Okay, if you will, please turn your Bibles to John chapter 3. We're going to be looking at verses 1 to 21 in my 20-year study of the book of John. Trying to outdo the real John. I've entitled this sermon, Look. Just simply look. Because a lot of the themes in this passage in John chapter 3 remind me a lot of the conversion story of Charles Spurgeon. Maybe some of you are familiar with it, maybe you're not. Spurgeon had a strong Congregationalist upbringing. His mother was a great prayer warrior. His father was a great preacher of the gospel. He had been christened as an infant, and he grew up hearing the beautiful, theologically sound hymns of Isaac Watts. He was very much like Nicodemus in our passage here. He was a man who was surrounded by the glorious light of the gospel, but did not have the ability to see that light. This is how Spurgeon describes the condition of his soul when he was a teenager. He says, I was years and years upon the brink of hell. I mean in my own feeling. I was unhappy. I was desponding. I was despairing. I dreamed of hell. My life was full of sorrow and wretchedness, believing that I was lost. Well, at the age of 15, Spurgeon was away at school in a town called Colchester. And feeling all the weight of this despair and this discouragement, he tried to go to an evening service at the local Congregationalist church, but he was hindered by a terrible blizzard that hit the town quickly. And he says as he was going up an alley where he could go no further, he wasn't gonna make it to the Congregationalist church, he turned a corner and he saw a primitive Methodist church. So yes, Methodists, the great Baptist pastor, Charles Spurgeon, part of his conversion story has to do with a Methodist church. He entered this church and there were about 15 people there. The man who entered the pulpit was not the pastor because the pastor was snowed in at home. This man was a lay pastor. And the elderly preacher got up and his text was Isaiah 45, 22, which says, look unto me and be saved, all the ends of the earth. The preacher said this, my dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says look. Now that doesn't take a deal of effort. It ain't lifting your foot or your finger. It is just look. Will a man not need go to college to learn to look? You may be the biggest fool and yet you can look. A man need not be worth a thousand a year to look. Anyone can look, a child can look, but that is what the text says, to look. After simply stressing the importance of looking to Christ for salvation, this man did something that Spurgeon felt uncomfortable about and definitely was not used to. He started talking to Spurgeon from the pulpit. He said, young man, you look very miserable. And he said, you will always be miserable in this life and the next if you do not obey this text. But if you obey, you will be saved, and you will have eternal life. And Spurgeon said this, there and then, the cloud was gone. The darkness had rolled away, and in that moment, I saw the sun, S-U-N, the sun. Now as we approach John chapter three, all of you good reform people know that there are a lot of complex issues that we could really dig into in this text. But since I'm on a 20 year journey, I don't have time for that. There's concepts like, you could do a whole sermon on what does it mean to be born of the water and the spirit. Lots of different interpretations of that. The title of Jesus is the son of man. Daniel chapter 7 and of course the controversy of what does world mean in John 3 16 wherever you land on those concepts it's fine if you disagree with the conclusions I'm going to quickly go to with those things there's nothing more important in this text than what Christ is simply trying to teach you want to be saved You have to look to Christ, the only source of your salvation. So let's look at this passage, John chapter 3, beginning in verse 1. Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, We know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these things that you do unless God is with him. Jesus answered him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, truly, truly, I say to you, Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. Nicodemus said to him, How can these things be? Jesus answered him, are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the son of man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. In this story, we are introduced to Nicodemus, a religious man who did not truly know the God of his people. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. And if you know the book of John, well, those facts are not always just historical facts. John means that to be a theological motif. Nicodemus came at night. Nicodemus was in darkness. He was spiritually blind. He was not able to see the kingdom of the God of his people. But the good news is he was coming to the one. who can enable him to see that kingdom. This Pharisee has seen Jesus work miracles, he's seen the signs, and he's come to the realization, this man has to be from God, but I don't really know what to do with that information. Jesus' first lesson to Nicodemus is this, unless you were born again, you cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus, of course, showing that this doesn't help him understand who Jesus is anymore, he asks a follow-up question. How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born again? Now, this is where Jesus makes it clear that he's not talking about physical birth. He's talking about something deeper. He's talking about spiritual things. He says, you must be born of water and spirit. And in this statement, Jesus is beginning to launch into a deep teaching on the work of the Spirit in our salvation. And I believe, this is one of those things where I said I'm not going to get too deep into this, I believe that water and Spirit are being used here as synonymous terms. The water cleansing is a picture of what the Spirit does when He births you again. The reason that Jesus mentions water here, I think, is because he's now switching to an illustration that Nicodemus would understand better from the Old Testament. We know Ezekiel 36 is not up here today. If you guys have seen it enough, you should know it well. It says, I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleanness And from all your idols, I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You see there the combination of cleansing and the work of the spirit go hand in