New Birth – Born of the Spirit
For some Christians, the good news of the gospel stops at what we spoke of yesterday. He has forgiven me - that is all I need to know! And so they go on living as they did before, but convinced that God keeps forgiving them.
The Transformation of New Life
But this is not the way of Jesus! He instead spoke about being born again - becoming a new person - when you follow Him. And so, to follow the path we've been on this week, God pursues us, convicts us of sin, washes that sin away, and He makes us new when we believe.
Here's how John Wesley puts it in his sermon The New Birth. "This, then, is the nature of the new birth. It is that great change which God works in the soul when he brings it into life; when he raises it from the death of sin to the life of righteousness."
Great words! When you believe in Jesus as your salvation, He affects in your heart a great change. Remember earlier this week we spoke about how we are dead in sin and dead to God? Well, when we come to believe in Jesus and His saving grace, He changes that. We are now dead TO sin, and alive to God!
Living as a New Creation
I like the way Paul says it: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!" (2 Corinthians 5:17)
We baptized some members of our church the other day. A wonderful moment in their lives and ours. I spoke to the candidates beforehand about how baptism doesn't save you - it's a picture of the salvation you already received by faith. Because when you believe in Jesus, you put to death your old life of sin, and you rise up as a new person. That is what baptism pictures - when we go down into the water, it's a picture of our old, pre-God life being buried; when we come up out of the water, it's a picture of our new life in Christ beginning.
The Changed Heart of a Believer
Many people embrace Jesus for His offer of forgiveness, but don't know that the invitation is much wider than that, and so they live a kind of a hybrid-religious life of continual asking for forgiveness but no new birth. No new life in Christ!
This is not to say that the new Christian just stops sinning. Sin still has a hold on the Christian, and we need a deeper cleansing to deal with that, as we shall see next week. But the new birth brings about a change in orientation. Instead of living carelessly for ourselves, with no care for God's glory, we now seek to honour God, and when we get it wrong, we are instantly repentant, because we have hurt our God.
In fact just the other day a friend of mine said that the reason David was called a man after God's own heart was because his life was marked by repentance. Even though he sinned, he repented sincerely. The new-born Christian has a new desire to honour God, and repents sincerely when sin pulls them down.
So the question is: are you born-again, or just looking for God's forgiveness? A real understanding of our sin will lead us to both: a deep desire for His forgiveness, and a deep desire to be made new.
