“Coconuts and Bananas” One Part Only

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 914 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text

-- Brother Phil Enlow: Praise God! I’m reluctant to get up here. I’m afraid something will happen to spoil all the wonderful things the Lord has done for us this morning. I appreciate His presence and His faithfulness to us.

Turn to John chapter 3 just for a few minutes--a scripture we know well--John chapter 3. This is the account of Nicodemus. “Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council.” (NIV). Now this, you know, the Jews religion was ruled by a council, I think of 70 people. And this was a member of that council who came. But he saw something in Jesus that made him want to come and inquire further rather than just listening to what he said during the day.

He came by night. We don’t know why. Whether he was ashamed or whether he just wanted more time, I don’t know. Whatever it was he came to Jesus and he said, “He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.” And of course we know the emphasis and the ministry of Jesus was not on the miraculous signs. The miraculous signs were meant to point to Him and to the message that He brought. That was always the center and apparently this man got that--that there was a message. He’s a teacher and so he’s focused not on the signs but on what the signs point to.

But Jesus said this in reply, “…I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. How can a man be born when he is old? Nicodemus asked. Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” All he could think about was the natural side of it.

“Jesus answered, I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, You must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

And I will pause there for a moment. I think that there’s something that has been largely lost in Christianity today that, you know, the idea of being born again and saved has just lost its meaning, most places. They’ll get people to pray a little prayer and declare them saved and born again and there’s no reality to it. But I pray that God will…that we will never lose the reality that this is a supernatural kingdom, and that this can only happen because of God.

I gave…I used an illustration the Lord gave me during this trip. I used it repeatedly and it never failed to get many laughs and smiles because I think people got it from tribal villages right on into the cities. It was a tropical area so I just imagined with the people that there was a man who planted a seed and it grew up and it became…it was a coconut tree and it bore nice coconuts. But one day he said I don’t want coconuts. I don’t like coconuts. I want bananas. And so, suppose that man were to go and to begin to command that tree to bear bananas. See, I got the same reaction over there!

( laughter ).

They thought that was hilarious. They saw the problem immediately. You know you can’t get the…you can’t pray. You can’t get the pastor to go lay his hands on that tree and it bear bananas. You can’t send it to banana school. You can’t play banana music to it. You know, there’s no way that you can get something that’s a coconut tree to bear bananas.

But folks, that’s exactly what most religion tries to do. We’re born into a family of sinners and there’s nothing else we can produce. The very best a child of Adam can produce falls way short of the glory of God. That’s what the Scripture says. We’ve all sinned. And of course, everybody says, oh sure, I make mistakes. But we come short of the glory of God. We continue, no matter what we do. The best we can do is going to come short of the glory of God. And we are part of a system, part of a world order that is headed for fire, headed for the destruction. Nobody can be part of this kingdom.

You know the danger in any church, no matter if you’ve got truth and living truth, the danger is people who grow up and they just sort of embrace the culture of their religious environment. But they never enter in to what Jesus says here, because you cannot be a partaker of the kingdom that God has established unless there is a total transformation.

Now you think about that poor coconut tree that’s sitting there, saying oh, you know, what can I do? That would take a miracle, wouldn’t it? Yeah, and that’s what it takes here. You look at what John says in chapter 1 about this. He talks about Jesus coming in to the world and the world, even “…though the world was made through him…” in verse 10, “…the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” That was…in general terms that’s what happened with Israel.

“Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” Now this is what’s necessary. We’re children of Adam, but that’s not good enough. That won’t get you in. I don’t care how you live. You can be the most moral person in the history of the world, if there was such a thing, and it wouldn’t do you a bit of good, because you’re still a child of Adam. You’ve got to be a child of God.

Now a lot of people think that this, what he’s describing here, is this little prayer we pray-- invite Jesus into our hearts and that’s what “receiving Him” means. But receiving Him, they had to receive Him as One sent of God. That had to receive Him as One who had words from heaven that could give life. And when they opened their heart to the messenger, then the message had a way to get in. Once the message got in, the message had life in it. The message brought forth life in the heart of everyone who opened themselves to that Word. It’s the Word that brings life.

But listen to what He says here. He describes these children of God, He says in verse 13, “children born not of natural descent….” It doesn’t matter what earth group, what people group you’re a part of--whether you’re Caucasian, or African, or Asian, or any other people, any national group, whether you’re Jewish or Gentile, it has nothing to do with being a part of God’s kingdom. There’s no advantage to any of those things. “…Nor of human decision…” This is not something you just decide one day. I tell you, we are dependent on God.

