Marvel not that I said Unto thee.
Ye must be born again. John 3, 8.
In the year 1789 the crew of the English government
ship The Bounty mutinied, and those of the mutineers who escaped
capture sought to evade punishment by settling on a rocky island in the
South Seas. For ten years drunkenness, debauchery, and murder reigned
in this settlement of fugitives, until, after an orgy of bloody
quarrels, disease, and native uprisings, one single white man,
Alexander Smith, remained alive on the island. Among the articles
salvaged from the ship which they had stolen and then destroyed was a
copy of the Bible. When that lone survivor, cut off from the rest of
the world and surrounded by native and half-breed women and children,
read that revelation of God and all the damning savagery of his past
life loomed up before him with its appalling consequences, he found the
Christ of forgiveness and love; he was converted to that Christ, and
from that time on the reign of crime and lust was ended. And Pitcairn
Island (for this is the name of that tiny, yet remarkable speck in the
Southern Ocean), the island that had been a veritable hell on earth, by
one of the most spectacular changes in history became a model
community, which has attracted the attention and excited the admiration
of all travelers who have visited it.
Now that particular Bible which was responsible for
this startling change is preserved in the New York City Library. But
the Bible that can bring to you who do not yet know Christ the same
change and the same happiness is the Bible that may repose unopened and
unread in your home, the Bible that you may neglect and belittle and
ignore, the Bible that down through the ages has made men Christians.
The change that shook Alexander Smith is the change that must
revolutionize the heart and soul of every one who comes to Christ
today. For this is the plain teaching of that word of Scripture which I
present to you this evening, “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must
be born again.”
THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF THESE
WORDS.
Now, who spoke these words, “Ye must be born again”?
Remember that this is no personal or private opinion, no theory of
mine, no hypothesis of the Church; it is rather the everlasting Word of
our Lord that will outlive heaven and earth — Christ preaching into our
very hearts tonight. And as Moses was commanded when God spoke to him,
“Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou
standest is holy ground,” so I ask you to listen with reverence and awe
as the Majesty of Love tells us tonight, “Ye must be born again.”
To whom were these words of our Lord spoken? If we
have a mental picture of some reprobate or outcast whom Christ has
lifted up out of the gutter, then let us immediately disabuse our minds
of that error. For he who on that memorable night was privileged to see
His Savior face to face and to learn from His own divine lips this
foundation truth of life and eternity was notably preeminent in the
religious and political circles of the Jewish capital — Nicodemus, a
master, a leader, a pillar in Israel. But what Christ says to Nicodemus
He repeats to every one of us, “Except a man” (that is, any man, every
man) “be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” There is no
exemption; the universal, unavoidable decree of God is this: “Ye MUST
be born again.”
Let us not pass lightly over this unescapable
“must.” I find that throughout His entire ministry our Lord, as far as
His utterances have been recorded in the four gospels, used this word
“must,” when giving His instructions to men, in only one other place,
in a passage which stresses the spiritual nature of true religion. The
importance of this is often overlooked; for it implies that in the
temporal and perishable things of life Christ makes no conditions and
does not concern Himself about the artificial distinctions which men
are prone to prize so highly. He does not ask whether a man is an
intellectual giant or a mental dwarf, but He does say, “Ye must be born
again.” He does not inquire whether he is an American or a Canadian,
whether he is a citizen or an alien, whether he is in the social
register or on the police blotter, whether he is a Republican or a
Democrat, whether he is white or black; but there is one common
condition which completely levels all humanity, this injunction, “Ye
must be born again.”
