Inventing Yourself Godward
February 19, 2017
Bishop Scott Jones
John 3:1-17

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews. He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, 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 a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? “Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just 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, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:1-17 NRSV)

How great it is for me to worship with you all this morning. I’m very grateful to you and to Tom for the invitation to preach here this morning. As he told you my wife joined St. Luke’s United Methodist Church as soon as we moved to Houston. That was the last Sunday in August and I’m sorry to say that was the last Sunday we were here. We are in church every week someplace.
Some of you are new to the United Methodist Church and wonder what’s a bishop, anyway. Well, I lead the United Methodist Movement in 55 counties in East Texas from Texarkana to College Station to Beaumont, 680 churches, a quarter million members. I’m in church someplace, just not in Mary Lou’s home church. But she and I know we need a Sunday school class to anchor our community life, so we joined a class here at St. Luke’s and are glad that this is our spiritual home. So I’m glad to be here.
She would want me to give you her regrets for not being here today. I don’t want you to take it personally. She just got a better offer. We have three grandchildren and two of them needed her this weekend.
To show you how serious that choice was she even missed watching her beloved Jayhawks beat the Baylor Bears yesterday. I was at the game but Mary Lou was taking care of the granddaughters.
Anyway, I’m glad we’re part of St. Luke’s though we’re not here every week, but I hope that you all know that we do care about this church, just as I care about all 680 churches that I lead in East Texas.
Let’s pray together. God, we thank you for the presence of your Holy Spirit in this place, for we trust your promise that wherever two or more are gathered there you will be also. And yet, God, sometimes we don’t get it. So we ask open our eyes that we might see you. Open our ears that we might truly hear your word and then, God, strengthen our hands and feet that we might be doers of the Word and not hearers only. All this we ask in Jesus’ name and all God’s people say “Amen.”
You can be better than you are by God’s grace!
That statement is both the challenge and the opportunity of the Gospel. It’s the opportunity because if you have ever thought that frankly there were problems in your life that needed to be fixed or things in your life that you would like to grow toward, or ways in which you would like to become a better person, the good news of the Gospel is that by the grace of God it can be done. It’s possible.
Now it’s the challenge at the same time because quite frankly it’s also possible to make some bad decisions and take a dive in the wrong direction in your life. It’s also the challenge because quite frankly several of us would like to blame somebody else for our shortcomings. The problems in my life are the direct result of the way my parents raised me. Or my spouse hasn’t been supportive of me. Or the economy was a downturn. Or things happened beyond my control.
We’d always like to blame someone else of why we’re experiencing our problems. The reality is that God’s grace is at work in your life helping you to become the kind of person that God wants you to be. And that’s what it means to be human. God created us in God’s own image. We have the capacity to make choices and to shape our lives and God’s grace is always at work out there enabling and empowering us to do that.
I think that’s the point to the text that Katie read a few minutes ago. That important conversation between Jesus and Nicodemas where Jesus was trying to help Nicodemas to not only figure out all the rules that Julie was demonstrating for us here, but also to understand what the purpose and meaning of life was all about in its largest perspective.
Now I hope you’re following carefully as Katie read the Scripture because I want every United Methodist Christian to be a careful and good student of the Bible. So if you were following carefully enough come verse three, something should have gone off in your head to say, “Wait a minute, this is different.” In verse three Jesus says, “You must be born from above.”
Now wait a minute! If you were raised on the King James Version or maybe you use the New International Version in your Bible study, well, isn’t that supposed to read “You must be born again”? How can two reputable English translations give different translations of that word?
That’s why it’s so important when you’re doing that Bible study Tom invited you to join to participate in, that you ought to have several English translations present at the table because it helps you figure out what’s really going on in the text.
But it also helps you to know a little bit of Greek, so I’m going to teach you the one word that led to this divergent translation. The word is anothen. The first three letters – ano – literally mean “up” or “back.” Then - is like adding the word “ly” in English and turns something into an adverb. So what Jesus was doing when he said “You must be born anothen is that he was baiting Nicodemas, offering him a deliberate misunderstanding. And it worked!
