How Jesus Changes the World

The Kingdom You Cannot See—You Must Be Born Again

John 3:1-21

John does not tell the story of Jesus the way Matthew does. Matthew moves through proclamation and conflict in Israel’s public life. John moves through encounters—carefully chosen moments when a single person meets Jesus and discovers that reality is not what they assumed it was. Earlier, John stated his purpose plainly: he writes “so that you may believe… and that by believing you may have life in his name.” John 20:21.

John even shapes his Gospel around six personal encounters—individual lives in which belief becomes visible and eternal life begins now. He selects them because they mirror the lived world of his readers and because they expose life’s deepest crises: the kind that imprison people from the inside and the outside.

Nicodemus is first—and he is first because his problem is the most dangerous. Some problems are obviously tragic: sickness, disability, shame, death. Nicodemus’ problem looks noble. It looks responsible. It looks like leadership. But it is spiritually compromised at the root: the mixing of religion and politics. That mixture always promises life. And it always leads to death.

Believe

Jesus began his ministry at a wedding in Cana. The crisis was social and humiliating: the wine was about to run out. Jesus ordered the servants to fill six large stone jars—used for Jewish cleansing—with water. When the liquid was drawn out, it had become wine. Not merely wine, but the best of the feast. The master of ceremonies praised the host: “You have saved the best till last.”

John calls this a sign and records its effect: the disciples believed. The word believe runs through John’s Gospel like a heartbeat. John uses it again and again—more than eighty times—and he uses it with intention. The Greek root (pistis) carries the meaning of faith, trust, and confidence—often used for loyalty and reliability, even in binding arrangements where something valuable is entrusted from one person to another. 

Belief does not merely agree with a statement. It is entrusting your life to a person. John is about to show what that costs—and what it gives.

Nicodemus

John introduces the first of the six encounters: the first is Nicodemus. 

“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night…” 

Nicodemus is not merely religious. He is a religious professional rabbinic scholar and a leader on the Sanhedrin council; a public teacher whose credibility depends on being seen as both faithful and wise. And he comes at night.

Night is not just a time marker in John. It is a spiritual and political atmosphere: secrecy, fear, risk, caution—the conditions that exist when speaking honestly can get you killed.

Nicodemus says, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

Notice what he does not say. He does not call Jesus Messiah. He does not confess. He tests the water. Nicodemus is carrying a question that every leader under pressure carries: What is safe to say aloud? His world is filled with “rumors of war.”

Rumors of War

John’s Gospel assumes a background that modern readers can miss: the long, simmering conflict between Jewish messianic expectation and Roman imperial control. Many ordinary people hoped Jesus would be a conquering Messiah, and even the disciples carried political expectations and competed for positions of authority.

Nicodemus is a leader in the middle of this. If Rome suspected that a Sanhedrin leader was aligning with a messianic movement, the consequences could be catastrophic. Nicodemus and Jesus could suffer the fate of other figures who inspired revolt. 

John traces the chain of tension: Judas of Galilee and the resistance to registration and taxation—ending in brutal suppression, crucifixions, and exile. The persistent resentment that surfaces even in Gospel questions about taxes to Caesar. The choice of Barabbas—an insurrectionist—over Jesus at trial, revealing how deeply political hope had captured spiritual expectation. The rising pressure that continues after Jesus’ ascension, including persecution and killings.

And finally, the climax of the collision: Roman legions march; leaders die; Jerusalem is breached; inhabitants are massacred; the Temple is dismantled and its treasures carried off. This is where the mixing of religion and politics goes. Not to renewal. To death. To the collapse of the world.

It is in that context—this looming inevitability—that Nicodemus comes at night wanting to “see the Kingdom.” And then Jesus says the most radical thing Nicodemus has ever heard. 

The Kingdom You Cannot See

Jesus answers: “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” Jesus’ answer has two parts—and the first is often overlooked: you cannot see the Kingdom. 

Nicodemus wants a visible Kingdom—an identifiable political reality, a change of regime, a triumph of “our people,” a sacred nation restored. Jesus interrupts him before he even finishes the thought. 