( congregational amens ).

If God does not do something in a human heart, it will not get done. And we can strive and we can try, religiously speaking, to get people to decide this and decide that and most of the time it’s empty. We need God to open up hearts, don’t we? It says, “…nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”

And that’s what He’s describing in chapter 3 when He says the Spirit has…the Spirit is what has to do this. God has to so work in a person’s heart that He brings them to a knowledge of what they are and their need.

You know, we read over in 1st Corinthians chapter 15 and I’ll just…I’ll look at the verse so that you can know where it’s at. Let’s look over there for a minute, because Paul talks about the kingdom of God. It’s a passage about the resurrection and the fact that what God has ahead for his children is a full and a complete transformation, a complete deliverance from all that we were in Adam. Everything will be gone, even this flesh that we contend with right now. Every bit of that will be gone. It will be transformed into His likeness.

But listen to what he says in verse 50, “I declare to you, brothers, that the flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God….” That’s pretty plain. I don’t care how religious your flesh is. I don’t care what you do. If’s that all you are and that’s all you have, you’ll never enter His kingdom. It’s not for you. You will perish with every other son of Adam that’s never been joined to Christ.

“…nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” This life we’ve received is infected with death, there’s nothing you can do about it except replace it. God has…and it’s the same way if that poor coconut tree…you need a banana tree transplant or something. You’re gonna have to have a different kind of life in there capable of producing those bananas. We’re gonna have to have something we weren’t born with in this world. And, I’ll tell you, God has to bring somebody--everybody, individually, to the point where they…where this is the message of God’s heart to your heart--you need to be born again. You need to--you need to have supernatural life that you don’t have.

You know I was thinking of…you know, what would happen if you took a quart of milk and you opened it up and you set it out for a couple of weeks. Okay, now let’s see if we can redeem that milk. Let’s just put it through some kind of a filter and maybe we can make it okay again. No? What’s happened is corruption has entered in. It’s so integrated into the milk there ain’t no way to rescue that.

Folks, that’s what we are. We don’t think of ourselves that way. We are so full of blindness. We compare ourselves with each other. We imagine that God grades on the curve. Do you know what grading on the curve is? You know one teacher comes along and says, here is my standard. You students, you take your exams. You’ve got to meet my standard and that’s how I’m gonna grade.

Then another teacher comes along and they don’t want…he doesn’t want to look bad, I guess, and so he says, we’re gonna give a test and we’re gonna match the standard to what people do. And so if the top student in the class gets a 10, he gets a 100 because you’re grading on the curve. You’re just matching the whole standard to what’s done. That’s how people imagine God’s gonna do on the judgment day, that He’s gonna compare you with everybody else and if you kind of come in the top…the top half you get in.

Oh no! You’re still “rotten milk” without Jesus. You need Him. This was one of the most religious people that Jesus probably could have approached. Obviously there was something in him that was hungry that was awakened by what Jesus said enough to want to inquire and try to understand. You know, there’s plenty of evidence in the scriptures that he did become a believer. He shows up two other places in the gospel narrative as one who was a believer. He was one of the ones that helped Joseph…he was the one who helped Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus--to bury the body of Jesus. So he was a disciple.

But I’ll tell you, at this point, he didn’t have a clue. He thought of religion as God giving us rules to obey and we obey them and that makes us righteous in His eyes. There is nothing you can do to make yourself righteous in His eyes. That’s…I’ll tell you salvation and the new birth begins with recognition of what we are and only God can do it. My words have no power to do that in themselves. At some point, in every person’s life that is ever born again, God has got to come to you with a conviction that you are lost and you need Him and that if He doesn’t show you mercy, you’re gonna go to hell.

( congregational amens ).

Now what is a conviction? You know, we have ideas that we have beliefs that we sort of toy with, but a conviction is something that is down here. You know in the depths of your soul that this is true and only God can get past this and past your defenses and come right down here and say, you, I’m talking to you. Without me you’re lost. You can go to church all you want to. But, I’ll tell you, what we’ve been singing about this morning, it’s real.

( congregational amens ).

You may look at some of us and you see our faults, but I thank God, there’s somebody bigger than my faults. And I want to grow in Him. I want to…I want this new life that He’s put in me to grow and to become more like Him. That’s what we’ve been singing about. But, I’ll tell you, if you’re never born again, you’re not even in the game. You’re not even in the kingdom.