Nicodemas responds, “Anothen? How can a man be born again? Can I enter back into my mother’s womb? This makes no sense, Jesus!”
Jesus had him. He uses this teaching technique frequently in the Gospels. Think about his conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. Same sort of thing was going on. He was deliberately trying to push the person he was talking to into a deeper spiritual understanding of what was being talked about. “You must be born anothen.”
Well, eventually he begins to teach Nicodemas that what he’s after is to say, “You have to be born by water and the Spirit. In other words if you want to see the Kingdom of God you have got to figure out what is your relationship to God. You must be born by the power of the Holy Spirit. You must be identified with who you are at your deepest level. Your identity must be wrapped up in your relationship to God.”
That’s true for you and me as well. Every human being has to decide, “Who are you going to be? And how does that relate to God?” God has no grandchildren. Each of us is invited into a relationship with God and the question is, are you going to accept God’s offer of that relationship and be a disciple, or are you going to go a different direction in your life?
Now, I’m well aware that we live in Texas and that there are other Christian groups around who read the Bible like we do. And sometimes they will take that traditional reading – “You must be born again” – and begin to teach others around them about what that means.
I’ve heard some people say, “Being a born again Christian means you have to have had exactly the same experience I have.” In other words, some of these folks can tell you the exact minute, hour, day and where they were when they got saved. “I was in the back seat of the church on the right hand side during the last night of the August revival when the Holy Spirit came and changed my life.”
I’ve known people whose experience was just like that. And I’ve always admired their testimony and frankly wished I’d had that. See, I’m a born again Christian but I never had quite that experience.
My experience is a little different and before I launch into my story I need to tell the young people in the room please do not do what I did. I’m getting ready to talk about hitchhiking and it was very dangerous. Do not do this. I do not recommend it. I’m lucky to have survived it. But it’s my story and it’s true.
I left home and even though I was raised in the church and gone through confirmation, as soon as I left home I quit going to church and I fell into some behavior patterns that were frankly wrong. I’m not very proud of what was going on. I was wandering in a spiritual wilderness, not attending church. But I got picked up hitchhiking near Bristol, Tennessee on Interstate 81.
The truck driver picked me up, that was unusual enough, and between Bristol and Knoxville where I got out to take I-40 going west, he shared his faith with me. I was amazed, listening to this lay person. He was a Seventh-Day Adventist telling me about his relationship with Christ. And I can tell you exactly what it was like climbing down out of the cab of the truck because I was thinking, “I want what that man has.”
I went back to church at West End United Methodist Church in Nashville. It was Lent and I joined a Bible Study full of old people. They were in their 50s.
Now, you young people, there used to be a little technology called a cassette tape recorder. I know you’ve never seen one but I remember them. The pastor put a message on a cassette tape and we put it into a recorder and the group listened to it to start our little Bible study during Lent that year. It was boring, boring, boring! This group did nothing for me.
Well, I started the University of Denver the next year and went to some non-denominational Bible studies. They had little pamphlets that said, “Here’s the Sinner’s Prayer and if you pray that, God will zap you and you will be saved.” I prayed it and nothing happened.
I then transferred to the University of Kansas and joined the United Methodist Campus Ministry, and for the next three years God was working on me. I never had that wonderful instantaneous experience but literally on my knees in the chapel the spring of my senior year, this peace came over me. I knew that I’d become a Christian somewhere. I was born again, it was just a four year, three month long labor.
I can’t tell you when it had happened, but I know that I had accepted Christ and was headed in that direction. So don’t let anyone tell you that being a “born from above” Christian means a particular experience. The question is, “Have you heard God’s call and have you said, ‘yes’ to it? So that at the deepest level in your heart your loyalty to Christ is the most important characteristic in your life.”
There are three aspects to this whole journey that I want to share with you this morning so that you’ll understand it more deeply. The first one is what I call the prerequisite.
I taught at Perkins School of Theology for twenty years. There were courses you had to take before you could get into my class. They were prerequisites – the requirements that you had to do before you could go on this part of the learning journey.
I think there’s a prerequisite to being on the salvation journey, and that’s the awareness that God loves you.
