AlanSmith_Sermon_WhatsInMyAccount

This is the message I gave last weekend at Crossroads Church in Decatur, TX.

I am struck in these verses with the mysterious interplay between a man’s will and God’s. This is a powerful example of the partnership that exists between God and man in the salvation process. God has sovereignly given light to every man (vs 9). None of us could hold any hope apart from this truth. No amount of lifting my sail will result in the movement of my boat unless the wind is blowing. No amount of choosing to look will avail if there is nothing to see. God has given light to every man.

There are some who reject him. Some people who have light choose not to see. But some see. Some receive. Some believe in his name.

And what is God’s response? He authorizes them to become his children. Man responds to God’s light, choosing to see. God responds to man’s faith, authorizing him as a child. But when a man chooses to receive and believe, he is responding to God’s sovereign initiative in giving him light. So though a man exercises his will to receive and believe, his salvation is not by his own will, but by the will of God. God’s will is the cause of my salvation. My choice to receive and believe is the necessary condition. God’s grace and mercy expressed through the finished work of Christ on the cross is the cause of my salvation. My faith is the necessary condition for his provision to be appropriated in my life. The wind moves my boat, but only if I lift my sail. His light enables sight, but only if I choose to look.

In the end, I will take no credit for my salvation, for I am born by his will, not my own. But for those who refuse to see, who refuse to receive and believe, it will be the exercise of their will that excludes them from his grace. If I refuse to lift my sail, I cannot blame the wind when my boat is dead in the water. If I refuse to open my eyes, I cannot blame the sun for my blindness.

5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
NKJV

Birth must be quite an experience. What must that be like? We leave the only reality we have ever known, a warm and cozy space about the size of a volley ball and emerge into a vast world completely outside of our capacity to understand. We are born into a reality for which we have absolutely no point of reference. We enter a world in which we are completely dependent and within which we must now learn to grow and mature. But this is not a learning defined simply in terms of the accumulation of new and additional data. This is a qualitatively new way of seeing and experiencing reality.

Jesus describes our entrance into God’s Kingdom in these precise terms. What is it like to enter the Kingdom of God? First, we must leave behind the only reality we’ve ever experienced. By the Spirit we emerge into a bigger, deeper reality – one for which we have no reference point. Entrance into the Kingdom is best described in terms of birth.

Faith in Christ is so much more than mental ascent to doctrine. Becoming a disciple of Jesus is far more than a commitment to identifying and implementing Biblical principles. Christianity isn’t simply our identification with a group or organization, nor is it a new set of ideas, even good, right, and true religious ideas. Saving faith is in fact an entirely different way of perceiving reality. It is an awakening from darkness to light, emerging into a new reality where none of the old rules apply and everything is somehow strangely different and upside down.

Like the wind, this new life surprises us and is difficult to tame or predict. When asked to explain we find ourselves stretching for a vocabulary that doesn’t quite exist yet. All we are able to describe is that the trees are blowing. The wind itself is beyond description for we are so new to this larger, deeper reality called the Kingdom. We are born. Again.

God has provided a way through Jesus for us to enter a new reality called the Kingdom of Heaven. Many long to be free – free from addictions, free from destructive behavior patterns, free from demonic oppression, free from anything in our life that hinders us from becoming all Jesus created and died for us to be. Our first step to freedom is the new birth. This is not something we add on to our old life as an accessory. Being born radically alters our perception and definition of all we have every known to be true and real. You cannot be born and remain within the cozy reality you’ve occupied before. So the first thing God frees us from is all we have ever thought to be true and all the ways we have thought about truth.

Birth must be quite an experience. What must that be like? We leave the only reality we have ever known, a warm and cozy space about the size of a volley ball and emerge into a vast world completely outside of our capacity to understand. We are born into a reality for which we have absolutely no point of reference. We enter a world in which we are completely dependent and within which we must now learn to grow and mature. But this is not a learning defined simply in terms of the accumulation of new and additional data. This is a qualitatively new way of seeing and experiencing reality.

Jesus describes our entrance into God’s Kingdom in these precise terms. What is it like to enter the Kingdom of God? First, we must leave behind the only reality we’ve ever experienced. By the Spirit we emerge into a bigger, deeper reality – one for which we have no reference point. Entrance into the Kingdom is best described in terms of birth.

Faith in Christ is so much more than mental ascent to doctrine. Becoming a disciple of Jesus is far more than a commitment to identifying and implementing Biblical principles. Christianity isn’t simply our identification with a group or organization, nor is it a new set of ideas, even good, right, and true religious ideas. Saving faith is in fact an entirely different way of perceiving reality. It is an awakening from darkness to light, emerging into a new reality where none of the old rules apply and everything is somehow strangely different and upside down.

Like the wind, this new life surprises us and is difficult to tame or predict. When asked to explain we find ourselves stretching for a vocabulary that doesn’t quite exist yet. All we are able to describe is that the trees are blowing. The wind itself is beyond description for we are so new to this larger, deeper reality called the Kingdom. We are born. Again.

God has provided a way through Jesus for us to enter a new reality called the Kingdom of Heaven. Many long to be free – free from addictions, free from destructive behavior patterns, free from demonic oppression, free from anything in our life that hinders us from becoming all Jesus created and died for us to be. Our first step to freedom is the new birth. This is not something we add on to our old life as an accessory. Being born radically alters our perception and definition of all we have every known to be true and real. You cannot be born and remain within the cozy reality you’ve occupied before. So the first thing God frees us from is all we have ever thought to be true and all the ways we have thought about truth.