It was March 18. Leanne tried not to think about the fact that Melvin would have been 39 today. The face of the man driving the van flashed in her mind. She tried not to feel the anger. Once more the scream of brakes, the crash and then the silence replayed itself in her memory. She thought of the whispers in Melvin’s ear through a maze of tubes and machines, words that she could only hope he somehow had heard. Leanne remembered having to tell her two boys about the nightmare and trying to support them in their grief as she struggled with her own.
She remembered the sound of the blades whipping through the evening sky as the helicopter carried Melvin’s organs to others whose very life depended on his final gift. Who were they? Would she ever get to see them? The recipient of Melvin’s heart had written twice in the year and a half since the transplant. Leanne had finally found the courage to answer and admit that she longed to hear that beautiful heart beat again.
There was no way she could have known that at that very moment, John Meinhardt and his wife Jan were signing release forms to reveal their identity to the donor family.
John’s head swam with memories too: he could almost feel the mix of terror and elation hearing the nurse’s casual statement that a heart had been found. He wanted to live so much, but he had struggled with guilt knowing that for him to live someone else would die. He remembered the nurse walking away and his wife Jan slipping under the covers and holding him. She had kissed his heart good bye. Together they had prayed for the doctors and their future and surrendered the outcome to God.
Later that night a small light appeared in the evening sky and soon the roar of whipping chopper blades. Jan remembered the tears watching that blue Igloo cooler being lowered from the helicopter and carried into the hospital on a dolly. She had stopped the survival flight team and dropped to her knees to kiss the cooler. She prayed with their children for the success of the surgery and for family of the donor.
And now John was signing the papers to meet that family that so many times they had wrapped in gratitude. Soon John and Leanne were choking back tears as they spoke on the phone "When can we meet?" John asked. "How about in an hour at Latina’s Pizza?" Leanne replied.
An hour later Leanne laid her head upon John’s chest and heard the heart she had loved for so long, Melvin’s heart. The heart which had given new life to John. (Jan Meinhardt, http://www.rjwitte.com/changeofheart/May_1999_donor.htm)
New Life. That’s the topic for today. A man came to Jesus in the middle of the night and Jesus spoke to him about his need for new life. As John lay in a hospital bed he understood that a new heart was what he needed. When Nicodemus came to Jesus, he wasn’t at all sure what he needed but Jesus helped him to find the truth.
Included in out text today is the best known and most widely memorized verse in all of Scripture, John 3:16. It contains the Gospel in a nutshell.
Today we’re going to look at that verse and the meeting which prompted it, as in each of these messages throughout the book of John I’d like to suggest that the words of Jesus to us today are the same as his words to those he spoke to face to face, two thousand years ago, in this case, to Nicodemus. And today I’d like to concentrate on the essentials of the central message of the Bible, the Good News about Jesus. What we often call the Gospel message.
The story begins with man’s...
Desire
1-3 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, "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." In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."
Nicodemus has come by night, no doubt, because he doesn’t want the other Pharisees to know he’s coming to Jesus. In chapter 2 Jesus had already begun to make himself unpopular by causing a scene in the temple courts. Nevertheless, Nicodemus is drawn to him and says, "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." Does it seem odd to you that He would take such a risk just to say this? I think it did to Jesus too, who, as we saw in last week’s conversation with Jesus, skips right to the heart of the matter and shares the truth that Nicodemus has really come to hear whether he knows it or not.
The same desire that brought Nicodemus out in the middle of the night still pulses within each of us. Often I’ll have unbelievers who come visiting us here remark that there was something special about what they experienced in our worship, something that draws them and yet spooks them a little. Sometimes, those who haven’t yet trusted in Jesus experience the same thing in relationships with Christians.
Maybe you’re here today and this describes you. What you’re experiencing is the emptiness of what’s been called the God shaped hole in your heart. Like the moth drawn to the flame, as you draw near to God’s presence in worship or in His people your sense of longing grows. That’s a good thing, God is calling you home, to the state that you were created for, the state of fellowship with Him. You’re ready to hear the good news. But before the good news there’s some important bad news about your impending...
Danger
For each of the remaining points we’ll refer back to verse 16 which really does contain the whole of the good news about Jesus in a nutshell: "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."
