Finally Alive

I want to say loud and clear that when the Barna Group uses the term born again to describe American church-goers whose lives are indistinguishable from the world...the Barna Group is making a profound mistake. It is using the term born again in a way that would make it unrecognizable by Jesus and the biblical writers.

[The New Testament] moves from the absolute certainty that the new birth radically changes people, to the observation that many professing Christians are indeed (as the Barna Group says) not radically changed, to the conclusion that they are not born again.

No human makes the new birth happen. No preacher and no writer can make it happen. You can't make it happen to yourself. God makes it happen. It happens to us, not by us. But it always happens through the word of God.

Some unbelievers look like better people than some believers. But that is because some pretty bad people have been born again, and the process of transformation is not always as fast as we would like.

We will go to hell if we are not born again.

The topic of the new birth is not marginal. It is central. Eternity hangs in the balance when we are talking about the new birth. Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

[John 1:13] refers to the children of God as those "who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." God causes the new birth; we don't.

The new life makes the faith possible, and since spiritual life always awakens faith and expresses itself in faith, there is no life without faith in Jesus. Therefore, we should never separate the new birth from faith in Jesus. From God's side, we are united to Christ in the new birth. That's what the Holy Spirit does. From our side, we experience this union by faith in Jesus.

[Referring to 1 John 5:4] "Born of God" is the key to victory. "Faith" is the key to victory. Both are true because faith is the way we experience being born of God. Being born of God always brings faith with it. The life given in the new birth is the life of faith. The two are never separate.

The new birth is the creation of spiritual life, not the imitation of life.

So we have life by being connected with the Son of God who is our life, and we have that life by the work of the Spirit. We concluded, therefore, that the work of the Spirit in regeneration is to impart new life to us by uniting us to Christ.

In the new birth, the Holy Spirit supernaturally gives us new spiritual life by connecting us with Jesus Christ through faith.

The Bible has a clear and devastating message about the state of our souls. And the reason it does is so that we will know what we need and shout for joy when God gives it to us.

Apart from the new birth we are dead in trespasses in sins...are by nature children of wrath...love darkness and hate the light...have hearts that are hard like stone...are unable to submit to God or please God...are unable to accept the gospel...are unable to come to Christ or embrace Him as Lord.

Love and hate are active in the unregenerate heart. And they move in exactly the wrong directions - hating what should be loved and loving what should be hated.

Our ignorance is guilty ignorance, not innocent ignorance. It is rooted in hard and resistant hearts. Paul says in Romans 1:18 that we suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Ignorance is not our biggest problem. Hardness and resistance are.

No one can say ["Jesus is Lord"] and mean it without being born of the Spirit. It is morally impossible for the dead, dark, hard, resistant heart to celebrate the Lordship of Jesus over his life without being born again.

We were once so in love with sin that we could not leave it or kill it. Then something happened. The new birth happened. God caused us to get a new spiritual life, a new nature that hates sin and loves righteousness.

The statement makes no sense - that there is no good in us before new birth - without the conviction that everything good that God has made and that God sustains is ruined when it is not done in reliance on God's grace and in pursuit of God's glory.

Two times John tells us that Christmas happened - the Son of God became human - to take away sin, that is to destroy the works of the devil, namely, sin. (1 Jn. 3:5,8)

When we ask why we need to be born again, the answer could look backward to our miserable condition in sin, or could look forward to the great things we will miss if we are not born again - like entering the kingdom of God.

Consider that the aim of the new birth is to enable us to believe specifically in the incarnate Jesus Christ. If there were no incarnate Jesus Christ to believe in, then the new birth would not happen.

That's the aim of the new birth. And so faith in Jesus Christ is the first evidence that the new birth has happened. "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God." Faith is the sign that the new birth has happened.

Christianity is not a kind of spirituality that floats amorphously through various religions. It is historically rooted in the person of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Scripture says, "Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life" (1 John 5:12).

One of the unsettling things about the new birth, which Jesus says we all must experience in order to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3), is that we don't control it.

We don't decide to make [the new birth] happen any more than dead men decide to give themselves life.

Our condition before the new birth is that we treasure sin and self-exaltation so much that we cannot treasure Christ supremely...and we are guilty for this. This is real evil in us. We are blameworthy for this spiritual hardness and deadness.

The way [the new birth] happens, is that the Spirit of God supernaturally gives us new spiritual life by connecting us with Jesus Christ through faith.

Our first experience of this [new life] is the faith in Jesus that this life brings. There is no separation of time here. When we are born again, we believe. And when we believe, we know we have been born again. When there is fire, there is heat. When there is new birth, there is faith.

The instant Christ commands Lazarus to rise, Lazarus does the rising. The instant God gives new life, we do the living. The instant the Spirit produces faith, we do the believing.

The word for regeneration in [Titus 3] verse 5 [palingenesias] is used only one other place in the entire Bible, namely, Matthew 19:28. This is a reference to the rebirth of the creation.

...a sermon is relevant if it will make a significant difference in their lives whether they feel it or not. That second kind of relevance is what guides my sermons and my writing. In other words, I want to say things that are really significant for your life whether you know they are or not.

Your involvement in the event of the new birth is to exercise faith - faith in the crucified and risen Son of God, Jesus Christ, as the Savior and Lord and Treasure of your life. The way you are engaged in the event of your new birth is by believing on Christ.

