When gospel conversations don't end how you want them to

I imagine him:

the slap-slap of his worn sandals in dusk-stained streets. The way he might’ve kept to the shadows, dipping his chin, hooded on a night too warm for a cloak. How maybe his heart drum-rolled when he saw the familiar silhouette of an acquaintance, how he slowed his steps and chose another route to his destination, desperate to avoid recognition—and confrontation.

Reaching the designated place, he perhaps hesitated, his fist held hovering at the stranger’s door. A deep inhale, maybe, a shuddering exhale to calm raw nerves. The man, knocking, with far more confidence than he felt.

Then Jesus, greeting him. Welcoming him inside. Asking his name—as if he didn’t already know.

“Nicodemus,” the man would say.

The name belonged to a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews. Leader, authority, and religious teacher—all were titles he claimed. Yet for an undisclosed purpose, Nicodemus had gone to meet Jesus that night. Alone. Uncertain. Seeking something.

And Jesus wasted no time in giving Nicodemus what he didn’t even know how to ask for. The world-uprooting, curse-reversing, love-lavishing, wonder-evoking gospel came to an unready heart that night on a rooftop. I think Jesus was planting seeds for a harvest.

Perhaps Nicodemus’s conversation with Jesus would irrevocably change him.

The heart of Nicodemus

The fact that Nicodemus came to Jesus at all says something about him. John 3 doesn’t spell out the specifics of why he came, but it probably wasn’t at the request of the Pharisees. Their goal was to silence Jesus, not to understand who He was or why He had come. Nicodemus’s first comment reveals that he believed God was with Jesus; he just didn’t yet understand that Jesus was God. He thought he had gone to meet a man that night.

As a spiritual leader, Nicodemus was supposed to ‘have all the answers.’ His deliberateness in seeking Jesus reveals teachability, humility, and another admirable quality: where the Pharisees as a whole had labeled Jesus a blasphemer, Nicodemus had not. He was a truth-seeker, not a blind follower.

There’s a verse that has something to say to those who seek Christ for themselves rather than simply believing what others say of Him:

“You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek Me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

The first verb seek in this verse comes from the Hebrew word baqash, meaning “to strive after”—like you might expect. The second verb seek comes from darash, meaning “to trample with the feet . . . to tread or beat a path” or “to go to a place, to frequent it” [Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon]. It gives me the mental impression of someone walking down the same path, over and over again, to the same destination until the earth is beaten and worn, with an intentional and passionate pursuit that endures. When we seek God in the darash way, He says we will find Him.

I can’t help but wonder if darash brought Nicodemus to Jesus.

The Conversation that Matters

The real reason I studied John 3 was because it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. The conversation seemed all wrong. Nicodemus says very little in the entire dialogue. In fact, Jesus seems to ignore and discard his first comment: “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” (v. 2).

Jesus replies, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (v. 3).

But gradually I started to see what Jesus was doing.

He was redirecting the conversation. Jesus had only a little time with Nicodemus, and he wasn’t about to waste it. Like a trail of bread crumbs, the miracles of Jesus that Nicodemus mentioned were meant to be arrows aiming straight at Jesus’s identity as the Son of God. In truth, Nicodemus didn’t know who Jesus was, and maybe he was too afraid to ask.

Jesus boomeranged the conversation to the gospel itself, to all the answers to the questions that Nicodemus didn’t even know to ask. Because that alone was what Nicodemus needed most. You aren’t going to get this right now, Nicodemus, but I’m going to give you the whole truth so that when the time is right, you will understand, and you will believe in Me.

And Jesus starts with Nicodemus’s desperate need for life.

Nicodemus, you must be reborn.

Essentially, Jesus looked at Nicodemus and said, “Nicodemus, you are dead. You are not living. And you cannot enter heaven until you are born spiritually—until I give life to you.”

And he didn’t leave Nicodemus hanging, either. Rather, Jesus gives Nicodemus the full-fledged gospel story in one conversation.

Here’s the realization that floored me, however: Jesus gave Nicodemus the gospel knowing he wouldn’t understand it. Let me rephrase that: knowing that Nicodemus wouldn’t understand it yet. Nicodemus’s questions show us he wasn’t getting it:

- “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb?” (v. 4)

- “How can these things be?” (vs. 9)

Jesus was patient in revealing Himself to Nicodemus, and He moved forward in preparing him for what was to come.