The truth is that without what Jesus has done for us each of us are going to perish. The knowledge of that I think is written deep within us and I think it is at least part of the reason that we are drawn to the things of God. It is a terrible thing to be out of fellowship with God in life. How much more so is it to be separated from him in death, when all possibility of restoring fellowship is removed? But perish is exactly what the Lord does not want to happen to us because he loves us so much. Christ wasn’t sent here to condemn us, verse 17 says, but that we might be saved from condemnation. Yet, the Lord goes on to say that because of sin and unbelief, many will choose to turn their backs on the salvation he offers.
In 1969, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a group of people in the posh Richelieu Apartments were preparing to have a "hurricane party" in the face of a storm named Camille. Facing the Beach less than 250 feet from the surf, the apartments were directly in the line of danger. Were they ignorant of the dangers? It certainly doesn’t seem so, as the local Police chief, Jerry Peralta came by to beg them to evacuate. "This is my land," one of them yelled back. "If you want me off, you’ll have to arrest me."
Peralta didn’t arrest anyone, but he wasn’t able to persuade them to leave either. He wrote down the names of the next of kin of the twenty or so people who gathered there to party through the storm. They laughed as he took their names. They had been warned, but they had no intention of leaving.
It was 10:15 p.m. when the front wall of the storm came ashore. Scientists clocked Camille’s wind speed at more than 205 miles-per-hour, the strongest on record. Raindrops hit with the force of bullets, and waves off the Gulf Coast crested between twenty-two and twenty-eight feet high.
News reports later showed that the worst damage came at Pass Christian, Mississippi, where some twenty people were killed at a hurricane party in the Richelieu Apartments. Nothing was left of that three-story structure but the foundation; the only survivor was a five-year-old boy found clinging to a mattress the following day. (Christian Values Quarterly, Spring/Summer 1994, p. 10.)
Just as sure as those who rejected the warnings about hurricane Camile, those rejecting the call of Christ are in danger of perishing. But YOU don’t have to because Jesus has a...
Design
"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."
God’s design was the gift of His son. It was a willing gift and a great sacrifice. Leanne’s husband Melvin in a very real way gave a gift of new life, but it was because of an accident. Jesus gave his life willingly, in order to give us what he described to Nicodemus in verse 2 as New Life, being born again.
You see the Lord understood that no half measures would do. We aren’t in need of a tune up, we’re not in need of a self help program. Like John’s physical heart, our spiritual hearts are beyond repair. We need to be born again. Jesus came and paid with his life, by dying on the cross to pay the price for this heart transplant. And the point of the transplant is to make us new
Christian writer Henry Eerdmans says, "If I had a car with the engine that was ready for the grave, I’d have a new engine put in. I’d take the car into a mechanic who would put it in for me. If when I got that car back, it ran just as poorly, I’d begin to wonder if the old really had been replaced or just cleaned up. It is not different with our new lives in Christ." (Henry Eerdmans, Christian Personal Ethics, 1957, p. 383ff.)
We don’t just need a clean up, we need a transplant. God’s design is that we be born again, and there’s something really beautiful about that new life because of its...
Destiny
"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."
If a new life on earth wasn’t enough, how about heaven with Him forever thrown in the bargain. We were created for eternity, and we were created to be God’s friends. In this New Life we get both--eternity with Him.
And notice that eternal life isn’t some far off promise. You don’t have to wait ’til you die to get it. The New Life of the New Birth is an everlasting life.
So now the most important question of all comes into play. What do we have to do to avoid the danger, and inherit the eternal destiny. In other words what is our...
Duty
"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."
All that God wants from us is to believe in Him--that is in Jesus, that word believes is more accurately translated "trusts" To receive the gift of eternal life we must trust in Jesus. In verses 14 & 15 it says "the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life" So we’re to trust in Jesus, lifted up. That is specifically that we must place our trust for salvation in the fact that Jesus was lifted up on a cross to pay the price for our sins. That’s our duty, the ticket price for new life. Now once we have new life there’s going to be a change in our lives, we’ll live like the heart donor.
One question John Meinhardt had for Leanne was "did Melvin like Pizza? I used to hate it but since the transplant I can’t get enough." Coincidentally it had been Melvin’s favorite food. That was why a pizza joint had been the place for their reunion.
Jesus gives us his life remade in us when we are born again. Yes, it requires cooperation on our part, but when new birth happens, his desires become our desires and little by little the old heart dies away. But that change in our behavior is not what saves us... It is our trust in him that both saves us and causes the change. Whoever believes in Him has eternal life.
So what about you? Have you received the gift of eternal life by trusting in Jesus? If not why not today?
**Points 2-5 of this outline are borrowed from a series of sermons on John 3:16 by John Piper.