I asked Katie to read all seventeen verses in chapter three because sometimes when we read the Bible we isolate just one particular verse and we don’t see the whole flow. I wanted you to hear both verse 3 – “you must be born from above” – and verse 16 which is frequently quoted. You know it. “For God so loved all white people….” Wait a minute, that’s not it. “For God so loved all black folks….” No, that’s not it. “For God so loved all Texans…” Well, maybe you’re all with me on that one, I don’t know. “For God so loved all English speakers…” No, that’s not right. “For God so loved all educated middle class people…” No. What does John 3:16 say? “For God so loved the world…” – everybody. This is the foundation for our Wesleyan doctrine that God redeemed everybody that Christ died for the sins of the whole world. The technical name we call this is universal redemption. Everybody is redeemed. Everybody receives God’s grace.
And that’s a crucial message because you may be here this morning feeling worthless. Maybe your life is falling apart, you’re contemplating suicide and you’re wondering, “Is life worth living?”
Maybe you’re so wracked with guilt over things you have done or maybe are doing that you’re wondering “Can God possibly forgive me?” Many of us are experiencing in the world around us messages that belittle and demean us. Messages like, “You’re not the right color of skin.” Or, “You don’t speak the right language.” Or, “You’re not old enough.” Or, “You’re not young enough.” Or, “You’re not beautiful enough or handsome enough.” Or, “You don’t have enough money.” Or, “you don’t have enough education.”
In other words the world sometimes gives us these messages and we absorb them thinking, “I‘m not worth very much.”
People, that’s just plain wrong. The good news is God loves you. Your life matters to God. You are important. Your life is valuable and God cares about you. That’s a crucial message to hear because the possibility of God working in your life to help you invent yourself in the right direction is pretty important.
Sometimes we think, “Well, I’m too old and too set in my ways. God can’t possibly do anything with me.”
Well, I want to share with you the testimony of a man named Michael Swayzer. He’s on the facilities staff of a United Methodist Church in Sugar Land and I heard his testimony.
Michael was in prison for a number of years. I don’t know exactly what he did but he was there a really long time. His own testimony is that the things he was doing were just flat evil. Evil! He said he benefited from them materially, and by money, but they were wrong.
In prison he was reached by a group of United Methodists. He says, “God put them in my life to show me a new way.” He’s now out and has an honest job. He says, “God is so good to me it scares me sometimes. And the only important thing in my life right now is my relationship with Jesus Christ and doing the right thing.”
If you could hear Michael’s testimony it would bring tears to your eyes. Now sometimes that’s a motivation for engaging in prison ministries and that’s a wonderful thing to do. But the point I’m trying to get across to you is that if God did that for him, I’m guessing that your problems are just not that serious. And what can God do in your life?
Which leads us to the second point about direction. You can be headed in the wrong direction but God is inviting you to reinvent your life Godward. And the question is, what does Godward look like? What should be the goal of your life? How are you going to measure your progress to become the kind of woman or man that God wants you to be?
The New Testament gives you a lot of measuring sticks. One of them is in Matthew 25 and the parable of the sheep and goats is pretty clear. If you want to make it to heaven you sure better be doing something to feed the hungry, to welcome the stranger, to visit those who are sick or in prison. If you’re not doing those things you have an issue because Christians do those kinds of ministries.
There’s another set of places where the New Testament teaches us what being a grown-up Christian looks like. Galatians 5:22 is one of them and in that letter Paul talks about the Holy Spirit working in the life of each believer. And the way you know the Holy Spirit is working in your heart and mind is that it produces certain kinds of fruit. He lists 9 characteristics and says, “When you’re living in Christ the Holy Spirit is making you progress in all 9 of these areas.”
Now if you’re serious about following Jesus I think you should memorize the 9 fruits of the spirit. I’m going to help you right now. Repeat after me: “Love, joy, peace.” Again, “Love, joy, peace.” Once more, “Love, joy, peace.” Now say it again, “Love, joy, peace.”
If you wonder how I memorized my sermon, this is my method. Say it again, “Love, joy, peace.” Then “patience, kindness, generosity.” Once more, “patience, kindness, generosity.” Say it again, “Patience, kindness, generosity.”
