A good example of this is academic achievement. In order to be successful in school, you have to spend time studying to learn the required information. The problem is that most people don’t enjoy studying. So let’s say you have a test tomorrow. If studying is not your thing, then you are faced with a dilemma: do you put off studying to do the things you enjoy (like watching television or playing video games or talking on your phone) and risk not knowing the information well enough for the test or do you delay the immediate gratification of the things you enjoy so that you can study and ace the test?

This is the concept of delayed gratification in a nutshell: can you endure something you don’t like to get something better you do like in the future? So Walter Mischel wondered if he could determine when the control of delayed gratification develops in children. Mischel obtained permission from the nursery school located on Stanford’s campus to use their children in his experiment. The children ranged from ages four to six and each of them were brought individually into an empty room where a treat of their choice (Oreo cookie, marshmallow, or pretzel stick) was placed on a table.

The researchers explained that the children could eat the treat now, but if they waited for fifteen minutes without eating the treat, they would be rewarded with a second treat. After giving the child the instructions, the researcher would then leave the child alone in the room with the treat. Now I could show you some of the original footage from this experiment, but that’s kind of boring. One of the best recreations of this that I have seen was actually done by a magician named Justin Willman. Let’s watch his version of what has become known as the Marshmallow experiment.

After performing the experiment, Mischel kept track of the children as they grew older to see if there was a correlation between their ability to employ delayed gratification as a child and their success in adulthood. Mischel found that the children who waited longer (high delayers) exhibited a striking array of advantages over their peers who couldn’t (low delayers). As teenagers, high delayers had higher SAT scores; they had a greater sense of self-worth; they coped better with stress; they were more likely to plan ahead; they were more likely to use reason, which resulted in less conduct disorders, aggressiveness and hyperactivity.

When Mischel returned to his subjects as fully grown adults, he found that the high delayers were less likely to have drug problems or other addictive behaviors. He also found their relationships were healthier. They were less likely to get divorced. He even found they were less likely to be overweight. For each minute that a preschooler was able to delay gratification, Mischel was able to show a translation towards a .2% reduction in Body Mass Index (BMI) 30 years later.

Forty years after the first marshmallow test studies, a team of neuroscientists at Cornell University recruited 59 of the original participants and gave them a delayed gratification task. This time, instead of testing them with food, they tested them with images. They would be exposed to three different types of faces: happy, neutral, and fearful. Every time they saw a neutral or fearful face, they had to hit a button. But when a happy face came up, they had to resist hitting the button.

Those who had been high delayers as preschoolers were more successful at controlling their impulses in response to the happy faces, suggesting that they continued to show better ability to dampen or resist their impulses as adults. They also performed fMRI brain scans on 26 participants as they completed the task. The researchers discovered major differences between the brains of high delayers and low delayers. Specifically, they used different parts of their brains to cope with delayed gratification, which is why the low delayers are generally not as successful as high delayers.

Recently, a number of aspects of Mischel’s original study have been called into question. It has been hard for researchers to repeat Mischel’s results. But perhaps one of the most important things that I’ve taken away from this study is that the original intent of the experiment has been misconstrued. Although the Marshmallow Experiment eventually evolved into how delayed gratification in children manifests in adulthood, this was not why Mischel created the original experiment.

The larger point of the study was not the immediate outcome—determining whether a child possessed the skills for delayed gratification. What Mischel was trying to determine is whether a child who exhibited little to no ability to engage in delayed gratification (meaning they ate the Marshmallow immediately or within a few minutes), could they be coached towards delayed gratification with the right strategies? And indeed, what Mischel found is that if you provide the child who exhibited no capacity for delayed gratification with the right strategy, then they could last the 15 minutes needed to get the second treat.

So whereas the Marshmallow Experiment has become synonymous with the belief that your life is static—your impulse control as a child is the same impulse control you will have as an adult—the original purpose of the study was to show that we are capable of change. If you have poor impulse control, with the right direction, you can be taught how to have good impulse control. And indeed, this is what the new Marshmallow Experiments have shown us—people can change. We are not destined or predetermined to be one way.

And although it might sound strange, the Marshmallow Experiment is essentially the central thesis of what Jesus teaches in the gospels, just on a much larger scale. We read this morning from gospel of Mark where Jesus says: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” In other words, Jesus is telling us that, in order to become his disciple, we need to sacrifice.

We need to give up our own personal aspirations and set aside the things we want for ourselves to embrace Jesus’ mission. We need stop living for ourselves and start living for Jesus. By doing this, we help create God’s kingdom on earth. What does this tangibly look like? If you have extra food, you sacrifice that food for those who have none. If you have extra clothes, you sacrifice those clothes for those who are cold. If you have extra housing, you open your room to someone who needs a roof over their head. You give up what you have now and it benefits the whole society in the long run.

So the larger premise of the gospel message is that one must be willing to sacrifice for the long-term success of the kingdom. In this way, the gospel is very much centered around delayed gratification as means to create a better world. And the reason why is because much of the evil that we endure in the world comes as a result of humans saying, “I want this for myself right now,” and not thinking about the consequences of how that act of selfishness will impact other people down the line.

Jesus understands that this is at the core of why the world is full of so much evil. Every act of selfishness has the potential to ripple out beyond itself and impact bystanders who are several degrees removed from the initial incident. Therefore, Jesus wants us to change this pattern. If we can adopt a posture of selflessness, if we are willing to sacrifice what we have for the benefit of others, if we are willing delay our own gratification, then we can change those negative ripples into positive ones. And like the Marshmallow Experiment, this can happen if we are coached to think differently than we do now.

If we imagine that Jesus is our coach, then the gospel is a blueprint that will guide us towards becoming the kind of people who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good of our society. You are born one way. You are designed to think about your own needs first. Then, through exposure to the gospel, you are reshaped into someone completely different where you are willing to sacrifice what you have for creation of God’s kingdom.

This is the idea of rebirth from the gospel. In our scripture reading from John, Jesus is speaking to a man named Nicodemus about being born again. Nicodemus thinks about rebirth quite literally when he says, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Of course, Jesus is referring to a spiritual rebirth; one where you become a new kind of person; one where your orientation towards the world always forces you to ask the question: what can I give as opposed to what can I get?

And once you are reborn into this new person, you end up creating new positive ripples out in the world and you disrupt and stop the negative ones. This is ultimately how Jesus envisions the creation of the kingdom of God. It is through God reshaping and reforming us into new people that our positive ripples end up changing the world for the better.

So if you take nothing else away from this sermon, I hope you will understand this: the duty of a Christian is to create positive ripples in the world. There are negative ripples emanating from everywhere. They emanate from the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives—I’m better and deserve more than my neighbor down the street. They emanate from the violence we exact upon each other. But most importantly, they emanate from our refusal to allow people to change.

The beauty of Christianity is that it proclaims that change is possible; that nobody has to remain the same forever. The gospel is a change agent for the world around us. It has the power to disrupt and break those negative ripples that have adversely impacted our lives. So if you are sitting here today and your life is not what you want it to be; if you see the person staring back at you in the mirror and you’re feeling the tide of all those negative ripples dragging you down; if you want to be a person who continually sends positive ripples into the world, then perhaps it’s time for a rebirth.

So as you leave here today, my prayer for you is that you might allow God to reshape and reform you into a new person. May you adopt a posture of selflessness, where you sacrifice what you have for the benefit of others. May you be a disrupter of the negative ripples that destroy our potential so that you can create positive ripples that restore us to life. May you embrace Jesus’ gospel so you can create God’s kingdom on earth and may you be an agent for change, where you are always asking the question, “What can I give to make the world a better a place?” Amen.