New Beginings with God
Sermon preached in St Salvator's Chapel, St Andrews on the 17th February, 2008 by Rev Bill Slack
Readings: Genesis 12: 1 - 4a & John 3: 1 - 17
Sermon
As we journey through Lent towards the Cross and the Resurrection, today's lectionary readings remind us that God gives us moments of opportunity to make a new beginning. The American preacher Robert Schuller said 'Life is full of endings, but every ending is a new beginning.' His comment was based on something Thomas a Kempis said some five centuries before, that 'What seems to be an end may really be a new beginning.' We can make new beginnings in many different areas of life but especially in our relationship with God. Our lives can be clouded by countless disappointments and scarred by multitudes of failures but, in our Lenten journey, we remember that 'God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him.' In Jesus Christ, God graciously invites us to a journey of faith and opens up the possibility of a new beginning, a fresh start in our relationship with Him. As the Apostle Paul comments in 2 Cor.5:17 'if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!'
In our Old Testament reading, God invited Abram to make that kind of new beginning in life. 'The Lord said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you." We see that:
1. A NEW BEGINNING INVOLVES SEPARATION
Who was this Abram who eventually became God's friend and the father of all who believe? When we meet him, he had nothing in his background to mark him out as special. Abram didn't know or worship God. He worshipped the sun god like the rest of his family. Josh.24:2 says "Long ago, your forefathers, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the River and worshipped other gods". There nothing in Scripture to suggest Abraham was seeking for spiritual truth beyond his immediate experience or aspiring to live a better life than others. Not only was he a man with no background, he was a man with no reputation. He hadn't achieved anything of significance in his life. He wasn't a great leader, nor had he undertaken daring adventures. He earned no honours from his community. He had no special standing or reputation. And Abram had no special qualifications. His home city, Ur of the Chaldees, was a university city, a centre of academic excellence. But he wasn't an academic. He was a farmer, a small businessman leading an unspectacular career. So he was a very ordinary, relatively insignificant man from a human perspective with no background, no reputation and no qualifications. Yet God called him and gave him the opportunity for a fresh start, a new beginning that would transform him into the man God would describe in Isa.41:8 as 'Abraham my friend'.
Before he could realise his potential and become the person God created him to be, he had to separate himself from the ties in his old life that were familiar and made him feel secure but held him back from developing a relationship with God based on trust and faith. 'Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you' So Abram left, as the Lord had told him.'
God invites each of us to a journey through life with Him. This new beginning in our relationship with him starts with a call to separate ourselves from the old ties that bind us to a way of life that holds us back from fully realising our God-given potential and hinders us from exercising trust and faith in the God who loves us deeply and the Christ who died and rose again to transform us. John Baillie, the Scottish theologian, said "When I respond to God's call, the call is God's and the response is mine. Yet, the response is God's too; for not only does He call me in His grace but also by His grace brings the response to birth within my soul." So the God who calls us also enables us to say 'yes' to this opportunity for a new beginning of faith. When my daughter Emma was 4 years old, I tried to teach her to swim. She believed her Dad wouldn't let her drown but it took her a while to eventually let go of my arm and trust herself to the water. And the moment comes when we must exercise faith and trust by letting go and entrusting ourselves fully into the hands of God.
2. A NEW BEGINNING INVOLVES REGENERATION
While Abram had no real knowledge or understanding of the God who was calling him to a new beginning of faith, Nicodemus was an expert in all things religious. He was a 'Pharisee - a member of the Jewish ruling council'. So that tell us he had religious eminence. Pharisees were leaders within Jewish society, people who were well schooled in the Scriptures and in Jewish tradition. That gave him social prominence. He was honoured and respected within his society. As a member of the Jewish ruling council, he had significant political influence. And his life would have been characterised by moral excellence. So, given all that, you might think it would be easier for him to make this new beginning with God, and yet it wasn't. He'd heard all about Jesus, perhaps even been a witness to some of His miracles. He knew all about God's promise to send the Messiah, the Christ, the one who would be the fulfilment of all God's promises. And he knew that something of critical importance was missing from his life and experience. Yet he really struggled when it came to separating himself from the familiar things associated with his very religious life and entrusting himself fully to this Jesus whose life he found so compellingly attractive. 'Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no-one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.' That simple recognition, however, wasn't enough to satisfy Nicodemus and it certainly isn't enough to satisfy Jesus who immediately puts his finger on the heart of the issue. 'I tell you the truth, no-one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again (or born from above).' To begin with, Nicodemus thinks Jesus is speaking about a physical rebirth. 'How can a man be born when he is old?' Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb?' But Jesus then clarifies for Nicodemus that he's speaking about a spiritual rebirth. 'I tell you the truth, no-one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.'
Nicodemus discovered that the new beginning to which God was inviting him involved regeneration, experiencing a spiritual new birth. All his religious advantages were not enough to satisfy God's requirements to enter His Kingdom. In reality, despite all his religious advantages, he was as dead to God as Abram the pagan had been. His religion consisted of what he had done to fulfil the requirements of the Law. Jesus was now speaking of what he couldn't do by his own efforts but what God wanted to do for him. By exercising trusting faith in Jesus, he would be born spiritually from above. Paul explains in Rom.3:20 that 'no-one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. But now a righteousness from God, apart from the law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.'
Oswald Chambers said 'In new birth God does three impossible things: the first is to make a man's past as though it had never been; the second, to make a man all over again; and the third, to make a man as certain of God as God is of himself.' So, as we journey through Lent, God reminds us that in Jesus Christ His sinless Son, who died on the cross, paying the penalty for our sin and who rose again to offer us the gift of eternal life, our lives can have a new beginning. 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.'