Now do all six: “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and generosity.” All six. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity.” Once more, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity.”
With the last three I put a little rhythm with it. “Faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Those three, “faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” Again, “faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
Now do all nine. “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self- control.” Congratulations, St. Luke’s! You’ve memorized the fruit of the Spirit.
Now here’s my parenting and grand-parenting tip for the day. Make your children memorize the fruit of the Spirit.
Mary Lou and I lived in the North Texas area for 27 years. We had family in Colorado, and in Kansas. We spent a lot of time in the car. Wall to wall car seats when they were little.
Children are sinners. You do not have to teach children how to misbehave. And so my children would steal each other’s toys, pull each other’s hair. They would irritate each other deliberately just to see if they could make them cry. Those trips were sometimes a little long.
So I would turn around from the driver’s seat and say, “Arthur, fruit of the Spirit!” And he would say through gritted teeth, “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
Then I’d say, “Arthur, which of these nine are you not showing right now.” And he’s say, “Patience! And it’s Marynell’s fault!”
There’s a downside to this parental technique. Your children grow up, and right about now Arthur is preaching the Gospel at St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church in Plano, Texas. Every now and then my children look at me and say, “Dad, fruit of the Spirit. Which of these nine are you not showing right now?” Because my children know their father’s a sinner.
I can tell you exactly where I was standing in the parsonage in Commerce, Texas when I blew up and lost control. My daughter had done something that deserved correction, but she did not deserve the explosion she was witnessing in her father. We Jones men had learned how to handle anger – we’d stuff it down in our gut and stay calm.
If something bad happens you stuff it down in your gut and you just stay calm. You just keep storing up all these bad things until if there’s a trigger then – kaboom! - you explode!
Well, that’s what happened that day. I lost control. I went into this ranting, raving, mad yelling match. And I watched this precious little 13-year-old girl step back in fear, and I realized I had a problem.
Fortunately I was in an Emmaus reunion group at the time and I confessed my farthest from Christ moment as that event. I found two of the guys in the group who also had the same problem. We began being honest with each other. We began praying. And eventually God made me a more patient man and increased my self-control. That did help when the kids left home.
But quite honestly, I’d made spiritual progress in a lot of ways over the years so I’m in better shape now than I was 25 years ago. The point being that God is at work in your life in each of these nine areas. God is at work inviting you to be in ministry with the homeless, God is at work inviting you to reach out and be a part of helping other people. And that’s a crucial part of the direction as we are inventing ourselves in a Godward direction.
Now the third important point in this is that if you remember my opening sentence - you can be better by God’s grace. Mark Twin once said about the Bible, “It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me….” Did you catch the double negative? “… The parts of the Bible that bother me are the parts I understand all too well.”
So when Jesus gives us a commandment and I take it seriously, I begin to realize that, “Oh, God! I can’t do this! You’re asking more of me than I can possibly imagine.”
But the truth of the matter is that John Wesley has taught me that whenever God commands something in the Scripture, it’s a hidden promise. Because God’s never going to command you to do something that God’s not going to help you do. The way we make spiritual progress in our lives is by the grace of God.
So the question then comes, “How do we get some of that grace?” The answer is, “You do the things that God has commanded as means of grace – as channels of grace.”
You’re in worship every week. If not here at St. Luke’s, then some other place. You’re engaged in a small group, perhaps a Sunday school class, or one of the Bible study groups that Tom was talking to you about. You’re engaged in some sort of service activity. You’re daily reading your own Bible and you’re engaged in your own prayer.
In other words, all these things we do are places where we allow God to shape our hearts and minds so that we can become the kind of people God wants us to be. It’s this Christian journey of reinventing ourselves Godward. Yes, becoming a Christian is the big one, but all the way along the journey God is going to be helping you address whatever the issues are in your life, and God’s grace is going to shape you to grow up and become the kind of person that God deep down intended you to be.
That’s why we come to church. That’s why you’re in worship this morning. That’s why you’re doing your Bible study and engaging in ministries of service to other people. Because, my sisters and brothers, you can truly be better than you are, by God’s grace.