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Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God” (John 3: 5).

This statement that made by Jesus to Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, was a follow-up on what He had already stated, “Truly, truly, I can to you, unless one is born anew (or from above), he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus was a devout man and a seeker of God – two characteristics that pleased our Lord and which we should emulate. We are all to be devout, and striving for personal holiness, and we are to life-long seekers whose desire is to grow in our knowledge and love of God. In the Christian life, we either move forward or backward in our spiritual lives. We don’t stay the same because the life of the flesh will have its way more and more if we are not conscientiously seeking to deepen and develop our relationship with God.

All of us here this morning have been given the basic ingredient for such a journey and pilgrimage. We have been washed clean of original sin in the waters of Baptism and we have been re-generated (made new, born again) by the action of the Holy Spirit. We move forward as we are graced by the Sacraments of the Church, as we are instructed by the scriptures, as we learn from the lives of the saints how to live the Christian life, as we give ourselves to a discipline of prayer, as we seek to serve others in the Name of Christ, and as we assist the church with the time, talent, and treasure we have been given by God to build up the Body of Christ, the Church on earth.

I wrote in the latest edition of the Rod and Staff that one of the things that is to happen in Lent is that as our spiritual lives are more intentionally focused, there will a spill-over beyond Lent so that our lives quite naturally stay more intentional and focused on God.

We move forward in Lent to keep moving forward. We don’t keep Lent for a season, and say in one way or another at Easter, “I’m glad that that is over!” We should say something like, “I now continue with so much of what I have been doing.”

Jesus used his time in the wilderness, which was presented to us in last Sunday’s Gospel, as the necessary prelude for the beginning of His ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing. It was the Holy Spirit who led Him immediately after His Baptism into the wilderness to fast and pray, and to do battle in His human nature with the three temptations of Satan.

Our human nature is triune in its composition. We being made in the image of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are triune. You are I are body, soul, and spirit. St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Thes. 5:23). The body enables us to live in the created world and sensorially experience life and relationships within the created order. Our soul is our fundamental identity, the source of created uniqueness and unrepeatability. Our spirit is the life force within us that animates our bodies, and keeps us alive.

The Holy Spirit through the action of Christ in His Church fuses itself to our human spirits and is present within us to govern our souls – our minds, our wills, and our emotions. The Holy Spirit gives us eyes to see beyond ourselves and our place in time and space in order that we see heaven, our heart’s true longing.

As we reflect upon the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, and our Lord’s clear speaking of water and the Holy Spirit being the necessary ingredients for the new birth, the new relationship with God in Christ in whom comes grace and truth, the lens through which we see beyond ourselves to see and understand Him, we need to ask ourselves how the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives; or put another way, how are we doing in the life of the Spirit?

When Jesus returned to the Father at His Ascension, He promised to send the Holy Spirit to guide, comfort, govern, direct, and sustain us, for it to unify His apostles and disciples, and for us to be guided into all the truth. The Holy Spirit blows within us and upon us if we dare to feel it and listen to it. We all need to be still more and more, and let the Spirit have dominion. We need to slow ourselves down from the hectic, hurried, and de-humanizing pace of our culture to be men and women who are centered in Christ, and through whom Christ may challenge the world. He calls us to fight the good fight against the culture of death for the culture of life to be seen and known.

Because God is God and because His plans are so often unknown to us before they happen, we are to understand that, as Jesus said to Nicodemus, “The wind (the spirit) blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.”

This means that the Holy Spirit’s action cannot be predicted or orchestrated. It falls upon, moves within, moves upon, and stirs up our human spirits that our souls (that trinity of mind, will, and emotions) do new things and fresh things for God. The Holy Spirit sets us free to be fully alive for and attentive to God’s desires in us and for others. As we are increasingly born of the Holy Spirit, we increasingly understand who Jesus is in all His manifestations. We increasingly understand Him as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of and for all things.

We usually think about the Holy Spirit on the Feast of Pentecost, or at times of ordinations and confirmations, and certainly at baptisms, but we think today about the Holy Spirit in the season of Lent because in Lent (as I said on Ash Wednesday) we are to come to ourselves, as the Prodigal Son did. We are to understand more and more who God desires us to be as His adopted sons and daughters through baptism, what lies at our core of living as Christians, what is the driving force that is within us and which comes upon us as we appropriate the gift bestowed.

We as Christians are to understand ourselves as Father loved, Christ saved, and Spirit guided. Because as Jesus said to Nicodemus, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life,” we work out our salvation as people who have been born again by water and the Spirit with “fear and trembling,” meaning daily prayer that we be in tune with God’s working in us and for others. When St. Paul said, “It is no longer I who lives but Christ who lives within me,” He was saying that the Holy Spirit, which he calls the Spirit of Christ, was reigning in his life which enabled him to do and endure things he never thought he could or would.

This is the place where we are all to be. This is to be our self-understanding, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. In this, we come to ourselves.

Let me say that this is not something that happens overnight, but it is process of sanctification and purification that requires a fervent desire for it and an accompanying life of prayer and devotion. There will be bumps in the road, dry spells, and possibly dark nights of the soul, and in such times we ask for the grace to be strong when we are weak, and we seek the prayers of others and the prayers of the saints.

I pray that as Lent moves forward, you and I are moving forward as the Spirit of God moves within us and upon us for our good and for others.

Spirit of the living God fall afresh on us. Melt us, mold us, fill us, use us. Spirit of the living God fall afresh on us.