Sermon Tone Analysis

Our theme for 2022 is “Begin Again”

It time to begin again to do the things that we stopped doing.

I’m calling this series “Believe Again”

You may have already believed the gospel, but it is time to believe again.

John calls us back to a living and vital relationship to God first, and then through God to others.

Faith is something that we grow in, and it is time to believe again!

Last week was “Believe in Jesus”

We learned that Jesus is the Word - God’s revelation of Himself.

And that we recognize Him as we are being transformed by the Spirit.

Jesus came to be like us, so that we could become like Him.

Becoming like Jesus requires an entirely different perspective.

Remember Jesus communicating with humans is like trying to explain air to fish.

There is a whole spiritual reality that humanity is generally unaware of.

In our modern society, most people would say that angels and demons, God and the devil are just constructs of our imagination to try to explain feelings and experiences that we don’t understand.

It’s true that the way think about these things is mostly a construct of our imagination, but there is no denying that they are real!

There is a spiritual realm all around us that sometimes and in some ways intersects with our own lives.

Jesus came to restore our human capacity to relate to God.

That requires and ability to perceive, understand and function in spiritual reality.

We are spiritual beings who have largely forgotten who we really are.

Since we are essentially like “fish out of water” when it comes to spiritual reality, we rely on metaphors - things that we understand and can relate to which also help us understand spiritual things.

In this passage, we will learn about spiritual reality from Jesus going to the temple, from him talking about new birth and from discussions about heaven and earth.

The Temple

One of the first things recorded in the Gospel of John that Jesus did is the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem.

All of the other gospels put this event at the end of Jesus’ ministry, during the last week before the crucifixion.

It is possible that Jesus cleansed the temple on more than one occasion - or even that it was his regular practice when attending the Passover feast.

Jesus claimed that they had no right to be there.

This is “God’s house” not an open market.

The temple is like an embassy for the spiritual realm.

Since I lived overseas for a time, I have also been to an American embassy.

An embassy is literally a representation of America in a foreign country.

You are not allowed in unless you can prove that you have a reason for being there.

When you are there, it is like you are on American soil.

They run the place according to American rules.

The whole purpose for an embassy is to transact business with the country that it represents.

We were there to get a passport for our daughter who was born in that country.

The embassy could validate her birth certificate and recognize her as an American citizen.

This was not a tourist destination.

There was no museum or gift shop.

If someone would have been in the lobby selling T-shirts, that would be very inappropriate.

This is a place for official government business.

The temple is like an embassy for the spiritual realm.

That is also true of pagan temples - they represent other spiritual beings.

The temple in Jerusalem is the place that represents Yahweh - the One True God.

It’s like the embassy of heaven.

God gave his people a portal to be able to communicate with Him.

This was a place that they were to come and spend time in His presence.

It was a place to worship God, to pray and to hear from Him.

But at the time of Jesus, it had become more of a commercial enterprise - taking advantage of peoples religious sentiments to make money.

Somebody stops Jesus and asks him for his credentials- what gives him the right to do this.

Well first of all, if this is an embassy; then he’s the ambassador - but they don’t know that yet.

They are asking for his insignia- literally a sign.

Jesus says, “you want a sign - I’ll give you a sign.”

Destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in three days.

The whole dialogue is a clever play on words - sign can mean insignia or it can mean a miracle demonstrating God’s power and authority.

“Temple” can mean a few different things too.

The temple that Jesus was speaking of is His body.

When Jesus said “destroy this temple, people assume that he meant the temple complex - the courts where all the people are.

But the word that John records Jesus as using is the word for the holy place - that part of the temple in which the deity dwells.

Remember we said last week that Jesus is God?

Well He is saying it Himself - right here!

Jesus is prophesying His own death and resurrection and nobody understood what He was saying - until after it happened.

Unbelievers misunderstood Jesus because they perceived only the physical or surface level meaning of his statements and were unaware that these statements actually revealed something about Jesus and the transformation of life that he brought

Why did Jesus use double meanings?

Because he was describing things that people wouldn’t understand.

He was using words that we understand to tell us about things we can’t understand knowing that someday, many of us would understand.

When John tells the story, he is writing to believers who now make up the church which is also called “the Body of Christ.”

As the Body of Christ, we are His temple.

To understand this better we need to go to the writings of Paul.

When Jesus spoke of His body as the temple - the dwelling place of God - that was true as He was God made flesh.

But it is also true of His metaphorical body - the church - the new temple and His representation on earth.

The “you” here is plural, referring to believers together as the church.

There is one other place where the “you” is singular - referring to the individual believer.

The point is that the temple is the representation of the spiritual reality on earth.

It’s God’s embassy.

Jesus is the ambassador.

And now we are appointed His ambassadors.

If that’s true, then Jesus cleansing the temple is a way of demonstrating that we need to be about Kingdom business.

This body is not a marketplace and it’s not for sale.

This temple is a place to commune with God.

The New Birth

Does anyone remember being born?

Probably not.

But you might remember your kids being born - they open their little eyes and see for the first time the source of that mysterious voice that they have come to know and recognize.

Being born again is like being born the first time - you didn’t do anything to make it happen - you just opened your eyes to your new reality!

Open your eyes to spiritual reality.

Nicodemus protested to Jesus that it is impossible to be born again.

Jesus told Nicodemus that it’s only impossible because you are thinking about it in the physical way.

There is a whole world around you that you have not yet experienced because you have yet to open your eyes - spiritually speaking.

You have not begun to breath the air of heaven.

This world is a womb - your just here to be formed into the spiritual being that you were meant to be.

Jesus says that we need to born through water and the spirit.

Of course, most interpreter through church history have taken this as a reference to baptism - in water and in the Holy Spirit.

I believe that it is adding another layer of imagery to baptism by comparing it to childbirth.

A baby is formed in water and then when it is born, takes it first breath of air.

Breath and air are the same word as spirit in both the Hebrew and the Greek.

So baptism which symbolizes repentance and spiritual transformation are a kind of spiritual birth.

We are formed by that experience as we reflect on it and realize what it means.

We begin to be sustained by spiritual life, like the air that we breath.

Spiritual things become our new reality and the reality through which we interpret all of life, even the physical.

Understanding spiritual things comes by experience.