Hey, church family, it is Devo Time.

If you got your Bible, we're going to be in John Chapter 3.

For many of us that have been doing Bible study for a long time,

it's a very, very familiar passage, but sometimes one of the dangers when we study the Bible,

and we're very familiar is we can miss so much is because the moment we start out in 3-1, our mind jumps to 316.

And so let us not rush past God's inspired word for the verses before and after,

maybe the most, currently the most famous verse.

John chapter 3, beginning in verse 1. Now there was a man of the

Pharisee named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. Now the Pharisees get a bad rap in the New Testament and

rightfully so, but there are several Pharisees in the New Testament that come to put their faith in Jesus Christ.

The word Pharisee in Hebrew, it simply means like separated one.

And the idea is that the Pharisees would know the law of God so well, everything from Genesis

to Malachi. They would know the old covenant so well. They would know

all 613 laws so well that they thought that it wasn't good enough to just obey the law, but

they created laws about the laws about the laws. So the law says honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. And so they would define exactly

what does that mean. So they would come up with, you can't take more than this many amount of

steps because if we create that guardrail, then surely we'll never break the law. And so then they

got too focused on the law by the time Jesus arrives and they're two feet

away from the very Son of God.

They can smell his breath, but they can't sense that they are in the presence of Jesus.

The reason that they were so law driven is because they thought if we can stay holy and

separated from this polluted world, then we would be the first to recognize the

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