“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
John 3:8 NKJV
There should always be a few head-scratching verses in the Bible which make you stop and ponder. This passage stuck in one of the most familiar chapters in all the Scripture has been one of those verses for me. I mean, who doesn’t know John 3:16? For many of us we memorized that verse in a Sunday School class too many years ago to remember. However, long before you get to that sixteenth verse, you must pass through verse eight.
The story of Nicodemus is the story of a man that God is obviously drawing. As a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, he stealthily seeks Jesus out at night and askes a question. Surprisingly, his question is not about “getting to heaven”, or “how might I be saved”, but rather it revolves around the demonstration of the miraculous (see v.2). Jesus pivots the conversation and question to the real point which is a person must be “born again” (or “from above”) to see (which connotates perceive or comprehend) the kingdom of God (or sphere of God’s reign). This chapter is packed with a far deeper conversation than the one most Christians default to.
Nicodemus was both consternated and inquisitive. He was struggling with the reality that Jesus was challenging all of his presuppositions and established traditions, yet couldn’t deny that God was at work. He intuitively understood that Jesus was coming to massively change religious life as he knew it and was trying to wrap his brain around it. Would this be a good thing? Would it be a God thing? Just how much of what he currently knew about God and spiritual life was in the crosshairs of getting bombed by the Holy Spirit? It can cause a person to lose their spiritual equilibrium, even when its righteous and needed change.
I find myself sympathetic to Nicodemus. There are times I can be as dense as a rock, but I am not so arrogant to think that I too, had I lived in that time period, might be as equally consternated. God’s sovereignty is colliding, it appears, with our adaptability.
How many times (these past two weeks in particular) have I said, “Hey God is in charge”? It was the right thing to say, but I must confess my adaptability tolerances have been stretched to their limits. Whatever a church has chose to do during this pandemic by way of worship services, I suspect everyone can say that adaptability was exercised. Yet is it not also interesting that no matter how these days are interpreted everyone seems to agree that “God is at work”.
“The wind blows where it wishes…”
Anyone who knows me knows that I desire to be (as John Wimber coined a generation ago) “ruthlessly” biblical. Change for the sake of trendiness, fads, or mere novelty is not what Jesus was teaching. Jesus wasn’t bombing the entire Old Testament, but rather fulfilling it due to the fact God’s people had bombed it over the course of centuries and reinvented some things on their own and called it “God”. If anything was getting bombed, it was the traditions of men and not the revelation of Scripture. The wind (Holy Spirit) was blowing and you could see the impact He was producing, but could you “perceive” it?
I am wondering as we all are facing some new realities concerning church life, if the “Wind” is blowing again at this very moment? What adjustments might be the Holy Spirit at work? How righteously flexible am I really? What is biblical and what is dead tradition? What is God’s unalterable truth and what is my opinion?
“The wind blows where it wishes…”
Perhaps in this lock-down season, I might need to make sure I am standing in the right breeze…
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