No More Hiding
My favorite band, Waterdeep, sings a song entitled “Secret Lives” that rings so true to life. It goes like this:
Everybody’s got their secret lives. All the way from the ocean to the desert a million stories dying to be heard, but once they open up their mouths they know they will never be the same again so they hide.
Everybody’s got their secret lives. It’s true. It is the natural consequence of our sin and brokenness. We carry pain. . .pain that we have caused and pain that we have suffered, and our way of dealing with it, of coping with it is to keep it quiet. . .to hide, as Waterdeep says. Why do we do this? Well, because we’re afraid. We are afraid of being hurt again. We do this unconsciously because it is a part of our programming really.
Our instincts tell us that we need to protect ourselves. Self-preservation…we want to survive. That instinct is in all of us before we ever learn or experience anything in life…it’s our nature. And there is also the nurture side…what we learned from interacting with others. All of us have stories of being hurt. . .and being hurt by people we trusted, that were supposed to be there for us. . .whether intentionally or not. We have a default setting that is both innate and from experience that tells us we have got to protect ourselves, being vulnerable can be dangerous. . .so we hide. That is our knee-jerk response. And since we’re a ministry, it’s important to note that this is completely true theologically as well. Ever since the Garden of Eden when our ancient ancestors Adam and Eve fell into sin by believing the lie from Satan that God could not be trusted. . .we have all hidden. . .we have all been on a mission of self-preservation. . .hiding to protect ourselves.
Highly developed self-preservation
John 3, one of the most well-known parts of the Bible, displays this for us. It is a conversation between Jesus and a pharisee named Nicodemus. The set-up is that Nicodemus has come to see Jesus in the night, under the cover of darkness. He wants to ask Jesus a few questions, and it is clear that he does not want to be seen talking to Jesus. He doesn’t want his pharisee buddies to know, and he doesn’t want the regular people to know either. He is curious and wants to hear more from Jesus, but he is scared to be found out. He is hiding. You can imagine being in his shoes. He feels like he has a lot to lose. . .he and his pharisee friends have been taking a hard line with Jesus. They have to maintain order and preserve the law after all and Nicodemus doesn’t want to undermine their position by seeming sympathetic to Jesus, who does not seem concerned at all with preserving the status quo. Nicodemus has his reputation to maintain amongst his friends and the regular people. He’s still more worried about self-preservation than the truth. But, he is curious.
Jesus knows all of this, just as he knows all of the ways you and I are posturing and trying to protect ourselves right now. And he does what he always does with people when they come at him from a place of self-preservation, he goes right after them and puts his finger right on the place where they are misguidedly putting their faith. He points out what they are hiding behind. In Nicodemus’ case it is his knowledge, his theological chutzpah. . .he is a pharisee after all. So, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be born again if he wants to see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus is befuddled. He doesn’t understand what Jesus is saying. He rightly recognizes that that is impossible, being born again, but Jesus doesn’t let up. He says it to him again, and then questions Nicodemus. “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?” He exposes him. Jesus wants Nicodemus to see how he’s trying to protect himself. . .what he’s hiding behind isn’t working. It’s not going to give him what he hopes it will. There’s only one way to see the Kingdom of God, and it is an impossible thing for Nicodemus and anyone else to do. It requires nothing short of God’s miraculous work.
And that’s exactly where Jesus takes him. He tells Nicodemus the heart of God. He shows this “God expert” who God really is and how he really operates. He tells him that God’s love is the active force in the universe. His love is the change agent of all things. Because of his love God “gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (3:16-17). God seeks after the lost…He is actively coming after us. This is a revolutionary teaching from Jesus, and he is setting Nicodemus and all of his theological expertise straight.
We often take this passage out of context and want to use it as purely referring to the meta-narrative of how God operates, and Jesus is certainly teaching that here, but it is important to remember that he is teaching it to a person. . .a particular person that came to him in a particular way and has his own particular issues. It is Nicodemus’ situation that Jesus highlights next. He says,
“Whoever believes in [God’s Son] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already. . .and this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come into the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out by God.”
Jesus says a lot here, and we’re gonna unpack it. But first I want you to see what he’s doing.
When did Nicodemus come to Jesus? At night. He came in the darkness, not in the daytime. He did not want to be seen. He was still hiding. So, while Jesus is talking on large scale about people in general he is also using Nicodemus as the prime example for all of humanity. You came in darkness, Nicodemus. You came in fear. You are afraid of the light. . .of me.
Remember this is what we all do. “Everybody’s got their secret lives,” and we know that if we open up our mouths and share where we really are we’ll never be the same, and that scares the hell out of us. The best illustration for this is the cockroach, or as my friends down in Charleston, SC call them: “palmetto bugs” (part of their never-ending quest to make things more pleasant). We are naturally like cockroaches. When you turn lights on them, they scatter for their lives. They run for the shadows. . .they’ve got to find some place to hide because otherwise they are exposed, they are vulnerable. . .and they’re right. What happens to cockroaches or palmetto bugs when they get caught in the light out in the open? They get stepped on! They get smacked by your shoe. . .no matter what cute name you try to give them. They scatter for the darkness, to run back into hiding because they are afraid they are going to die. Light means death to them. That’s how Jesus describes us here. That’s how he describes Nicodemus here. We hate the light because we do not want it to expose our evil works.
