THE BRIAR AND A ROSE: JESUS’ SOLUTION – FROM THE INSIDE OUT
By: Frank Tunstall, D. Min.
A gardener walking by with his spade noticed a briar growing in a ditch. The gardener looked at the briar carefully and decided to dig around it. Then he lifted the briar to take it with him.
“What is he doing?” the briar asked himself. “Doesn’t he know I don’t belong in a rose garden?”
The gardener took the briar into his garden and planted it with his flowers. This time the briar said, “What a mistake he has made planting me among these beautiful roses.”
The gardener came once more and made a slit in the briar with a sharp knife and grafted it into the rose. The briar complained again: “What are you doing? You’re hurting me.”
When summer came lovely roses were blooming where there had only been briars!
The gardener said to the briar, “Your beauty is due to what I put inside you. You will no longer be known as a briar but as a rose. You could not make yourself lovely and fragrant, I did.”
What made Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus so outstanding is the simplicity with which Jesus framed the sinful condition of all humanity and the cure He offered. He used the word picture of a baby’s birth that comes from the loving heart of a mom and dad and their Heavenly Father (Genesis 4:1-2). Everyone understands the birth of a baby.
THINK ABOUT IT. Eve had it right: “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” God has a part in every baby’s birth and wants to have a part in the spiritual development of every person (Genesis 4:1-2).
Nicodemus had no awareness the Son of God was willing to pour out His sinless blood even for him Nicodemus if only he would repent for his sins and confess Jesus as the Son of God. Neither did Nicodemus recognize Jesus was His Messiah who was there that night just to teach him.
Paul the Apostle later expressed how wonderful this spiritual heart transplant is. “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone and the new has come. All this is from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). Jesus’ plan for inside-out redemption made a fundamental change in worship that opened the door for the Holy Spirit to make new hearts.
A baby begins as a seed in its mother’s womb and then grows to birth and on to a new life. The solution for a person’s sins demands a spiritual birth that comes from above, from heaven, at the throne room of God. This inside-out salvation grows for a lifetime as a new ‘rose.’
If anyone is to escape the moral brokenness in his relationship with God, he must begin with a new birth.
Nicodemus went home that night without even one ‘rose.’
Nicodemus was the first person in the Christian era to whom Jesus presented the message of a new birth. He could have been the first person to go back to the Sanhedrin to teach His associates what Jesus had taught him.
Since that conversation, the word picture of being grafted into the vine with a new birth has become the most widely accepted truth Jesus taught to offer a person eternal life.
And ah! the beauty of those ‘grafted roses.’
