How were you born?

Isaiah 6:1-9; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

Let us Pray - O God, light of the minds that know you, life of the souls that love you, and strength of the thoughts that seek you -bless the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts. Breathe your life into us that we may live in the manner you have appointed unto us and better love and serve you and one another. Amen

A little was told by her teacher in school that she has to write an article on "birth, The moment she got home, she went up to her mother and asked as to how she had been born. Her mother, who was busy at the time, said 'the stork brought you darling, and left you on the doorstep.'

Continuing on her research she asked her dad how he'd been born. Being in the middle of doing repairs to his computer, her father similarly deflected the question by saying, 'I was found at the bottom of the garden. The fairies brought me.'

Then the girl went and asked her grandmother how she had arrived. 'I was picked from a gooseberry bush', said grandma.

With this information the girl wrote her essay. When the teacher asked her later to read it in front of the class, she stood up and began, "There has not been a natural birth in our family for three generations..."

When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus of being born from above - or being born anew, Jesus was not talking of a natural birth. As he explained to Nicodemus, he was talking of a spiritual birth - a birth that was, and is, somehow, supernatural.

"Very truly, I tell you", Jesus said, "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.."

I want us to think about this today - I want us to think about our own unnatural birth - and about the mystery that is involved in it – the mystery of God - the God who made us and gave us our first birth - the God who saves us, by becoming one with us, dying with us and for us - the God who lives and works in us and gives us our second, our unnatural birth.

Our experience of God is a marvelous and mysterious experience. It is a bit like looking at the picture of the old woman - and the young woman there is one reality - yet there is more than one reality....

And so it is with God.

We have and we know the God of Isaiahm the God who is high and lifted up in his temple; the God who speaks and brings forth all of creation, the God who is judge, lord, ruler, king - the God who is in light inaccessible hid from our eyes..

This God is strange to us, this God is beyond us, this God we dare not touch
even though we know this God and he knows us, even though we see this God's signs all around us in the earth, the wind, the air, and the fire.

And then we have the God who is in Christ, the God who is Christ, the God whom is lowly, and humble; the God who reaches out and touches others, the God who serves others, the God who walks the earth with us, and cries and laughs with us; the God who calls God Abba, Father, Daddy; the God who is tempted with us; the God who hungers and thirsts with us; the God who embraces us and encourages us; the God who surrenders himself to death for us; having only the promise and the hope of being raised again.

And we have and know God the Spirit; God the bringer of visions and of dreams; God the source of strength and of hope; God the supplier of healing words and of comfort filling prayer; God the wind, the breath, the air we breathe; God the transformer, the one who gives new birth, new life; God the presence within us and the presence all around us; God calling to us - calling for us - calling through us, calling in us..

We are the children of God, says Paul. When we cry Abba -, Father, it is the Spirit of God bearing witness with our Spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. - if in fact we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

As a Christian I do not know all about God that there is to know. God is always greater than my knowledge of him, but I do know what God has shown about himself I do know God in three different ways, I know him in three ways, I experience him in three ways and I love him in three ways.

CS Lewis - in his book Mere Christianity tries to describe part of this experience - this three-fold knowing - this three-fold loving - in his description of a Christian at prayer.

"What I mean is this." he writes, "An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. The whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary act of prayer."

What so many people lack in their lives is a sense of the mystery of God and of the mystery of the life that God gives to them.

We keep trying to develop one simple mental picture of God one simple portrait of what our life in God is like or ought to be like.

Most of us like to think that things are either black or white - and we will go to incredible lengths to fit things around us into one or the other category -but God is greater than any category - any system of thought or classification, and so is our life in him.

God is just and holy - demanding perfect obedience -yet God is merciful and forgiving - willing to forgive unto the seventh generation.

I am a sinner - unworthy to touch the hem of the gown worn by Christ yet I am a child of God - intimately acquainted with his Spirit, a joint heir with his Son of all the riches of heaven.

Our God is a mystery and the life that our God gives to us is a mystery, but because God, within that mystery, touches us, it is mystery that we can experience and savour and know something of.

When I became a Christian, when I yielded myself to the outrageous claims of Jesus, his claim to be the Son of God, his claim to be the way, the truth and the life, his claim to be in the Father, and the Father in him, something happened to my life.

My vision began to change. I began to see new things in the world around me. I began to see the hand of God in the lives of people around me – stirring them up. I began to sense that God was reaching out to people and calling them to himself. I began to sense that God was in people, struggling to convince them of the beauty that is in them, I began to see the world as a magical place, full of enchantment full of purpose and of meaning, and I began to feel compulsions to do things that I had never done before, the compulsion to pray for others, the compulsion to tell others that God is all around them, the compulsion to suddenly stop in the midst of turmoil and to thank God for little things, or simply to take a breath and savour the fact that in it is some divine purpose too deep for words. and I began to experience within myself a growing peace, a peace that continues to grow, and I began to experience in others - in their struggles and in their joys, in their sufferings and in their triumphs, the working of the God that is in my life.

My life is not natural - and I thank God for it.

What I experience now is not something that came to me as the result of my first birth- nor did I learn it somehow by going to this or that school, nor did I earn it by living a better life than most other people around me, it just happened as a result of coming to believe in God, and in his Son Jesus Christ, and asking him to be my God, my personal God - in the way Jesus taught.

All believers have this experience, all who hunger and thirst for righteousness, all who yearn for God, are satisfied.

All experience grace. All sense the giftedness of their lives. All know the incredible miracle of the indwelling God. All know that they are born from above - and as in their first birth - the birth by water - they know it is totally miraculous, totally the work, the labour, of another.

And we believers - as a result of our experience, come to see the words of the bible about God as true in every respect, we come to see that God has revealed himself, and reveals himself still, in many ways, and that the way that is written in the scriptures, the way that describes God as three, yet one, the way that shows God as creator, redeemer, and sustainer, the way that speaks of God as Father, and as Son and as Holy Spirit, the way that tells of God being a loving parent, a dear brother, and a caring presence, is a true way, a life giving way..

That my brothers and sister-in-Christ is part of the truth that Jesus spoke of when he spoke to Nicodemus.

Nicodemus had a very difficult time understanding that truth, he couldn't quite understand how one could be born anew it didn't seem natural to him --and it isn't natural - rather it is divine, it is the gift of the God - the Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.

So we preach, and so you believed - says the Apostle Paul
May it be so, both now and forevermore. -- Amen