Here’s where you make your final stand. You ready? This is where you make that one last effort at self-defense against the onslaught of Jesus. You say, “Wait a second there, Jesus! My works aren’t evil. I’ve never killed anybody. I pay my taxes. I’m a pretty good person.” The self-preservation kicks back in. . .I’m not evil. And now he’s got you. He’s got all of us, right where he wants us. Remember who he is talking to here: a pharisee. Nicodemus is a professional good guy. He works his butt off everyday to make sure that he is doing the right thing. All he’s about is keeping God’s law, and yet Jesus says that his works are evil, that he does wicked things. How can he say that? What is he talking about? What has Nicodemus done to deserve such a scathing assessment? Jesus has already told us: he hasn’t believed in God’s only Son as the only way to eternal life. Nicodemus has done what all of us do: he has put his faith in his own efforts. He has hidden behind his own “goodness,” his ability to do the right thing, to be a good guy. That’s where he and we try to scatter when the lights come on. It’s just what you felt internally when you heard Jesus call your works evil. We reflexively object, “No they are not! I try really hard to be a good person all the time. I do good things.” But that’s just it…as Jesus said, unless we are born again we cannot see his kingdom. We need to be reborn of the Spirit, made new by the love of God that enters into the darkness to find everyone hiding there. We need to be saved from ourselves. . .from our own compulsive self-preservation, we need to be saved from our own good works when we put our faith in them. We need our faith to be in Jesus Christ alone, nothing else.
That’s why Jesus says those who do not believe stand condemned already. They are condemned already because they are still stuck in the darkness. They are putting their faith in themselves. They are still hiding. That is our true default state. . .we are dead in our sins. We are the lost sheep and the lost coin in Luke 15. We are the cockroaches running for our lives back to the shadows. Here’s the painful part: the only way that changes is to actually suffer the fate that every cockroach is running from. . .we’ve got to die. There’s no other way. There is no other way to be reborn other than to be dead first. This is why Jesus said this is the judgment that the people loved the darkness rather than the light because they wanted to hold on to what they thought was life. They think they are preserving something worth saving, but it’s not true. All that we are preserving when we hide from the light is our own denial. . .that false image that Nicodemus was worried about losing, that reputation for being a good guy or a good gal, that perception that you’ve got it together, that you’re not that bad, but all the while you’ve got your secret life. All the while, you’ve got those dark places that you don’t want to be displayed on the jumbotron for everyone to see. You’re still hiding behind a façade, and you’re in darkness.
It’s the way the rest of the Waterdeep song goes. They sing, “Maybe it won’t be the same, what is there to lose that you can hold on to, I mean really hold on to?” What are you really holding on to? The answer is nothing. The only thing you lose is your denial because the truth is your worst fear has already come true. . .you are already dead. That’s what Scripture says about us humans and it’s what Jesus has just told us along with Nicodemus. . .whoever does not believe in the Son stands condemned already. That is where we already are in our sin, remember? We’re lost. Any time we put our faith in anything other than Jesus we are just displaying the fact of our deadness. That’s why we need to be saved. That’s why Jesus came into the world. . .why God gave his only Son to us…so that we might be saved. So that we might be found by him and be given new life. . .that we might be born again by the Spirit. . .saved from the condemnation we already sit in.
“All the way from the ocean to the desert a million stories dying to be heard. . .” We are desperate to be known, to be set free from our own prison of self-preservation, to have our secret lives brought into the light so that they can be forgiven, so that we can be healed. That’s the thing that none of the palmetto bugs believes could ever happen—that new life lies out there in the light. But that is exactly what God does for us in Jesus. Remember he has come not to condemn, but to save us from our already condemned state. That’s what Jesus does. He exposes us to show us that we’re dead, so that we might finally stop running, so that we might give up and finally recognize him for who he is—our Savior.
That’s what happened to Nicodemus. This encounter with Jesus where he was brought into the light to be exposed resulted in him coming to believe in Jesus, the only Son of God. John tells us after the crucifixion that Nicodemus joined Joseph of Arimathea in embalming the body of Jesus for burial. Nicodemus supplied all of the expensive spices and ointments and helped lay Jesus in the tomb. His works were now true – he believed—and he had come into the light for all to see that his works were carried out in God. That’s the new life that Jesus promised on the other side of death. He was born again and was now a disciple of the one true God.
The same promise is true for you. Wherever you are hiding, whatever your secret life is. . .Jesus already knows you there. He is already there bringing you into the light so that you can experience his healing there. That’s the love of God. He has come to save you from the darkness, to save you from condemnation, to save you from your secret lives. No more hiding. I promise you you’ll never be the same. And that’s really good news. What is there to lose that you can hold on to, I mean really hold on to?
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