From Nicodemus to New Birth: Learning to Pray “Your Kingdom Come”
For a long time I have struggled with how to pray. I know that prayer is not about getting my will done in heaven, but about God’s will being done on earth. Yeshua taught His Jewish disciples to pray exactly that: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” That line has shaped my sense of prayer more than anything else.
When I look at the Scriptures’ picture of the kingdom, I see a world with no death, no mourning, no crying, and no pain, because the old order of things has passed away. In other words, in the kingdom there is no sickness. So when I pray about sickness or brokenness, I am not trying to force God to do what I want; I am consciously asking that His kingdom reality touch this present need, that His will be done here the way it is already done there. If it is His will to heal in that particular case and moment, then bringing the kingdom to bear on that situation will mean real healing. If He chooses not to remove the sickness now, I am still aligning myself with His will and trusting His future promise where all sickness will be gone.
This struggle for understanding has driven me back to the Scriptures. I began to search out what it really means to see the kingdom, to be born again as a child of God, and to pray in line with God’s will. That search is what I am putting into writing here.
Starting with Nicodemus: Seeing Something, But Not Yet Seeing the Kingdom
When I read about Nicodemus, I recognize myself. As a Jew, he comes to Yeshua at night and starts with what he can see:
“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.” (John 3:2)
Nicodemus has already reached an important conclusion. He knows Yeshua is “from God.” I also began there. I could see that the works of Yeshua in the Gospels, and in people’s lives, did not fit inside a merely human explanation. God had to be involved.
But Yeshua does not stay at that level with Nicodemus, and He did not allow me to stay there either. Instead of explaining the signs, He goes straight to a deeper issue:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again [or ‘from above’], he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3)
This verse slowed me down. Nicodemus sees enough to say “God is with you,” but Yeshua says that to actually see the kingdom, something more is required: a different kind of birth. That forced me to ask myself: am I just admiring what God does, or do I actually see the kingdom Yeshua is talking about?
Nicodemus is confused, and I have been, too. He asks how a grown man can be born again (John 3:4). Yeshua clarifies:
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” (John 3:6)
Here I began to notice a pattern. “Flesh” includes everything that comes by natural birth—family line, culture, even religious training. “Spirit” points to a life that comes directly from God. It is not an upgrade of what I already have by nature; it is a new source.
When I set this beside John’s opening words, it became clearer:
“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12–13)
Here John names three things that do not make someone a child of God:
- Not “of blood” – not simply by ancestry.
- Not “of the will of the flesh” – not by natural strength or effort.
- Not “of the will of man” – not even by another person’s decision or arrangement.
The positive statement is simple: “but of God.” This helped me hear Yeshua’s words to Nicodemus differently. He is not giving a slogan about being “born again.” He is saying that seeing and entering the kingdom requires a birth whose source is God Himself.
For me, this raised a new question: if this birth is “of God,” how does it relate to the Torah that Nicodemus already knew so well, and that I am learning to love?
Rediscovering Torah: More Than Law, a Living Way and Truth
To answer that, I went back to the Psalms. Psalm 1 describes the blessed person this way:
“His delight is in the Torah of YHWH, and on his Torah he meditates day and night.” (Psalm 1:2)
This is not the language of mere obligation. It is delight and constant meditation. That forced me to reconsider what I meant by “Torah.” I began to notice how often Torah is described as a way and as truth:
“Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the Torah of YHWH.” (Psalm 119:1)
“Your righteousness is righteous forever, and your Torah is truth.” (Psalm 119:142)
Here Torah is not just a list of commands. It is God’s path, His truth, His instruction. The word “Torah” itself carries the sense of teaching and direction, not merely statute.
As I paid attention to that language, Yeshua’s own words sounded different to me:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)
The Psalms say “walk in the Torah,” and “your Torah is truth.” Yeshua says, “I am the way… I am the truth.” John adds:
“For the Torah was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Messiah.” (John 1:17)
Slowly I began to see that to receive Yeshua is to receive the living Torah—the embodied way and truth that the written Torah was already revealing. That means that being “born of God” is not a move away from Torah, but a move into its deepest intention: walking God’s way from the inside out.
The Spirit and the New Covenant: Torah Written on the Heart
At this point I still had a problem. If Torah is God’s way and Yeshua is its fulfillment, how do I actually walk in that way? I know my weakness too well.
The prophets helped me here. Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant:
“I will put my Torah within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” (Jeremiah 31:33)
Ezekiel adds more detail:
“I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you… And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.” (Ezekiel 36:26–27)
These promises explain how a person can move from Torah on stone to Torah lived out as a way of life: God Himself writes His instruction on the heart, and He puts His Spirit within. The result is not that we become perfect overnight, but that we gain both inner clarity about the righteous path and real power to walk in it.
Paul’s contrast between “letter” and “Spirit” fits here:
“[God] has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6)ǰ
Without the Spirit, even God’s good Torah can become a dead letter to me—something I know about, argue over, or fear, but do not truly live. With the Spirit, the same Torah becomes a living word that feeds me, corrects me, and leads me.
Yeshua promised this help:
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” (John 16:13)
That is exactly what I have been asking for when I go back through Scripture and pray, “Open my eyes, open my ears. Let me see what Nicodemus did not yet see.”
Inner Conflict: Yetzer Hara, Yetzer Tov, Flesh and Spirit
As I looked at my own heart, I could not avoid the inner battle. Jewish teaching names this struggle very plainly:
- Yetzer hara – the evil inclination present from youth.
