Nicodemus

Cane Creek Friends Meeting 7/20/25.

John 3 1-12

I will begin this morning with a question. With whom was Jesus speaking with when He said, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life”? John 3-16

Yes, Nicodemus. And Nicodemus and John 3 1-12 is what we will be looking into this morning.

Nicodemus was a member of the Jewish sect of influential Pharisees and a member of the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish court. Nicodemus held the prominent position as ruler of the Pharisees, an enormously powerful position. He was a wealthy man of power and status.

The Pharisees pledged to obey all traditions and laws down to the smallest detail. However, they became arrogant because of their belief that they were the only ones able to interpret the word of God.

"Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, 'Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with Him.'" John 3:1-2 NIV.

Why Did Nicodemus Approach Jesus at Night?

Scripture does not tell us, but several reasons have been imagined:

•Was he simply an inquisitive, curious seeker interested in Jesus' teaching and ability to perform miracles?

•Was he afraid to come in the daylight for fear of being seen with Jesus? He might have lost his position, wealth, and status if he had come to see Jesus of his own free will. The fierce opposition to Jesus by the Jews was already growing daily.

•It was Passover. Perhaps he wanted to wait until dark when the crowds had thinned and Jesus had finished teaching?

•The Sanhedrin sent a delegation to investigate John the Baptist (John 1:19-20). Did Nicodemus go to Jesus as their representative to investigate and question Jesus?

•Did Nicodemus have a longing to discern if Jesus could be the long-awaited Messiah?

I believe the latter to be true. I can envision Nicodemus lying awake at night, tossing and turning wondering could this be the Messiah that he and all the Pharisees have been waiting for. I believe Nicodemus felt as if he needed to speak with Jesus and find out for himself what was this Jesus all about. What if He really is the Messiah?

Who was this Jesus anyway? They were looking for a Messiah, but Jesus didn’t fit the description of their Messiah. This was a common carpenter from the small village of Nazareth. He was a nobody, yet His very presence was arresting. He may have looked just like every other Jew, but there was something about Him, something in His eyes that pierced the soul and in His speech that stirred the heart.

Imagine Nicodemus with me walking through the streets of Jerusalem at dusk, hoping for an appointment with this man Jesus. As he walks along, he is thinking to himself:

"The law of Moses is all that anyone needs to live a life dedicated to God. These great principles given to us by God have been defined down to strict laws that anybody can understand and must obey.

"I don’t understand this man Jesus and his teachings either. He must be a prophet of God to teach with such power and conviction. He has done so many great and wonderful miracles.

"I should have sent a servant to ask these questions. No, I need to have this conversation for myself. I need to understand what he’s all about. He’s not going away."

Now, look with me at John 3:2-12. Nicodemus comes to the place where Jesus is staying, sits down with Him and says…

“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.”

3Jesusreplied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.

4“How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!”

5Jesusanswered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So, it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” 9“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked.

10“You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things? 11Very truly I tell you, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still, you people do not accept our testimony. 12I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?

What an amazing conversation! Nicodemus obviously came to Jesus with his own agenda, only to have Jesus take control and turn the conversation in a completely different direction. Whatever Nicodemus wanted to know, Jesus drove home his great need for conversion.

This now leads us to the subject of conversion, and more specifically two types of conversion. Conversion first is repentance (turning from sin and unbelief) and faith (trusting in Christ alone for salvation). But after conversion, or after salvation, there are so many believers who fall into a religious performance trap - the trap that Paul spoke about in the third chapter of Galatians. Galatians 3:1-5.

3Oh, foolish Galatians! Who has cast an evil spell on you? For the meaning of Jesus Christ’s death was made as clear to you as if you had seen a picture of his death on the cross. 2Let me ask you this one question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. 3How foolish can you be? After starting your new lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? 4Have you experienced so much for nothing? Surely it was not in vain, was it?

5I ask you again, does God give you the Holy Spirit and work miracles among you because you obey the law?

Of course not! It is because you believe the message you heard about Christ.

What’s the point here? Simply stated these people had been saved, they had repented of their sin and placed their faith in Christ alone for salvation, but now that they were saved by faith, they had begun to live under the law again to earn God’s favor. We do that all the time. We have this list of religious dos and don’ts that we unconsciously follow, thinking that it is our adherence to those rules that earns us favor with God. It may be Bible reading, prayer, attendance, or anything else. It’s not supposed to be about what you do or don’t do for Christ, but whether or not you are abiding in Him, encountering Him - and all that religious stuff, is supposed to reflect that intimacy with the Lord. You can have religion without a relationship with Christ.

Maybe this morning you’ve never been saved - you need to be converted! Many of you this morning are saved, but you’re living in that trap, and Jesus wants to free you from it - He wants to breathe life into your faith - He wants to transform your thinking and free you so that you enjoy a love relationship with Him, the Son of God.

Conversion will only take place in your life when you realize that Jesus alone can meet your deepest spiritual needs and you allow Him to meet them.

We need acceptance by God.