But what is the real meaning and intent of these
words? Nicodemus entirely misunderstood His divine Instructor, because
he asks, “How can a man be born when he is old?” And the mistake of
this master in Israel, this despiritualizing of religion, this
dragging down the truths of the soul to the level of things touchable
and tangible, is one of the saddest, yet one of the most constant and
prevalent, of all delusions. Jesus offers the Samaritan woman at
Jacob’s Well the living water, and eagerly she begs, “Sir, give me this
water that I thirst not.” He tells the Jews at Capernaum of the “true
Bread from heaven,” and yearning for a return of the manna days, they
beseech Him, “Lord, evermore give us of this Bread.” Nicodemus hears of
a rebirth, and his literal, material mind objects, “How can these
things be?”
Today people similarly forget that Christianity is
spiritual, that it deals with the soul, that the worship of God, by
the Savior’s own emphasized declaration, is only correct and effective
when it is “in spirit and in truth,” but most assuredly not correct
when it takes Christianity out of the heart or insists upon a slavishly
literal interpretation of spiritual truths. So when people today think
that they have been converted, “born again,” when they refrain from
using profanity or sign a pledge to stop drinking, or put honesty and
efficiency maxims in their offices; when they believe that mere outward
membership in the Church, checks for the Church’s work, occasional
attendance at church services, automatically involve conversions and
Christianity, they have fallen hopelessly short of the first and
fundamental requirement of Christian faith. Why, a heathen can use good
language and be temperate; a man who denies the very existence of God
and ridicules Christ can have a certain form of outward, civic morality.
No, the new birth is deeper than all this, for it is
the new life of true faith in our hearts; it is the inner change that
takes place when sin-laden human beings, even as you and I, Thy nature
the children of wrath,” as the Scriptures call all of us, become
children of God. It is that wonderful spiritual process whereby, as
soon as we believe in Jesus Christ as the divinely ordained Redeemer of
sinful mankind in its totality, we come into a new spiritual existence,
as new, twice-born creatures. “That which is born of the flesh,” our
Lord assures us, “is flesh”; that is, man of himself and by himself
not only lacks every bit of initiative and power to rise up above the
carnal state of his existence, with its strife, hatred, impurities,
envy, dishonesty, its base thoughts and motives, but he is also void of
all hope in life and in death. Yet as soon as a man meets Jesus, as
soon as his heart has been opened to this Friend of sinners, as soon as
he finds in the Cross forgiveness and a release from the forces that
have dragged him down, he is turned around, converted, his sins are
removed. He who was spiritually dead becomes spiritually alive; the
blindness of his soul is gone; the fog of unbelief that beclouded the
Light of the world is dissipated; God becomes his Father, and he
becomes God’s son; in short, he is born again.
Do I hear some one tonight asking in hopeful
anticipation, How does this stupendous change take place? How can I be
born again? I need not stop in answering to emphasize that you and I
ourselves, with all the resources of human ingenuity: education, law,
surgery, psychology, and similar methods, cannot convert ourselves.
“Can a leopard change his spots?” is the unanswered question of
Scripture which makes men look to God as the Source of every spiritual
power and to plead with assurance, “Turn Thou me, and I shall be
turned.”
Now, those who expect some tremendous outward change
and convulsion may be destined to the same experience with which the
prophet Elijah met when God came in a still, small voice, after a
whirlwind and an earthquake and a fire had passed without revealing
Him. For Christ says, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit,
he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” This rebirth, then, is the
miracle-working power of the Spirit of God in Baptism and in the Word
of God. Remember, that Spirit operates in your heart and in mine
through every passage of Scripture that you read and hear, through
every word of God that addresses itself to you, even as these words of
truth go out to you tonight. Every time you hear of Christ, every time
you read of Christ, indeed, every time you see Christ represented in
His grace and truth and love and understand what Christ means to you,
you have God’s invitation, God’s means of rebirth and conversion.
Think of slaughtering Saul on the Damascus road,
reborn and renamed Paul the Apostle. By what process? The Word of God
came to him from heaven. Think of the jailer at Philippi, converted to
the worship of the same Christ whom the two captive apostles served.