Nicodemus is confused. How can an adult enter the womb and be born again? Jesus has to speak this way because Nicodemus’ categories are too small. 

Nicodemus is trying to fit God’s reign into the machinery of human dominance. But Jesus is describing something so different that it can only be received as rebirth—a whole new way of seeing. To believe Jesus is the Son of God is to be introduced to a Kingdom you cannot see—a spiritual reality with future fulfillment that begins now.

This is why Nicodemus is the most religiously compromised. His problem is not that he lacks Scripture. His problem is that he has learned to survive—religiously and politically—inside a system where spiritual language is used to secure power.

Jesus does not merely challenge 

Nicodemus.

He attempts to save him—from the deathward trajectory of his world.

Scales Falling / Stepping Through the Wardrobe

Spiritual transformation is not the improvement of an existing worldview. It is the collapse of one world and the wakening into another. Paul described his own transformation like blindness giving way to sight—like scales falling from his eyes. (And everyone who has been truly “converted” knows that feeling: the same facts remain, but reality rearranges.) When you are reborn, you do not merely add a belief. You receive a new perception, new moral gravity, new allegiance, new center.

C. S. Lewis captured the feel of it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a child pushes through an ordinary-looking wardrobe and steps into another land. The air is different. The light is different. The rules are different. What seemed like a closed world suddenly is not. The deeper reality was there the whole time—but you could not enter it until you crossed a threshold.

That is what Jesus tells Nicodemus: you must cross a threshold you cannot manufacture. Rebirth is not a political strategy. It is the Spirit’s miracle. And it changes what you can see.

A Modern Parallel

This is not ancient only. It is present. When Connie and I arrived in Indonesia for our first assignment in Surabaya, I went to the head of the Christian sub-sector of the Department of Religion to complete our local registration. We were required to present passports and process residency documents.

Indonesia’s context mattered. It was—and is—majority Muslim, and its government has long been vigilant against violent uprisings by radical movements seeking to impose a religious state.

The official told me he had read the Indonesian Living Bible and believed it contained an error related to Matthew 10:4—where Simon is called a Zealot, with an added explanation about political struggle against Rome. Then he asked the question that revealed his fear:

Were we “Christian zealots”? Were we there to “see” a Kingdom in Java the way radicals wanted to “see” theirs—through political force?

In that moment, Nicodemus was in the room again. I reassured him: we had no political agenda. That is not what Jesus taught. Jesus was clear: “You cannot see the Kingdom.”

And the conversation turned. We came to an understanding: the Kingdom we proclaim is not an earthly theocracy. It is a spiritual reality entered through faith—transforming people, communities, and the way they relate to one another and to God.

That distinction protected our work. It also protected Indonesian believers—minority Christians whose safety can be endangered when Christianity is presented globally as a political takeover.

When Religion Becomes a Nation

In the United States, Christian nationalism has emerged as a budding movement eager to “see” a Kingdom—to make Christianity a state religion. Jesus’ teaching stands in direct opposition to that impulse. A nation-state—no matter how religious—is not the Kingdom of God, and Christ’s followers must resist the temptation to substitute political dominance for spiritual transformation.

The stakes are not abstract. When Christians pursue power as proof of righteousness, they repeat Nicodemus’ original mistake: trying to make the Kingdom visible by force, control, and identity politics. And history shows where that road leads: to enemies named as threats, to outsiders dehumanized, to fear baptized as virtue, to violence justified as necessary to death—social, spiritual, and sometimes literal death. Jesus offers a different entrance: rebirth.

Waking Up in a New Country

C.S. Lewis has been credited with likening being born to waking up into a new xountry. We felt like we aptured that with lived precision.

Your first morning after landing in Jakarta, exhausted from a punishing journey, were were jolted awake by the 4 a.m. call to prayer—so loud it felt like the loudspeaker was in the room. Then thousands of mosques joined in, broadcasting prayer across a city of more than 15 millions people.

We learned what it feels like to live inside a different worldview—where the rhythm of life revolves around prayer, where community matters more than individualism, where the pronoun “we” is valued over “I,” where gestures and tone carry moral meaning, where loudness can be uncouth, where cultural “center” is assumed until you learn to see another center.