By acceptance from God, I mean that every one of us, those of us in here and everyone else in the world is seeking acceptance by God. Now there are many in the world who don’t know that’s what they’re after. They may worship some other god; they may worship the cow or sun or moon. They may be New Age, Catholic, Baptist, atheist or agnostic. It really doesn’t matter what label you put on a man; every man is driven by this inner desire for acceptance, and he manifests this desire by the way he lives his life.

Think about Nicodemus, or any other religious person that lives under a works religion, and by works religion I mean any religion, faith or denomination that believes you must do something or keep being something in order to inherit eternal life. What drives that sort of performance? Nicodemus was the best kind of person that religion, education, and culture could produce. He knew the Law of Moses and he strived to live by that law in every detail. Why? Because his acceptance by God depended on it!

You ask someone if they are going to heaven and they say, "I hope so." Do you know what that means? It means, "I hope that God accepts me on the basis of how well I’ve lived my life, on how good I was or how well I obeyed His Word." It’s a trap! The Pharisees fell into it, and I believe there are a lot of fine people in our world today, both lost and saved, who have fallen prey to it.

Going back to our text in John 3. Nicodemus has obviously been giving some thought to Jesus. His words and actions have him perplexed. Jesus was obviously from God - "for no man can do these miracles that you are doing except God be with him." So, the question here really becomes this: if I am doing all this stuff and living for God, and you Jesus are too, then why is your life so different? So much more powerful, so much more dynamic than mine? What am I missing?

I want you to picture Nicodemus sitting there in the still hours of that night long ago with all the weight of the moment on him, and Jesus stares into his heart and says, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Immediately Nicodemus started trying to figure out what Jesus meant by that. Jesus told him, "Nicodemus, are you the great master teacher of Israel and don’t know what I’m saying? You’ve been trying to please God with all your righteous living and religious duty, and those things are admirable, but what you really need is to be converted - you need to be born again - except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

What does it mean to be born again? What does all this stuff about flesh and spirit and wind have to do with anything? Why does Jesus say in verse 12, "I have told you earthly things and you don’t believe, what makes you think that telling you about heavenly things will make you believe?"

Listen to the words again: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Now listen to what Jesus told the disciples, saved men, in Matthew 18, "unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven."

What’s the point? It’s this: what do you get when you have a birth? You have a tiny, defenseless little baby who can’t do anything. It can’t feed itself, can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t reason, can’t work, can’t clean its room, can’t ride a bike, can’t pass or fail a class, or anything else. All that baby can do is rely on you! When a child is born, our hearts are thrilled, overjoyed with the love we have for them! Our love, our joy, our acceptance of them has absolutely nothing to do with their performance - it exists solely because they are our children!

How does God want to meet your need for acceptance? If you’ve never been saved, if you’ve never repented and placed your faith in Christ alone for salvation - you need to know that God isn’t going to accept you based on what you can do for Him. He’s not going to accept you based on how good you can be or how perfectly you can keep His commandments.

The only way He’ll accept you is for you to repent - to turn from your sin of trying to earn His favor and place your faith in Him alone. Unless you become as a baby - God will not accept you. We don’t have anything to offer Him, there’s nothing we can do to earn His love, and our very efforts to bypass His Son Jesus Christ are offensive to Him.

Are you trusting in your own abilities to earn acceptance with God, or are you trusting in the death of Christ to pay for your sins? How sure are you that you would spend eternity with God if today were your last? If you were to stand before God today and He asked you, "Why should I let you into heaven?" What would you tell Him?

Would you mention your abilities, church attendance, kindness to others, Christian service, abstinence from some sin, or some other good deed?

It’s about recognizing our absolute inability to understand, to help, to do anything but admit our helplessness (like a baby), and trust Christ and Christ alone for salvation… "That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "That whosoever admits his helplessness and trusts Christ shall not perish but will be accepted by God."

Look with me at one last verse before I deal with the second conversion that needs to take place. Look at Ephesians 1:3-6.

3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. 4For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5he[a] predestined us for adoption to sonship[b] through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

How does Jesus meet that greatest spiritual need? In salvation, or conversion, when you are born again, when you come to Him as a little baby, He rescues you from the most wicked family known to man and adopts you into His family!

Let me address the second kind of conversion quickly now - many of you have already been accepted into God’s family through salvation, but if you’ll be honest with yourself, you’ve placed yourself in bondage to that performance trap.

· You sin, or you mess up, or disobey God - maybe it was deliberate and intentional or maybe not - you didn’t realize you sinned until later, then something bad happens in your life. Do you often find yourself thinking that God is getting you because you failed Him or sinned against Him? Here’s another one…

· You do something for the Lord, some act of service, maybe you give extra money or some other thing that you are proud of having done - do you find yourself thinking that God is going to favor you more because of it?

If you answered yes to either of those questions, it is very likely that you have succumbed to the performance trap, seeking God’s acceptance and approval based on your actions and behavior. Let me remind you of something - God will never love you any less than He does right now, and He can’t love you any more than He already does. Why? Because His love isn’t based on our performance - it’s based on being in His family.

So quit trying to earn God’s favor and live in the freedom that comes from an intimate love relationship with Jesus Christ.

You’ve already been accepted into the family! Cherish this and allow God to abide in you as we live out our lives in accordance with His will!