Your act of believing and God's act of begetting are simultaneous. He does the begetting and you do the believing...His begetting is the decisive cause of your believing.

If you have a hard time thinking of one thing causing another thing if they are simultaneous, think of fire and heat of or fire and light. The instant there is fire, there is heat. The instant there is fire, there is light. But we would not say that the heat caused the fire, or the light caused the fire. We say that the fire caused the heat and the light.

God's action is underneath our action. We purify our hearts in obedience to the gospel, that is, we act out regeneration; and we are able to do that because God regenerates us. His begetting causes our believing.

So the point is that God makes the word his instrument in the new birth, and the way the word works in the new birth is by awakening faith. That's what Paul says in Romans 10:17: "Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ."

This is what James says in James 1:18: "Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth." He brought us forth of his own will. God was not constrained by our will to believe. Ours was made possible by his.

The gospel - the news about Jesus Christ - is preached, we hear it, and through it we are born again. Faith is brought into being. "Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth" (James 1:18).

The Word was God and is God. He was not a sound. He was a Person. He was called the Word because he represents the expression of all that God the Father is.

[1 John 5:1] is the clearest text in the New Testament on the relationship between faith and the new birth. Watch the verbs closely as we read 1 John 5:1: "Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God."

Look at him in the gospel - the story of his life and death and resurrection and what they mean for your life. See his glory and his truth. Receive him and believe in his name. And you will be a child of God.

I have a 100-year-old commentary on 1 John in my library called "The Tests of Life" by Robert Law. It's a good title. What it means is that John wrote this letter to provide the church with tests or criteria for knowing if we have spiritual life, that is, if we have been born again.

Love for God is expressed in obedience to His commandments with a spirit that does not act burdensomely. The mark of love for God is willing, joyful obedience, not begrudging obedience.

If you love me - that's one thing - then you will keep my commandments - that's another thing. The one leads to the other. If you have the one, you will do the other. Love and commandment-keeping are not identical.

And if the commandments are not burdensome, what are they? They are desirable. What you desire to do with your whole heart is not burdensome to do.

The main reason we don't love God and find it burdensome to love people is that our cravings are for the things of the world.

The most immediate and decisive work of God in the new birth is that the new life he creates sees the superior value of Jesus over all else (2 Cor. 4:4, 6). And with no lapse of time at all, this spiritual sight of the superior value of Jesus results in receiving Jesus as the Treasure that he is. That is faith: receiving Jesus for all that he is because our eyes have been opened to see his truth and beauty and worth.

There is going to come a day when you do not love as you ought. What will you do if your heart condemns you because you know that love is a sign of the new birth? How will you fight the fight for assurance at that time?

He has come in the flesh. And the Son of God remains in the flesh forever. So John's first response to the false teaching is to set straight their view of Christ. His physical being is not a mirage. It's not secondary. It's not unimportant. That he has a body marks and identifies him forever.

John, in fact, insists that spiritual being must be validated by physical doing, or else the spiritual being is simply not real.

The practice of sin is the evidence and confirmation that one is not born of God. Doing confirms being. Not practicing sin is the evidence and confirmation of being born again.

These false teachers who think they can separate who they are spiritually from who they are physically do not understand either the incarnation or regeneration.

...love is from God the way heat is from fire, or the way light is from the sun. Love belongs to God's nature. It's woven into what he is. It's part of what it means to be God. The sun gives light because it is light. And fire gives heat because it is heat.

And what is propitiation? It means that he came to bear the punishment for sin and thus be the one who removes the wrath of God from us (Rom. 8:3; Gal. 3:13).

Love is humble. Love delights in other people's good. Love doesn't protect its own flaws. Love takes steps to change them. What a beautiful fellowship where everyone is rejoicing in each other's strengths, not resenting them! This is what the love of God looks like when the new birth gives it life in the people of God.

Verse 17: "If anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?" The main way John has in mind for us to lay down our lives for each other is that we share what we have. Love doesn't think possessively.

This is the way I live my life every day - seeking to bring my vagrant feelings into line with ultimate reality. My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God's word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives.

Haughty, condescending proclamation of Christ, with no feeling of brokenness or servanthood, contradicts the gospel. And silent servanthood that never speaks the gospel contradicts love. "We proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord with ourselves as your servants." That's what we do to help people to be born again. We tell people the good news of Christ from a heart of love and a life of service.

The seed that God uses to create new life in spiritually dead, unbelieving hearts is the seed of the word of God. "You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God." There are not many verses in the Bible more important than that. If you see the implications of that, it will change your life profoundly.

So the way God brings about the new birth in dead, unbelieving hearts is by the gospel, the good news.

O, that we would so love the gospel and have so much compassion for lost people that tribulation and distress and persecution and famine and nakedness and danger and sword and gun and terrorist would turn us not into fearful complainers, but bold heralds of good news.

Don't stop because you can't do this. Of course you can't. Only God can open the eyes of the blind (2 Cor. 4:6). But the fact that you can't make electricity or create light never stops you from flipping light switches. The fact that you can't create fire in cylinders never stops you from turning the car key. The fact that you can't create cell tissue never stops you from eating your meals. So don't let the fact that you can't cause the new birth stop you from telling the gospel.

The smallest word about Christ is not wasted.