That is the point: from infancy, people absorb an ethnocentric worldview as if it were universal. Being born again disrupts that. It is new life poured into the mind, heart, and soul—like an awakening into a different country.

Nicodemus thought he lived in the center of God’s story. He still could not see the Kingdom standing in front of him because he expected a political Messiah. Jesus tells him: you will not perceive what I am doing until you are changed from the inside out.

The Kingdom Is Here

If this new worldview were fully lived, love of God and neighbor would replace fear and domination. Justice, mercy, humility, and hospitality would shape communal life. 

What the world would look like if people lived the commands Jesus repeated and embodied: love God and neighbor, do justice, love mercy, walk humbly, do to others what you would have done to you, care for the hungry and thirsty, welcome the stranger. If that occurred within cultures and languages and nations—without coercion—then it could be said that Jesus was King spiritually, personally, and communally, and that the Kingdom had arrived. Not as a regime. As life.

The Kingdom would not be seen politically, but as a realized truth—a way of life caused by spiritual transformation. That is what Jesus is telling Nicodemus: the Kingdom is not built by taking power; it is received by new birth.

God Loves the World

Finally, Jesus brings Nicodemus to the center: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal llife.

The Samaritan Woman and Eternal Life

John 4:1-42

Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman follows immediately after his encounter with Nicodemus, and the contrast is intentional. Nicodemus was a Jewish man, a religious authority, and a respected teacher who came to Jesus under the cover of night. The Samaritan woman was none of these. She was a woman, a Samaritan, and socially vulnerable. She met Jesus in the open light of day, at the edge of society, while performing a daily task that marked her isolation.

John places these two encounters side by side to demonstrate that eternal life is not restricted by gender, ethnicity, religious pedigree, or moral reputation. Belief is offered to both the learned and the marginalized, but it takes shape differently in each life.

A Forbidden Conversation

Jesus was traveling north from Judea to Galilee and deliberately passed through Samaria—a region Jews normally avoided. The hostility between Jews and Samaritans stretched back centuries and was rooted in competing claims to land, Scripture, worship, and identity. Jews regarded Samaritans as ethnically impure and religiously compromised. Samaritans, in turn, rejected Jerusalem as the proper place of worship and centered their religious life on Mount Gerizim.

At Jacob’s well, Jesus encountered a woman drawing water at noon. Her presence at that hour is telling. Women typically drew water in the cooler morning hours, together. Her isolation suggests social exclusion—confirmed later by Jesus’ knowledge of her personal history.

When Jesus asked her for a drink, he violated multiple social taboos at once: a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman, alone, about something as intimate as shared water. She immediately recognized the transgression and named it.

Jesus did not apologize. He redirected the conversation.

Living Water and Misunderstood Thirst

Jesus offered her “living water,” a phrase that carried both literal and metaphorical meaning. At first, she heard only the literal sense—flowing water that would spare her daily labor. Jesus allowed the misunderstanding to stand briefly, then deepened it. The water he offered was not a convenience but a transformation: a source of life that would become internal, enduring, and self-renewing.

This exchange reveals something essential about belief in John’s Gospel. Belief often begins with practical concerns—relief, help, survival—but Jesus consistently moves the conversation toward ultimate reality. He does not shame the woman for her misunderstanding. He leads her through it.

Truth Without Condemnation

When Jesus named her marital history, the conversation turned sharply personal. Yet his words carried no accusation. He did not label her immoral, nor did he demand repentance. He spoke truth without condemnation—and she recognized it immediately.

Her response is crucial: “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.”

Truth, in John’s Gospel, is not a weapon. It is a revelation that opens the possibility of life. The woman was not driven away by exposure; she was drawn closer by being known.

Worship Reframed

The woman shifted the conversation to worship—Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim. This was not deflection; it was theology. For Samaritans, worship location defined religious legitimacy. Jesus’ response dissolved the debate entirely. True worship, he explained, is no longer tied to place, ethnicity, or temple. It is defined by Spirit and truth. Access to God is no longer mediated by geography or heritage but by relationship.

