Mystery of the Wind
“Just like the wind blows where it wants to and you hear the sound of it, but have no understandin’ of where it comes from or where it’s goin’; same is true for the birthin’ by the Holy Spirit of God” John 3:8 (“The Gospel of John Cowboy Style”).
I grew up on the plains of West Texas, near Amarillo, so I know something about wind. It is a rare day in the Panhandle of Texas when the wind doesn’t blow. It’s kind’a like when an Easterner traveling through a West Texas town asked a resident, “Does the wind always blow this way?” He answered, “Nah! Sometimes it blows from the other way.”
As a kid, I always wondered what made the wind blow? Oh, yeah, I now know there are physical and meteorological reasons like high and low pressures. But still, wind remains something of a mystery.
Perhaps that’s something of what Jesus was saying to Nicodemus when he was visiting with him about the mystery of salvation. Jesus used the
example of wind. Wind cannot be seen, but the effects of it can. In fact, that is the only way to know the presence of wind; we only know it by its effects, by feeling it and by seeing the results of it.
Jesus explained to Nicodemus that for someone to see the Kingdom of God, he must be “born again.” He goes on to say, “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, but that which is born of the spirit is spirit.” knowing that someone is “born of the flesh,” is no problem. It is evidenced by personal presence.
The same is true of the spirit. We may not know how the Spirit works, nor can we fully comprehend the mystery of the new birth, but we can see the effect of the Spirit and new birth in human lives.
We can point to a man or woman who has been re-made, re-created and re-born by the power and the effect by the inner workings of the Holy Spirit. We can say of that man or woman that “they are a changed person; there is something different about them; they don’t act like they used to.” That is the effectual change of “being born again.”
A preacher from the past used to tell of a workman, who had been a drunken scoundrel and who one day miraculously got saved. His workmates began to 
ridicule and make fun of him. “Surely,” they would say to him, “you don’t really believe in miracles, do you? You don’t really believe that thing about Jesus turning water into wine?” The man answered, “I don’t know about Jesus turning water into wine, but I do know that He turned beer and whiskey into food and clothing for my family.”
The Apostle Paul says it like this . . .
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