hand in Old Testament passages like this. And Jesus is saying here, simply, he's saying, in order to look, in order to see the kingdom of heaven, you must be cleansed, you must be purified by the work of the Holy Spirit. Now, Jesus' teaching on the Spirit continues in verse eight. He says, the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. In this illustration, the Spirit is like unto the wind that blows where it wants to. Man does not choose how and where and when wind is gonna blow. And that's Jesus' point here. The Spirit is like the wind. You don't choose where and when and how the Spirit works. You don't resist the Spirit. The Spirit has absolute free will to work on whom he chooses to work on. There was only one Pharisee that came to Jesus by night. Why is that? Is it because this Pharisee was a better Pharisee? Was he more intelligent than the other Pharisees? Did he have a better moral compass than the other Pharisees. No, the difference is the Spirit was working in this Pharisee and not the others in this moment. And here Jesus is pulling back the curtain and showing us some maybe difficult things about the will of God and the will of the Spirit. But the simplicity of the message is still very present. If you are surrounded by light, You cannot see that light. There is hope because the Spirit can give you sight. The Spirit has the power and the will to give you sight. So looking, seeing the kingdom, it's all accomplished by the work of the Spirit in you to give you sight and the ability to be born again. Now that brings us to our second question. You'll look in your bulletins, I forgot to say that. If you look in your bulletins, you'll see this sermon is based on questions. I think I stole that from Benji, his last sermon. The second question is, once you are born of the spirit, once you can see, your desires are changed so you don't look to the same old things. You look to something good. You look to the sun. Beginning in verse 9, Nicodemus said to Him, How can these things be? Jesus answered him, Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the son of man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. Nicodemus says to Jesus, how can these things be? And Jesus says, if I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, How are you gonna believe if I start telling you deeper heavenly things? And the difficulty, at least for me, maybe this is not difficult for you guys, the difficulty in this text is that Jesus is saying that his teaching on the new birth is earthly things. To me, that seems like a deep thing. But Jesus is here calling it an earthly thing. And I think the reason for this is because This is a basic fundamental first step into the kingdom. It's something that happens on earth. Jesus is explaining it with earthly type illustrations like birth and water. And I think another reason Jesus uses this earthly heavenly comparison is because he's speaking to a religious man. And he's making the point that this is a man who has an academic understanding of God's word, but he doesn't even understand the fundamental need to be born again. So Jesus is humbling this Pharisee by revealing to him that he cannot understand the things of the kingdom until he understands the simple earthly need to be born again. And Jesus continues his emphasis on the basics by going to an Old Testament story that he knows Nicodemus will be familiar with. In Numbers 21, Israel rebelled against God. They rebelled against Moses. So what did God do? He sent a bunch of what? A bunch of snakes, a bunch of fiery snakes. And they bit the people. And some of them died, but not all of them. The ones who were left, they went to Moses and they pleaded with Moses, please go to God and tell him to heal us. And so Moses goes and he intercedes with God. And what's God tell him to do? To raise up a serpent, raise up the serpent on a pole. And if the people who are poisoned look at it, what will happen to them? They'll be healed, that's right. And what is the purpose of this whole historical event? It is basically to show the people of the Old Testament the simplicity of the gospel in looking to Jesus on the cross. Jesus is telling Nicodemus that the Son of Man has to be lifted up in the same way that the serpent was lifted up And what he means is that he has to be sacrificed on the cross. Isn't it our nature to look to everything except what's best for us? We like to look at our own efforts, our own ability, our own morality, our accomplishments. We love to do this. We love to lower the standard. by comparing ourselves to other sinners. Well, I'm better than that sinner. Looking everywhere but to the Son of Man takes the focus off of a truth that unbelievers want to ignore, and that is that they love their sin. And the stubborn love of sin can actually make someone choose death over the simple command to look. And this brings us to our final point. Why don't we want to look? Because we love darkness. Beginning in verse 16, Jesus says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. Why did God provide a way to redeem sinners that cost him so dearly? Jesus' answer? because God so loved. Another way to translate this is, this is the way that God loved, or this is how much God loved. Calvin says this about this passage, the true looking of faith is placing Christ before one's eyes and beholding in him the heart of God. poured out in love. God so loved the world that he gave the most treasured being in the universe to redeem a multitude of people who loved their sins. The gift God gave? His Son. Eternal. Perfect. Good. The holy creator of all things, given for who? The world. That word world is not meant to picture something pleasant. It includes an unpleasant region that Nicodemus would have been familiar with. The world is more than Israel. It is the world of lost humanity in every nation. Those evil Assyrians. those evil Babylonians, evil Americans, every nation of humanity. The world in this context is meant to represent those in darkness, those who desperately need the light of Jesus. And what does Jesus do? He's lumping this Pharisee who is externally called by God's people in with this group of world who needs the gospel, who needs to look to Christ. Nicodemus, who has come to Jesus at night in the dark, wants to know who Jesus is and why he does the things that he does, and Jesus' ultimate answer is this, I am the great gift of God. have come to be lifted up and by that lifting up to