Again, we ask, By what process? Simply by the Gospel of Jesus which
those two prisoners preached to him. Think of the Ethiopian court
official whom Philip brought to Christ. By what process? we repeat. By
the working of “the Spirit and the water,” the Gospel promises of
Isaiah, interpreted to him by Philip, and the regenerative washing of
Baptism. Think of Martin Luther torturing himself in the depth of
agonizing despair, but converted to that happy, radiant, confident
Christianity that characterized his remarkable life. By what process?
By searching the Scriptures, through which the Spirit gave him this
surpassing truth, “The just shall live by faith.” Think of Lord
Littleton and Sir Gilbert West, two cultured and scholarly gentlemen,
who, believing that the Bible was out of date, set about to show, among
other things, that the Biblical account of the conversion and rebirth
of St. Paul could not be true, but who emerged from their painstaking
and minute investigation only to vindicate the Bible and to be
converted themselves. Once more we ask, By what process? And again we
answer, By the Spirit of God.
THE PROFOUND AND PERSONAL
SIGNIFICANCE OF THESE WORDS.
Now, if the Spirit of God can overcome such
predisposed hatred, if He can enlighten ignorance, if He can defeat
despair, surely He can come to all of you tonight and give you this
happy and wonder-working assurance that, if you will but believe the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and humbly and penitently, yet
confidently and triumphantly acknowledge that Christ died for your
sins, you, whoever you are and wherever you may be, are twice-born
persons, children of God. No conditions, no requirements, no
limitations, no qualifications, simply this pure and priceless promise
of a new birth that passes all power to understand and to explain!
And just because we cannot fathom
the depth of God’s divine working in our hearts, Jesus says, “Marvel
not.” He tells us not to rationalize, but simply to realize, this
wondrous love. What a rebuke this “marvel not” affords to our
proof-seeking, skeptical age when we are challenged, “Explain it, and
we will accept it”! But “explain a blade of grass,” we respond. “Tell
us how a little seed that is sown into the black earth slumbers in the
ground and decays and then in its season brings forth its stalks of
grass. Explain the human body with its marvelous cells or even one of
the intricate subdivisions of the cells.” For, if we believe and accept
only those things which we can understand and explain, what is there in
life that we can truly believe and accept? A distinguished American
scientist, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his
revolutionary discovery in electricity, states very candidly, “I
cannot explain why I am alive rather than dead. Physiologists can tell
me a great deal about the mechanical and chemical processes of my body,
but they cannot say why I am alive. But would it not be utterly absurd
for me to deny that I am alive?” These words of Dr. Millikan simply
reecho the classic argument of our Lord, “The wind bloweth where it
listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence
it cometh and whither it goeth.” And yet there is no one who denies
that the wind exists simply because he and no one else can explain its
nature and movements. And so when a radio friend in Los Angeles writes
us, “It has been years since I have been inside of a church of any
kind, but since I heard your radio program, I am coming back to the
blessed fold. I shall have to make my confession complete. Every
Saturday afternoon when I finished my work, I went on a drunk. But a
week ago tonight the Word went right home. I found salvation in my own
home in front of my own radio. That was the deciding point in my life,”
— when our mail brings us letters of this kind, showing the divine
blessings that have rested on this radio crusade for Christ, we cannot
analyze the change with the help of test tubes and crucibles and
microscopes and X-rays, but we know that it is there because Christ
tells us it is, because we can feel it and see its demonstration in the
new life. “He that believeth on the Son of God bath the witness in
himself.”
Are you converted? If you have never known what it
means to have the blessed assurance of a Savior for time and for
eternity; if you have never felt the happiness of having your
conscience cleared with God; if you have never experienced the joy of
faith in Christ, then the same Lord who tonight has told you, “Ye must
be born again,” calls out to you now, “Come to Me! Believe in Me! Trust
in Me!” May God grant that you heed this invitation of grace to the
newness of a Christ-conscious, Christ-centered life! Amen.
[The
preceding sermon first aired in 1931, and is included in the book “The
Lutheran Hour”.]