Hey, everybody. I’m excited to have this opportunity to share the Word of the Lord with you. One of the things that I have learned after years of studying God’s Word is that we develop what I call Christian colloquialisms and phrases, even in the Scriptures, that we assume that we have exacerbated all that there is to know about that thing like, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, you must be born again”. and it becomes almost a cliche. If you research it how we define being born again has become, calling conversion born again has become something that is evangelical that has only been in the last few hundred years or so, that we refer to conversion as born again. Strip away all your religious assumptions and join me in the Gospel of St. John chapter 3, verse 1 through 3 and let’s listen again at the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus and see if there is something else in addition to what we learned that could be learned from that conversation. I’m not trying to erase what we learned, I’m trying to add to what we learned. The message is called “Pushed Out”. I believe you’re going to receive something, I believe you’re going to conceive something, I believe you’re going to believe something that you never saw before. that you never saw before.
Yes, some of ’em here this morning. You don’t want anybody to know that you’re seeking Jesus. You just happen to be in the neighborhood and dropped by. You don’t want anybody to expect you to be a Christian. You’re just kind of window shopping to the spiritual opportunities available to you, and you can play it off as a visit when God wants a commitment in your life. You are just visiting him, seeking a one night stand, and he wants a relationship. Nicodemus now comes to Jesus at night, and they have the most powerful conversation. Nicodemus comes to Jesus in a diplomatic fashion and he says, “I know what the rest of them think, but I think you at least Rabbi. Yeah, you pretty smart old dude. You kind of got it together. Yeah, I mean, you cool with me, man, ’cause this way I figured nobody could do the things you do save God be with you.
He said, “But I’m starting to think that God is about to do a new thing. I’m starting to understand that I must take him out of the historical context of being an ancestral Savior and contemporize my understanding of God to the degree that I could have walked into the newness of life. I’m starting to think that the miracles didn’t stop in the Old Testament. I’ve been seeing you do some stuff that has quickened my faith and stirred my mind and shaken my understanding. I can’t rest. That’s why I came over. You’re messing with my sleep. You didn’t just kick over the chairs, you kicked over my unbelief, you kicked over my doubt, you kicked over my fear and I’m starting to believe that all”…
Is there anybody in here that’s had God stir you up? What you have to realize, I told you last week about dimensions. Jesus is operating in a dimension that Nicodemus has never seen before. Watch this. Nicodemus is not a sinner. He is a religious devout person whose ideas about God have been shaken and he says, “I think you’re a Rabbi sent from God”. And if I was Jesus, I would have said, “Thank you. God bless you. Pray my strength in the Lord. You know, I am indeed a Rabbi”. Listen to what Jesus says to him. He says, “I think that you are from God and you’re a Rabbi”. And Jesus looks at him and say “That’s it. You must be born again”. “Excuse me, Jesus. What are you talking about”? The guy just said you were a teacher and you just said something without teaching it, without explaining it or anything. You just told him, “That’s it. You must be born again”.
What does that really mean? If you have the courage to take off the goggles of what you have been taught about this text, I want to share something with you about this text that Jesus was not preaching conversion to Nicodemus as Nicodemus was already a believer. In this realm of his understanding, he was a committed believer to Old Testament theology. So he was not a sinner. One person got me. He was a seeker who had a seed that had been planted in his spirit and the seed had gestated to the degree that faith had become works and made him have to go to Jesus even if he had to go by night to say, “I believe that there’s something to you”. Once his faith escape the prison of where he came from, Jesus now looks at him and said, “That’s it. You can’t stay where you were and know what you know”.
Touch three people and say, “I got to get out of here. I got to get out. I got to get out. I got to get out. I got to get out”. What you just said is what a baby says in the third trimester. What’s wrong with the womb? It was okay in the first trimester. It was okay in the second trimester. But now the thing that was a blessing has become a curse because it’s too small for what is happening down inside of you, and the Lord sent me here this Sunday morning to tell you that you can’t stay where you used to stay and do what you used to do because you’ve been operating over here but he’s been called you over there.