shine out light into a dark and needy world and this begs the question of Nicodemus and everyone who has not received Jesus Christ will you submit to the light or will you perish in the darkness In verses 19 to 20, Jesus makes it plain why people do not want to come into the light. They love darkness. They don't want their sinfulness exposed to others, to God, and especially not to themselves. They don't want to see it. When I read this verse, this phrase came into my mind. I did not see because I did not wish to see. Anybody know where that comes from? It's like, those weird things get stuck in your brain. And I was like, where did that come from? And so thankfully, we have this thing now called the internet that you don't ever have to suffer like that anymore. So I looked it up, and it comes from a cartoon that I'm sure I watched with my kids back in the early 2000s. And I would say is a very, sketchy, historical movie about Moses. It's called The Prince of Egypt. Okay, so in, this is not biblical, but in the scene, Moses is being chewed out by the Israelites. They're like throwing mud at him because he went to Pharaoh and now they're being punished for it. And Aaron is basically telling him, Moses, you never cared about us being slaves. until you found out that you were a slave. And this is where Moses says, I did not see, meaning I did not see the misery of your slavery, because I did not wish to see. What a confession. And this is a great illustration of sinful man's love of darkness. Spiritual blindness is not just about inability. It is about desire. Coming to the light is facing up to uncomfortable things. Being exposed in the light of Christ means confessing that my desires are evil and I need Jesus to change those desires. It's not a comfortable place to be, but it is the absolute best place for a sinner to find themselves. And there's a trade-off and a cost to being found in the light. If you're in the light, you're aware of your sin. You are plagued with, I'm sure nobody else has this experience as a Christian, plagued with, I still sin, but I want to please Jesus. And constantly fighting sin, trying not to give yourself over to sin. Am I really a Christian because I keep sinning? There's all these internal struggles. And there's also struggles with the world. The world is constantly saying, be like us, be like us. Why won't you just think like us? You're radical, you're strange. But there's hope because you have the hope that Christ is going to one day eradicate all your sinful desires and there will be peace in his kingdom. Now, remaining in the darkness means ignoring sin. which does give, we have to admit, does give some temporal peace. It gives you some comfort because you just do what you want to, you get the whole judgment thing off your shoulders, and the world loves you. You're embraced by the world powers and the world system. But it also means reaping the wages of sin. in this life and in the life to come, eternal misery. All because you are clinging to the love of sin and you don't want your deeds exposed in the light of Christ. But the good news is that your love of darkness is no match for the love of Jesus Christ. That's what Nicodemus discovered. We don't really have an account of Nicodemus' conversion, but if you were to turn over to the resurrection story, you would find out that Nicodemus gave a very great monetary value of myrrh and aloes for Jesus' burial. And you don't do something like that publicly in the Pharisees' world if you're not saying, I side with Christ. Nicodemus was in darkness. Internally, he was part of the unclean world, but his love of darkness was not powerful enough to overcome the love of God poured out in the gift of his Son. By the power of the Spirit, Nicodemus was enabled to see the beauty of Jesus Christ. Now, in conclusion, I want to discuss two things that are always fun to discuss that are brought together in this passage, the sovereignty of God and man's responsibility. What a great thing to close on, right? As Christians, the fact that the Spirit does the work of cleansing you and giving you a new heart, what should that do? It should destroy every ounce of pride that you might be clinging to. You have no reason to look at an unbeliever and think, I'm better than that person. I'm deserving of salvation. I made the right choices that led me to God. Apart from the work of God, we deserve judgment. And that truth should make us, as John the Baptist will say in the next section, make us decrease and make Christ increase. There's also this bit of encouragement for us as Christians. If you have loved ones who are rejecting the light of Christ, there should be an encouragement that you are not depending upon their will to come to the light. Because if it was up to their will, they would never come to the light. The hope is that you pray to a God who has the power to work and act His goodwill upon them and draw them to the light. And if you are an unbeliever listening to this sermon, and you understand, maybe intellectually, that the Spirit is the one who initiates your salvation, you might think, as Paul says in Romans 9, why do I deserve judgment? I can't be held responsible if the Spirit doesn't give me the new birth, right? Go read Romans 9, Paul goes through that logic there. But Jesus in this text holds you responsible. He says the light has come into the world and he doesn't say people rejected the light because of the choice of God. He says they reject the light because they love darkness and they don't want their sins exposed in the light. Your rejection is not God's fault. If you refuse to place your trust in Christ, it is because you love darkness. Now, I'll admit, it's not easy intellectually or especially emotionally to reconcile God's sovereignty and man's responsibility. That debate's going to be going on to the end of time. But you don't have to understand deep theological issues like God's sovereignty and man's responsibility in order to look to Christ for salvation. The command is simple. The entrance into the kingdom is easy enough for a child to understand. Look. Look to Christ. Trust in Christ instead of yourself. Be willing to have your deeds exposed in the light of Christ's beauty. Trust that his work instead of your own. Repent of your sins and fall upon the limitless capacity of God's love for you. And Paul puts it very simple. He says, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. It is that simple. Amen.