I remember sitting at Eddie's Ale House in a little town outside of Madison, WI having a beer with a friend. Simon was an atheist who loved conversations about faith and life. He had grown up in England and was a brilliant scientist with a Ph.D. from Oxford. He and I first met at a local coffee shop one day when he and his wife dropped by with their newborn twins. I have twins myself and so we began to bond over the shared experience. I loved Simon (and love Simon) because he loves to ask really, really hard questions. He is completely unafraid to push back and didn't let anyone intimidate him at all...especially me! So we'd have these refreshingly honest conversations about life and God and why I believed the way I did. When I was preparing to move back to Colorado, Simon paid me the highest compliment I have ever received in my life. He told me that one of the reasons he loved to talk to me about these things was that, "It was clear I believed Jesus was worth wrapping one's entire life around." I am humbled by that statement to this day and continue to hope it is true.
I have been in ministry in one form or another ever since I first submitted my life to Jesus twenty years ago on the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder. I have served on college campuses, in churches of all shapes and sizes, and even a maximum security prison. I have experienced so many different traditions and expressions of the church and I have loved every minute of it. The church of Jesus Christ - at its best - is a wonderfully diverse and beautiful expression of the creativity of God. But there is an underbelly to it as well that isn't all that attractive. With growing alarm, I have watched the rise of a cultural form of Christianity that demands little, makes faith easy, and makes Jesus into more of a self-help guru than a Lord and Savior. And it breaks my heart. I have watched many people I love give their lives to this cultural form of Christianity only to find it empty and worthless and little comfort when life gets hard...as life inevitably does. In those dark valleys, you find out real quick if you've wrapped your life around Jesus or you treat him as more of an accessory.
Recently, I ran across a book by John Piper titled, What Jesus Demands from the World, and I have found it refreshingly honest. Kind of like my dear friend Simon. It is clear when one reads the gospels that Jesus is no wimp. He isn't afraid of confrontation. In fact, that is a significant facet of his love for us. His love is fierce and bold even as it is tender and compassionate. It is faithful and true even as it is courageous and convicting. The truth of the matter is that Jesus simply will NOT settle for being an accessory to one's life. He will NOT allow himself to be marginalized or pushed to the sidelines or treated as a convenience. His love is deeper and stronger and more steadfast. It lays claim to our lives even as Jesus lays down his own claim to his own life. The cross signifies the lengths Jesus will go to place this claim. He is relentlessly loving even to the point of death. Even to the point of taking our place. And this act of self-giving love is forceful and demanding in so many ways.
Authentic Christians are ones who - however imperfectly and sinfully and brokenly - seek to submit their lives to the loving demands of their Savior and Lord. And demand #1 is to be born again. "You must be born again", Jesus said to one of the religious leaders of his day. A man by the name of Nicodemus. Far from being a political label for a certain segment of evangelical Christianity, it is an essential part of the Christian faith experience. "Unless you are born again, you cannot see the Kingdom of God." Again, those are Jesus' words not mine. It is a requirement. A demand that must be met if one is to enter into the Kingdom which Jesus rules as Lord. Now this was a baffling to Nicodemus as it is to us. How does one get born again?
Fundamentally, Jesus sees humanity as divided into two different groups. On the one hand, there are those who have been given life physically but who remain dead spiritually. On the other hand are those who have been given life, not only physically, but whose hearts and souls have been infused to new life by the Holy Spirit of God. So how does this happen? This is where Nicodemus and people like us are right to be a bit confused. Because it's not something under our control. It's not something we can make happen on our own. The Holy Spirit is free to move as He chooses and act in ways that we do not always comprehend. The truth becomes really hard when one realizes that God isn't interested in playing by our rules. The paradoxical biblical reality is simply that we must be born again AND it is not something we are able to do for ourselves. This demand seems unfair on the face of it and yet we cannot escape it...not if we want to follow Jesus. Not if we want to call ourselves authentically Christian.
So what can we do? Piper shows us the way, "Look away from yourself. Seek from God what he alone can do for you. Moral improvement of the old you is not what you need. New life is what the whole world needs. It is radical and supernatural. It is outside our control...We must be born again, "not of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." (John 1:13) That is what Jesus demands from the world."