A closer look at John 3:16

Typically, we speak about ourselves in first-person: I, or me. But in the most well-known verse of the Bible, something odd happens. Jesus refers to Himself with the third-person pronoun him. Rather than saying, God loved the world so much that he gave me, that whoever believes in me should not perish, he disguises Himself in third-person pronouns.

He tells Nicodemus,

“For God so loved the world, that he 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. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:16-18)

Jesus did this deliberately. This was no mistake. And the more I ponder why He did it, the more I wonder if it was because He knew that Nicodemus wasn’t yet ready to grasp His identity.

Jesus gave Nicodemus the gospel knowing he wouldn’t fully understand it:

∙ You were already born a child of man, but now you must be born a child of God (v. 3, 5).

∙ The Son of Man descended from heaven—to earth, among Israel (v. 13). He’s here.

∙ Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness to give life to those who were perishing but looked upon it, so also the Son of Man must be lifted up in order to save (v. 14).

[Numbers 21:8 — And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”]

∙ God, motivated by love for the world, gave His only Son in order that whoever believes in Him for life will be saved (v. 16).

∙ Judgment has come: light has come to the world, but the world loves darkness more than light because the world is evil. (v. 19).

Instead of plainly telling him “I am the Son of God,” he seemed to be saying, This is what the Son of God has done and will do, and this is how you will know him, and He poured out the whole truth in one conversation and sprinkled all the pieces of the puzzle into Nicodemus’s mind that would eventually come together to show Nicodemus exactly who Jesus really was.

One last thing, though: Jesus gave Nicodemus a landmark for the identity of the Son of Man: “So must the Son of Man be lifted up.”

It hadn’t happened yet.

But just like the serpent in the wilderness, the Son of Man would be lifted up.

And I wonder if it was then, when Jesus was lifted up on the cross, that Nicodemus finally understood the gospel. Did he stand there caught between those mocking and grieving and feel shock pour through him as he watched the soldiers erect the cross upon which an innocent man hung? I wonder if Nicodemus fell on his face. I wonder if light flooded his heart as he remembered the night on the rooftop long before, when Jesus had given him the gospel, the good news, and he hadn’t yet been able to wrap his mind around it. Was that the moment he believed?

Before Jesus’ death, Nicodemus spoke up against the Pharisees in an effort to protect Jesus from their desire to kill him. (John 7:50-52). And later, after the crucifixion, Nicodemus helped to handle the burial arrangements of Jesus with another man, Joseph of Arimathea (John 19:38-42).

Where once he wore night to hide any association with Jesus, he had begun to identify with Jesus openly. It was a risk, and I wonder if it reflected what he had come to believe. Personally, I think he got it—the gospel. I think that the Word of God did not return void in him.

When you meet Nicodemus

In Nicodemus’s story, I am filled with encouragement.

I love planting. But I’ve learned that it’s easy to love the harvest far more. There is motivation in the harvest—watching something grow and flourish. Seeing, with your own two eyes, God receiving glory. Watching Him transfer a sinner from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.

In John 3, I see that harvests are good, but they are not the happily-ever-after of every gospel conversation. The book of John does not specifically tell us whether Nicodemus truly believed in Jesus as his Messiah. The book doesn’t lay that curiosity to rest, and I’m left wondering.

But I think that’s part of the point too: that the harvest is not the end-all. That the end-all is my obedience, and my love for Christ, not my love for results or spiritual victories. The end-all is my obedience to plant, to water, to pour the truth of the gospel into the lives of the people God puts me on a rooftop with, metaphorically speaking. The end-all is faithfulness to our great God, the Lord of the Harvest.

And if He chooses to draw back the veil of eternity and to show us when He harvests, oh, how I will rejoice. I have seen those harvests. I have loved them.

But sometimes you pour your heart out for someone and you give them every ounce of truth you know and you receive only rejection, unbelief, and pain in return. Sometimes they don’t get it or they don’t want it and they walk away and you never know the end of the story. Or you do it and it breaks your heart for them, over and over again.

Keep planting.

Stick a seed in the ground, and water it. What happens to the seed is His work, not ours.

For only God can change a heart.

Only God knows which hearts are like the good soil in the parable Jesus told. “’And some fell into good soil and grew and yielded a hundredfold.’ As he said these things, he called out, ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear’” (Luke 8:8).

For further study: Matthew 9:36-38, 2 Corinthians 5, Isaiah 55