And I’ll tell you, we can’t ever lose this message of lifting up Jesus as the only hope of mankind and a real conversion. We could fill this church with people. It’s done every Sunday in places around this country, places that are huge, great choirs, great sounding music, but what do they have if they don’t have the convicting power of God’s Spirit to change hearts? They have nothing. God help us never to lose that, that Jesus should come and confront our children, those who come in among us with a reality. If you aren’t born again of God’s Spirit, if there isn’t a real miracle born in your heart, you’re just religious and lost.

“How can this be? Nicodemus asked. You are Israel’s teacher, said Jesus, and do you not understand these things? I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world….”

See, that’s the thing. God sent light into the world. So what do we do with it? That’s the issue. Everything hangs on that issue. What do we do? “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light.” Now why did they do that? “…because their deeds were evil.” They prefer their own will and their own way and their own lusts, their own earthly desires.

“Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” You see, Jesus began to get into some of the realities of what it means to come and to believe in Him. This is not just some little old thing where you add Jesus to your life and you become religious and start going to church. This is everything. This is leaving the citizenship of this world and becoming a citizen of a heavenly kingdom.

“But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.” You know I was thinking about the…what Jesus used as an illustration of Him being lifted up. He talked about the occasion when Moses lifted up a snake, do you remember what happened? Children of Israel got to complaining. Something they had never did, of course, unless they had a chance.

( laughter ).

They were complaining and belly aching and there was a judgment of God. God sent some poisonous snakes among them--vipers. I don’t know what they were. Whatever it was, they were dying. But you know God’s merciful and He had Moses to carve, to form somehow, this brass snake and lift it up high where all the people could see it. And so God’s prescription was, you’re bitten by a snake, you look at that serpent and you’ll be healed.

Can you imagine what it would feel like to be maybe sleeping in your tent, maybe you step outside your tent and there’s a poisonous snake that’s got you. You were just walking along, you thought everything was great and all of a sudden you’re seized, literally with the knowledge that if something doesn’t change, you’re gonna die. You know, that’s what’s got to happen. God has got to seize you to the point where you’re scared to death and you know that if you don’t have an answer, if God doesn’t have mercy, if God doesn’t help you, you’re gonna die. And its God’s mercy to bring every soul to that, cause we walk in blindness without God’s mercy--without that light.

But oh, what a simple thing it was for them to do. They were saying--they were saying by looking, I believe God’s promise. God has made a way where I can…I don’t have to perish in this thing that has taken hold of me. This poison does not have to overcome me. I can look and He will heal me.

Now what did they do about their need? Was there some work they performed or some “something” that they had to go out and do? Did God send them on some grand quest and they came back and said, God, I’ve done what you told me? No. They were helpless--dying. I don’t know, some of them maybe the poison was beginning to work in their system and they…it was probably all the strength they could muster just to look. But, that’s all God wanted.

It’s surrender. It’s the opening of the heart when God confronts it and saying, yes, Lord. I agree with what you’re telling me. I agree with my need, Lord. Oh, God. Then there’s a heart that cries out--Oh, God show mercy upon me, like the man in the temple. Oh, God, have mercy upon me, a sinner. You’ve got to know you’re a sinner before you’ll ever cry like that. You’ve got to know that you’re in mortal danger before you will ever give up your life and your way.

You know, everywhere the…in the teachings of the New Testament, the resurrection of Christ is connected with the new birth, because that’s the life that He came forth with. And even in our identification with Him in baptism, that’s the message. But what do you have to do to be resurrected? What path do you follow to get to that point? You have to die. See, Jesus didn’t reach the resurrection without going to the cross, did He? And neither do we. What it means to really give Him our hearts and to give Him our lives is to come to the place where we’re willing to go to the cross with Him. Yes, He’s our sin bearer. Thank God, He took our place so that we can come out on the other side alive.

But, oh, that cross is not just for Him and we get to go free in the sense that we can just go on and live our lives. I’ll tell you, when God confronts you, it’s gonna be surrender. It’s gonna be, you give me your life. It’s my life now. It’s not yours anymore. I’m with you to lead you, to help you, to give you strength, but I’m your Lord. We don’t get life…we don’t get this other life without giving up this one. There’s a death.

