He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.” In reply Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” John 3:2-3 (NIV)
Are we righteous or merely religious? This is what Jesus was trying to get through to Nicodemus in our verses above. Nicodemus was a “teacher of teachers” a “Pharisee among Pharisees” yet he was left scratching his religious head over Jesus. He was house-trained to conform to certain religious ways of thinking and performing. And further, He could not understand the power that Jesus portrayed. It made no sense to him. Jesus did not fit into his religiously crafted mold and it was shaking up his world. And that was what Jesus intended to do.
Our Lord never came for things to remain the same. Nicodemus was foreign to the truth that there are two distinct realms in this fallen world – the flesh and the Spirit. And we are all born broken, fallen flesh inherited from our first parents when sin entered this world. Jesus tells us we all have need of another birth – a spiritual birth. Flesh gives birth to flesh but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. It is not simply religiously and meticulously seeking to follow a set of rules that saves us rather it is the righteousness of Christ that saves us. Religion never saves, Christ does. We could never be good enough or work hard enough. A sterile religion is a sad and impotent substitute for righteousness. Come to Jesus. He never turns away anyone and in doing so, He clothes us in His robe of perfect righteousness. Amazing. What a Savior. What a Friend.
You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you. Romans 8:9-11 (NIV)
I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. Isaiah 61:10 (NIV)