First, it’s traumatic. It is a separation of past habits. It is breaking away from that which is familiar. It is going through the metamorphosis of becoming that that you have never been before. It is this thing operating on that level. It requires pushing and shoving and stress. When babies come out, they don’t look like they look on TV, them little cute little babies coming out on TV sucking their thumbs and their jaws all rosy. When the baby comes out, the baby’s got all kind of stuff on it and all kind of goop on it and all kind of afterbirth on it. It’s often bruised and pushed, that its head look like an ice cream corn because it was so tight that you had to get through there any way you… Y’all don’t hear what I’m saying. Y’all don’t hear what I’m saying to you.
Somebody in this room is being pushed from one idiom of thought into the next, and there’s no cute way to be pushed. You can’t be pushed and remain calm. It’s going to require some stress, some effort, some grunting, some groaning, and you’re going to have to go through some tight places. But when it’s all said and done, God is going to birth you into another level that you have never belong before. Touch five people and say: I gotta go, I gotta go. I gotta go, I gotta go. I gotta go. I’ve stayed in the tight place as long as I can. It didn’t change, I did. I’ve outgrown acting like I used to act, I’ve outgrown thinking like I used to think, I’ve outgrown feeling like I used to feel, and something is pushing me to take it to the next level. Slap your neighbor and say, “Pushed”.
Somebody in this room, God has opened up a door and given you an opportunity, but you don’t know how to maximize the opportunity that you have. And so when the baby who needed to get out didn’t know how to get out, that’s when the nurse got in my wife’s ear and said, “Mrs. Jakes, you got a push”, I’m glad you came to service, I’m glad you’re watching over the internet because you haven’t understood what has been going on in your life. God set the contractions that you feel, the discomfort that you experienced was just him pushing you out. The stuff you went through with your heart, the thing that happened with your leg is nothing but God pushing you out, out of your comfort zone.
Find them three people and tell them, “He’s pushing me. He’s pushing me. He’s pushing me”. I can’t be who I was. I can’t think like I used to think. He’s pushing me. I’ve run out of time. I can’t stay where I was. The Lord is pushing me to the next level”. Somebody say, “One more push”. Whoever I’m preaching to this morning, you’re on your ninth month, and the Lord said with one more push he’s going to move you from one degree of grace to the next degree. You got about 30 days to pack your stuff, get your mind ready, get your heart ready, get your spirit ready because who you were yesterday and the enemy you saw yesterday, you shall see them no more. Slap somebody and tell them, “He’s pushing me, pushing me back to school, pushing me to stand up and speak, pushing me to get out of my comfort zone, pushing me to believe him for miracles, pushing me for my destiny”. Yes! Yes! Yes!
So I don’t know what I’m doing, you know, but I was trying to help. So I got over there, and so I was taking over the cheerleading job. So I’m in my wife’s ear, and I say, “Come on, baby, you can do this. I don’t know what this is, but I’m just trying to be positive. Push. Come on, baby, push. Push”. So, you know, I got real good at push. “Come on, push. Come on, push. Come on, push. The baby is crying, girl. Push. This ain’t no time to quit. Push. Push”. See, when you’re close to a breakthrough, the devil will try to make you tired and give up on your dream, but this ain’t no time to get tired. This is the time to push like you never pushed before. Look at your neighbor and say, “One more push”.
Ah, man, I hate to stop, but I got to stop right there. I wish you could hear that message in its entirety. This is just a brief summation of the entirety of the message, but it is very well worth thinking about and understanding how the world works and how life works and how many times we find ourselves in the trauma of birth, because birth is traumatic. To go from one level to the next is traumatic, to be pushed out of that which is familiar is traumatic, but in order to grow you must be born again and again and again and again and again. You know, I love talking to thinkers and leaders and people who really want to go to the next level. I’m not good at talking to people who are satisfied where they are. Still-born ministry is not my ministry. I want to talk to people who feel the push to go to the next level.