- Yetzer tov – the good inclination, awakened and strengthened by Torah and obedience.
I find this language honest. I know what it is to feel pulled in two directions inside. The prophets’ promise of a new heart and Spirit within helped me understand how that battle might actually change.
When I look back to Genesis, I see that Scripture names this “contrary” pull of sin very clearly. With Cain, God warns him before he acts: “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. (Genesis 4:7). In some translations that middle line is “its desire is contrary to you,” and that wording has helped me. Sin is not neutral; it wants what is opposite to my true good, and it pushes against the path God sets before me. Later, after the flood, God says, “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). Put together, these verses tell me that there is a real, inward bent (an early yetzer hara), and that sin’s desire runs against me, not for me. That is why I cannot treat sin as something harmless at the edge of my life; it stands at the door, wanting to master me, and I need God’s help to “rule over it” rather than be ruled by it.
The apostles speak in similar terms but with different labels. Paul uses “flesh” and “Spirit”:
“Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.” (Galatians 5:16–17)
He goes further:
“Those who belong to Messiah Yeshua have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24)
This is not a technique of self-improvement. It is the result of belonging to Messiah, of being “born of God” and indwelled by His Spirit. In those terms, the good inclination (yetzer tov) is strengthened and led by the Spirit, and the evil inclination (yetzer hara) is no longer allowed to rule.
With the Spirit, I begin to have real discernment about the righteous path and the ability to walk in the ways of the Lord. I do not always do this perfectly, but I am no longer a slave to the desires of the flesh. This connects directly to how I now read Psalm 1.
Psalm 1 and Revelation 22: The Tree by the Waters and the Tree of Life
Psalm 1 gives a simple but profound picture:
“Blessed is the man… whose delight is in the Torah of YHWH, and on his Torah he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” (Psalm 1:1–3)
Here is a life rooted in God’s instruction, constantly nourished, bearing fruit at the right time, with leaves that do not wither. When I read this in light of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, I see a person with Torah written on the heart and the Spirit as the underground water source.
Revelation 22 takes this image and enlarges it to the scale of the new creation:
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb… On either side of the river, the tree oex²f life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:1–2)
Psalm 1 shows me one tree by streams of water. Revelation 22 shows the river of life and the tree of life at the center of the renewed world. What is individual and partial in Psalm 1 becomes corporate and complete in Revelation 22.
For me, this means that when I am born of God, rooted in His Torah and led by His Spirit, I am already a small preview of that final tree. My life is meant to bear fruit in season and to be a source of healing, even if only in limited ways for now.
Returning to Prayer: Asking for the Kingdom to Break In
All of this brings me back to my original struggle with prayer. Yeshua taught us to pray:
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)
If the kingdom is the reality pictured in Revelation 21–22—a world without death, mourning, crying, pain, or sickness—then to pray for the kingdom to come is to ask that this reality begin to appear here and now in foretaste. When I pray for healing, I am asking God to let the river of the water of life and the healing leaves of the tree touch a particular situation.
The Scriptures also speak of confidence in prayer:
“This is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” (1 John 5:14–15)
James links this directly to healing:
“The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.” (James 5:15)
These verses do not promise that God will always heal exactly when and how I expect. But they do teach me that when I am praying in line with His will, He hears, and He acts. As someone born of God, with His Spirit within, learning to walk in His ways, my aim in prayer is not to push my agenda but to agree with His.
So my confidence in praying for healing is not based on my own power or on a formula. It rests on who God is, what His kingdom is like, and what He has already begun in me through the new birth. I am a child of God, learning to see the kingdom, rooted in His Torah, led by His Spirit, and invited to ask, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done,” even in the places where sickness and brokenness still seem strong.
A Simple Conclusion: Meditating, Writing, Understanding
As I look back over this study, I don’t feel like I discovered something brand new. Instead, I’ve come back again to something I already knew in practice: I need to meditate on the word if I want real understanding.
Psalm 1 describes the blessed person as one who “meditates day and night” on the Torah of the Lord. That is not theory for me. Over the years I have seen the difference it makes when I actually stop, read slowly, and stay with a passage instead of rushing past it.
This is also why I write. When I write, I think. Much of my “writing time” is really time spent turning the Scriptures over in my mind. I trace patterns, I ask questions, I bring my confusion into the text, and I pray for my eyes to see and my ears to hear. Often there is a long, quiet stretch before any sentences come. Then, at some point, the words begin to flow, and I realize that my understanding has shifted a little.
That is how this whole line of thought formed for me. I did not sit down with a system. I sat down with questions about prayer, about the kingdom, about what it means to be born of God. I returned to John 3, to Psalm 1, to the prophets, to Revelation’s final pictures. I kept reading, meditating, and asking for understanding.¹
If there is any simple point I would leave with the reader, it is this: take time to meditate on the word. Let the questions you already have drive you back to the text. Ask God for understanding as you read. In my own experience, this is how the scattered pieces begin to come together, and how the answers Yeshua gave to Nicodemus slowly become answers we can receive for ourselves.
Epilogue:
May the One who blessed our ancestors —
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah —
bless and heal the one who is ill:
[name], son/daughter of [mother’s name].
May the Holy Blessed One
overflow with compassion upon him/her,
to restore him/her,
to heal him/her,
to strengthen him/her,
to enliven him/her.
The One will send him/her, speedily,
a complete healing —
healing of the soul and healing of the body —
along with all the ill,
among the people of Israel and all humankind,
soon,
and let us say: Amen