This was a radical claim. It meant that neither Jewish nor Samaritan systems held ultimate authority. Eternal life was not inherited; it was received.

Belief and Revelation

When the woman spoke of the coming Messiah, Jesus made one of the clearest self-revelations in the Gospel: “I who speak to you am he.”

Unlike Nicodemus, who struggled to grasp Jesus’ meaning, the Samaritan woman responded with action. She left her water jar—the very reason she had come—and returned to her town. The symbol is unmistakable. Her old patterns of survival were interrupted by new life.

From Marginalized Woman to Communal Witness

The woman did not become a theologian or a moral exemplar. She became a witness. She told her community what had happened, and they came to see Jesus for themselves. Many believed—not because of her testimony alone, but because they encountered Jesus directly.

John records a remarkable outcome: a Samaritan village welcomed Jesus and confessed him as “the Savior of the world.” This title moves far beyond Jewish messianic expectation. It is universal in scope and missional in vision.

Eternal Life Made Visible

This encounter reveals eternal life not as abstraction but as lived reality. The woman moved from isolation to community, from shame to agency, from exclusion to participation. Her life became a sign of the Kingdom that cannot be seen but can be experienced.

What Nicodemus struggled to understand at night, the Samaritan woman began to live out at noon. She was, in the deepest sense, born again.

Why This Story Matters for Mission

This chapter is not primarily about gender, ethnicity, or morality—though all are present. It is about how eternal life enters the world. It enters through encounter: truth spoken in love, and belief that reshapes identity and community.  For the believers in Ephesus—and for readers today—this story declared that no one is beyond the reach of life in Jesus. Eternal life begins where barriers fall and truth is received.

The Mother Arab Church

By the year 2000, using the broadest definition of Christian—those with full or partial Christian ancestry—the term Palestinian Christian encompassed an estimated 500,000 people worldwide. The overwhelming majority of Palestinian Christians identify as Arabs. According to the U.S. State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report (2022), approximately 50,000 Christian Palestinians live in the West Bank and Jerusalem, with about 1,300 Arab Christians in Gaza. Others are citizens of Israel, and many more live in long-established diaspora communities across the Middle East and the West.

These Arab Christian communities live at the crossroads of faith, ethnicity, and political upheaval—conditions that have tested the church’s witness in recent decades. One of the most severe trials followed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, when the militant group ISIS swept across large areas of Iraq and Syria. Their goal was the violent establishment of an Islamic caliphate and the elimination of all who did not conform to their ideology.

Among those most brutally targeted were the Yazidis of northern Iraq and Syria, an ancient ethno-religious community long regarded as heretical by extremist clerics. Tensions between Yazidis, Kurds, and Arab Muslims—some stretching back centuries—collapsed into open violence. Mount Sinjar, the Yazidis’ ancestral homeland near the Iraq–Syria border south of Türkiye, became the epicenter of catastrophe.

In 2014, ISIS attacked Sinjar. Thousands of Yazidi men were massacred, their bodies discarded in mass graves. Women and children were kidnapped and enslaved. According to the Iraqi Prime Minister, meeting was no coincidence.

Later in Bangkok, Pastor M.D. described how women dressed in black burkas—along with their children—had begun attending his church. He believed they were the families of ISIS fighters who had been killed or driven out. They had nowhere else to go.

“I tell them that Jesus loves them,” he said. “I invite them to receive the gift of eternal life. I do not care if ISIS takes my head. These women and their families will be welcomed. If they choose to follow Jesus, they will join others who have made the same choice.”

At the same moment in history, an Arab pastor in northern Iraq was ministering to victims of ISIS, while another Arab pastor in Beirut was ministering to the families of the perpetrators. This is the Kingdom you cannot see—breaking down walls of hatred, violence, and fear.

The Kingdom of God is not a political territory or ethnic stronghold. It is a spiritual reality that heals ancient wounds, dismantles prejudice, and makes reconciliation possible. From the woman at the well onward, the Arab church has borne witness to a Kingdom that welcomes the vulnerable, the outcast, and even enemies—offering eternal life that begins now, as we follow Jesus together.