Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night. We don’t know why, but most presume that it was because he didn’t want to be seen talking to Jesus. Nicodemus was a ruler of the Jews. That was another way of saying that he was also a member of the Sanhedrin, a group of 70 men led by the High Priest. I have heard that if you were to combine the US Senate and the US Supreme Court, you would have something close to the Sanhedrin. It was a powerful body and Nicodemus was a powerful man. Jesus called Nicodemus the teacher of Israel. He was a man whom others came to for advice, to learn how to be a godly man. He was an expert in keeping the Torah. As a Pharisee, Nicodemus was very serious about keeping the laws of God. There were 613 of them—248 do’s and 365 don’ts. And many, many more laws the Pharisees added that had to be kept to be considered “right with God.” When a man became a Pharisee, he took an oath to keep the laws, every detail of them, for the rest of his life.
This great leader in Israel came to see Jesus with a question in the form of a statement. “We know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do the signs you do unless God is with him.” Nicodemus was seeking truth but did not know the One who is truth was standing in front of him. He said that it was clear that God was with Jesus. He saw Him as an anointed teacher, maybe one step higher than John the Baptist. Jesus didn’t correct his thoughts. Jesus didn’t address the mind of Nicodemus as much as He spoke right to his heart and his soul. He knew that Nicodemus was a Pharisee, and a leader in Israel, a man revered for his teaching and his devotion to keeping the law. But Jesus didn’t mention any of that. Instead, He addressed Nic’s deepest need, his blindness, his wretchedness, his sin. Jesus said in effect, “You’re not good enough,” when He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus, you need to be born again. With all your work to become righteous, you have not seen your greatest need. The first time you were born has led you to where you are right now, dead in your sins. You need a second birth. We all do. Because no matter how much of a self-improvement program we could put in place, we could never compare to someone like Nicodemus. He was a good man, by the world’s standards. But here’s the thing: Jesus didn’t come to make bad men good or good men better. He came to make dead people alive. Something none of us can do that. Not only can we make ourselves be born again, we do not even contribute to our new birth. Neither do we cooperate with it, any more than Lazarus did. Jesus called and the dead man came out. Charles Spurgeon said, “No man in the world can make himself to be born of God.” No matter how much he looks and acts righteous.
In August of 1973, in the midst of his legal troubles over the Watergate scandal, Chuck Colson went to visit a friend, a businessman named Tom Phillips who was president of Raytheon Company and a fellow ex-Marine. Phillips told him, plainly and without apology, that he had given his life to Jesus Christ. Colson was stunned. This was a hard-headed executive, Colson wrote later, not a man who would be swept away by emotion, one who talked about Jesus the way you’d talk about a friend. Then Phillips picked up a book, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and read aloud a chapter on pride. Lewis calls pride “the essential vice, the utmost evil.” Colson later said he felt as if Lewis had been writing about him. When he left, Phillips handed him the book. Colson got into his car, and he couldn’t drive away. He sat in the driveway in the dark, and he wept. He had never prayed like this before, and he said afterward that he hardly knew how. But he asked God to take him, just as he was. And here’s what’s remarkable. Nothing about that moment helped him, as far as his troubles in life were concerned. In fact, people assumed it was a public-relations move, but life got worse for Colson. In 1974 he pleaded guilty and went to federal prison for seven months. Yet he said for the rest of his life that prison was the best thing that ever happened to him, because it was there that God gave him his calling. He founded Prison Fellowship, which carried the gospel into prisons all over the world, and he spent nearly forty years serving the men and women the rest of us forget.
Like Nicodemus, Chuck Colson was a powerful man. He had money, fame, and power. He had everything in the world, he thought, that a person could want. And then he came to Jesus one night, sitting alone in his car, because the thing he needed most was something neither money, fame, or power could give him. This once powerful man came to Jesus in the dark, where the Spirit moved where He wished. And Chuck Colson was born again.
