There was a man named Nicodemus, a Jewish religious leader who was a Pharisee.  After dark one evening, he came to speak with Jesus.  “Rabbi,” he said, “we all know that God has sent you to teach us.  Your miraculous signs are evidence that God is with you.”  Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”  “What do you mean?” exclaimed Nicodemus. “How can an old man go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”  Jesus replied, “I assure you, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.  Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life.  So don’t be surprised when I say, ‘You must be born again.’  The wind blows wherever it wants.  Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit.”  “How are these things possible?” Nicodemus asked.  John 3:1-9

How can it be?  I would imagine if you told someone unfamiliar with American history that a back-woods, self-educated country boy in 1860 would be elected President of the United States, that visitor would wonder How can this be?  If you told a man two hundred years ago that in the future people would get in a big silver colored coach in New York and sail through the air at 500 miles an hour, landing safely in Los Angeles just six hours later, he’d say How can this be?  And if you told anyone living in Paris a hundred years ago that jingling, vibrating in that person’s back pocket would be Grandma calling him from Idaho in the States, and by pressing a button you’d see her, talk to her, and make plans to meet the next day for lunch in New Mexico, they would not only ask How can this be…they’d also arrange for you to meet the gatekeeper at the psych-ward.

That was the question of the evening for Jesus.  Nicodemus asked him how can a man go through the birth canal a second time?  I can imagine Jesus smiling and chuckling over that one.  But then it got serious.  Jesus was talking to a man of age, not a schoolboy, a man of great learning, you didn’t get to be a Pharisee, and a leader of Israel without intense study…and he was talking to a man of enormous influence, a respected teacher of Scripture.  Jesus told him to take all his age and life experience, all his study and certificates, and all his leadership awards honorary degrees and….dump ‘em…begin again…start over![1] 

As a person mid-way through the eighth-decade of life, I groaned when I heard those words in my mind and heart, just as assuredly as Nicodemus must have looked for the nearest exit.  How can you spend your life studying about God, teaching about God, serving God, and loving God….and then just dump all that life experience to start over?  And what does that even mean?

Then it clicked-in.

When you count on all you’ve seen…all you’ve experienced…all you’ve done, written, and the way people have said Good Job, man…that’s what you’ve got; you’ve got YOU in the center of the stage in Congratulatory Hall accepting awards and stars on your crown.  Suddenly God’s not in focus…you are!  That’s what Jesus was telling Nicodemus.  Or me.  Or you.

For You Today 

Today, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve lived the most perfectly acceptable successful life, done everything right, or if you’ve wasted every second and breath you’ve been given.  What matters is who is being worshipped right this moment.  In what Kingdom do you live, breathe, and have your being?  Who sits on the throne of your heart?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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There are about 2,600 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road library.

Title Image(s) courtesy of The Chosen via Wikimedia                      

Images without citation are in public domain.  Unless noted, Scripture quoted from NLT^©  

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[1] This thought comes from Dr. John MacArthur’s Grace to You broadcast, September 27, 2023

So...Which Came First?

[1]

Monday, January 8, 2018

There are a lot of different words that describe it:  getting right with God, getting saved, being born-again, completed, coming to faith, beginning a relationship with God.  This can be expressed in so many ways, and the essence of what constitutes responding to our Creator, and how that happens, has been debated for millennia.

Paul, the great Apostle of the Gentiles, spent a lot of paper and ink to help us understand which comes first; is it our faith in God or our works for God which move God to accept us?  Did the chicken come first, or was it the egg?

Let’s let Paul’s explanation instruct us this morning.  He uses the illustration of how God’s acceptance of Abraham is a model for responding to God with faith:

So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things?  If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it.  But the story we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story.  What we read in Scripture is, “Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point.  He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own.”  If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift.  But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God.  Sheer gift.  David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man: 

Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.  Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score.

Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised?  Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God?  We all agree, don’t we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?  Now think:  Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision?  That’s right, before he was marked.  That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.  And it means further that Abraham is father of allpeople who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the “outs” with God, as yet unidentified as God’s, in an “uncircumcised” condition.  It is precisely these people in this condition who are called “set right by God and with God”!  Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God’s action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.  Romans 4:1-12^(MSG)[2]

God gave Paul these words for us to understand that, the “chicken” of God wanting us close to Him, definitely came before the “egg” of our wanting to be with Him; it’s God’s initiative to save us.  In fact, elsewhere[3] Paul wrote that it was God Who first placed faith within us, in our hearts and on the very tip of our tongues, just waiting to get out.  It is true, we must respond in faith, just as Abraham; but we couldn’t even do that unless God had first placed faith in our hearts.  This is what Methodists have always referred to as prevenient grace, where God shows up first to watch over us, before we ever know anything about Him.  I may not be able to answer which actually came first in the chicken & egg debate, but the right answer is always God shows up first!

For You Today

Every step you’re going to take today has been checked ahead of time…from above!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!

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[1] Title Image: Pixabay.com

[2] The Message, ©1993, Eugene Peterson, NavPress

[3] Romans 10:8