Born again, but into what?
Daily Scripture
John 3:5-9
5 Jesus answered, “I assure you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, it’s not possible to enter
God’s kingdom. 6 Whatever is born of the flesh is flesh, and whatever is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Don’t
be surprised that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ 8 God’s Spirit[a] blows wherever it wishes. You
hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. It’s the same with everyone
who is born of the Spirit.”
9 Nicodemus said, “How are these things possible?”
Daily Reflection & Prayer
Nicodemus was not a beginner. He was a respected religious leader; someone other people came to with their questions. So, it says something that he came to Jesus at night, when no one would see him showing up as the one asking. When Jesus told him he needed to be born again, Nicodemus took it literally: “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” He had built a whole life on knowing how
this worked. Now someone was telling him he didn’t know at all.
Jesus didn’t soften it. He compared the Spirit to wind: you feel what it does, but you can’t chart where it came from or where it’s headed. A life led by the Spirit isn’t one you can map out in advance; it has to be followed, not just understood. A lot of us carry some version of Nicodemus, a track record that makes it harder to admit we’re still learning. That resistance is worth noticing. It might be exactly where the Spirit is asking to begin. Whatever Nicodemus was becoming, it wasn’t a better version of what he already was. It was something he couldn’t have engineered on his own, a life he’d have to keep following rather than finally arrive at.
- Nicodemus’s credentials made it harder, not easier, for him to admit he didn’t understand. Where
in your own life, maybe at work, in a relationship, or even in how long you’ve called yourself a
Christian, does your track record make it harder to admit you’re still learning? What would it
look like to let that guard down? - Jesus never gave Nicodemus a tidy formula for how the Spirit works, only a comparison to
something he couldn’t control or predict. Is there an area of your faith right now that feels less
like a solved problem and more like standing in the wind, not sure where it’s taking you? Can you
sit with that unpredictability instead of rushing to resolve it?
Prayer
Gracious God, I don’t always want to admit how much I still have to learn about you, or about myself. Meet me in my confusion the way you met Nicodemus, patiently and without shame, and give me the courage to follow where your Spirit leads even when I can’t see the whole path. Amen.
GPS Insights
Rachel Grgurich
Nicodemus was knowledgeable. He knew how the world worked, yet he still had trouble trusting. There was a disconnect between knowledge and faith.
I find this often in others and even in myself. You can know you are worthy of love. You can know your anxiety is not logical. You can know something in your mind, but still struggle to believe it in your heart.
Our brains are constantly trying to protect us from danger. Uncertainty feels threatening. We want answers, plans, and guarantees. We want to know exactly how our life will play out.
But that just isn’t the way it works. Life is unpredictable. And following Jesus often means becoming comfortable with not knowing everything ahead of time.
Like the wind, there are things we can study and describe endlessly, but that is not the same as experiencing them. There are things we experience before we fully understand them.
Throughout Scripture, Jesus usually asks people to follow first and understand later.
Jesus says to Simon Peter and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” Immediately, they leave their nets and follow Him. They did not know the whole plan. They did not know where Jesus would lead them or everything that would be asked of them. They simply took the next step.
And looking back, we can see that God was leading them exactly where they needed to go.
Faith is not simply knowing facts about God, and it is not simply feeling close to God. Faith is trusting Him even when neither our understanding nor our emotions can give us certainty.
Looking back at my written testimony, I noticed something I could not see when I was living it: God was all over it.
The moments that felt random, the conversations that seemed ordinary, the details I could not make sense of at the time…they were not meaningless. They were threads in a story I did not yet understand.
At the time, some moments felt disconnected. Some felt disappointing. Some felt confusing. Most of them made zero sense while I was walking through them. Sometimes the thing that feels like a detour is actually part of the path.
The path makes far more sense in hindsight than it ever did while I was walking it.
Nicodemus came to Jesus with a lifetime of knowledge and experience, but Jesus invited him into something deeper than understanding. He invited him into trust. He was not asking Nicodemus to throw away what he knew; He was asking him to admit there was still more God wanted to show him.
We often want to understand the meaning of things while we are still in the middle of them. We want to know why something happened, where it is leading, and how all the pieces fit together.
The plan is there, even when we cannot see it. We just have to trust enough to keep going.
Maybe that is what Proverbs means when it tells us to “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”
My understanding has been incomplete more times than I can count. But God’s faithfulness never has been.
I think this is also why remembering where God has already been faithful matters so much.
When I am standing in the middle of something I do not understand, it is easy to believe that because I cannot see the purpose, there must not be one. But looking back at where God has already worked reminds me of who He is. He has been faithful before, and He will continue to be faithful now.
There is a saying that “the only way out is through.” Sometimes the only way forward is to walk through the uncertainty instead of trying to escape it. The unknown can feel uncomfortable, but I can trust that I am not walking through it alone.
The same God who was present in the moments I only understood in hindsight is the same God who is present now. He is a good Father, and even when I cannot see what He is doing, I can trust who He is.
Meaning does not always come in the moment. Sometimes it comes later, when we look back and realize God was working in ways we never could have orchestrated ourselves.