You know, I’ve read all kinds of ideas about when Jesus spoke of being born of water and the Spirit and I don’t know… maybe people have used it legitimately in different ways. But to me, it does represent a death because that is a symbolic--that’s the meaning of real baptism in the New Testament. It meant this is the point at which I am laying down my life. I, in faith, I’m giving myself to Him, but I’m also coming in the anticipation of the fulfillment of His promise.

I’m putting my trust in Him. I have no more confidence that I can accomplish anything with respect to God. I cannot qualify myself to be part of this kingdom. God I am dependent upon your mercy and your promise and the provision of a Savior. My trust in myself is zero. My trust in Him is a hundred percent. I am putting myself in your hands. I am laying down my life, but when I come forth, there’s another life that’s gonna be born in me. And that’s the life that’s gonna grow up and live forever.

Folks, anything less than this is not--not the truth, not the faith that was once delivered to the saints. So, I don’t know who’s here this morning. I don’t know why these thoughts came to my mind except the Lord’s concerned about people and He wants our message to be clear. The only thing I can say is, have you been born again? That’s something between you and God. If there’s something about this that disturbs you and there’s any desire at all, you need to…you need to start crying out to God. You need to pray. You need to seek Him. You need to say, oh, God, help me to understand. I want you. I want to be one with you. Lord, I know my sins have separated me from you and I can’t do anything about it, but I need you, Lord. This birth is not something I can engineer. You have to do it in me, Lord. I’m just a coconut tree. It’s all I can produce. I need you. I need a miracle in my life.

And, I’ll tell you, if you will cry out to God with all your heart, God will do something for you that maybe has never happened in your life. Oh, we need to be born again. There’s no other solution to the problem of Adam’s sin. We can sing about the glories of the kingdom and the glories about heaven. It’s like the old spiritual, everybody talking about heaven, ain’t a goin’ there. But, I pray that there will be people here this morning, God wants to sow the seed of His Word and His promise in your heart.

“For God so loved the world that he gave….” Oh, thank God! It isn’t the spirit of condemnation that Christ came with. It’s love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Oh my, all of my eggs are in that one basket. Jesus is the only one. God has given Him to save me. I just put my life in His hands. That’s the only hope that I have. There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing you can do.

I was watching a kind of, sort of an informal debate the other day, with a man who is a prominent skeptic. There’s something about the man I’m attracted to. He seems to have an honesty. He’s not a fighter. But there seems to be a genuine perplexity, you know, why would God? I’m not so bad, what have I done? You know, it’s almost…this idea, I’m just…he looked around and he compares himself with other people. What have I done against Him that He should cast me into hell?

Oh, my. He needs to talk to Isaiah. Because you compare yourself with other people, that’s no standard. God doesn’t grade that way. There’s nothing, there is no taint of what we are in Adam that will ever enter that kingdom and only God can fix that problem. Only by replacing this corrupted--sin corrupted, sin darkened life can that happen. But oh, once His seed enters into a willing heart and you receive it, God will water that. He’ll do whatever it takes--whether it’s a quick thing or whether it takes a period of time, I don’t know. But that life that God puts in that Word will burst forth in your heart and there’ll be something that’s changed forever in your life. And your feet will turn in a different direction and you’ll be part of a kingdom that will last forever.

I pray that there will be people who will hear these simple words. I can’t…it’s not my explanation that can do anything anyway. We need to pray and we need to trust God, just give out the promise of God. But, I’ll tell you, if you will humble yourself--if God will give you the grace to humble yourself and say, yes, I’m a needy sinner. Without Him I am lost. He has shown me that I’m lost. But, He has shown me that there’s a Savior and if I put my whole trust in Him, He is able to do what I cannot do for myself and I cry out to Him.

You do that until He answers you with a gift of His Spirit, with peace in your heart. I’ll tell you, we’ll rejoice with you. Heaven will rejoice. Oh, I’ll tell you we can rejoice over a lot of things, but I don’t know anything greater than that. That’s what Jesus died for. We were all lost. He died and the joy that carried Him through that awful experience was the joy of knowing what He was going to be able to do and accomplish for us through that. Oh, Praise God!

I pray that you’ll be one of those, because His promise is sure. That’s the only thing that is sure. This world is going to pass away. Your life is gonna die. We’re all going to stand before Him one day. There’s only going to be two kinds of people--those that have surrendered to Him and that He’s performed the miracle of the new birth in and those that have said, no I want my own life. Which one are you? Praise God!

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