A New Day

By: Pastor Johnie Akers  

John 3:3, “Jesus answered and said unto him, ‘Verily, verily I say unto thee, ‘Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’”  Philip Yancey once noted in his book, Seeing the Invisible God, that every animal on earth has a set of correspondences with the environment around it, and some of those correspondences far exceed ours.  Humans can perceive only 30 percent of the range of the sun’s light and 1/70th of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy.  Many animals exceed our abilities.  Bats detect insects by sonar; pigeons navigate by magnetic fields; bloodhounds perceive a world of smell unavailable to us. Perhaps the spiritual or “unseen” world requires an inbuilt set of correspondences activated only through some sort of spiritual quickening.  In our Scripture lesson today, Jesus informed Nicodemus, a devoutly religious man, that, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above” [John 3:3, NRSV].  There are two levels from which we can operate—one is natural (limited), and the other spiritual (unlimited).  Paul the apostle wrote, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” [1 Corinthians 2:14, NRSV]. People who only operate in the natural become disconcerted by the visible—economic troubles, nations at war, and other consequences of the human condition.  But people who operate on the higher, spiritual plane, look beyond the visible, into an arena, where “all things are possible to them that believe” [Mark 9:23].  Upon which level do you operate today?  If you are restricted by what you can perceive in the natural world, once you become “born from above” you can by faith be elevated to see beyond this present, earthly realm, into the unlimited possibilities that await, with each new day. 

Source:  Philip Yancey, “Seeing the Invisible God,” Books and Culture (May/June 2000), p. 8