Sermon Tone Analysis

We Need to Be Born Again

January 6, 2008

Ephesians 2:1-10

 

We are six days into the New Year – 2008.

Have you made your New Year’s Resolutions?

How are you doing at keeping them or have you given up already.

Some of them will be difficult to keep, won’t they?

My copy of “Our Daily Bread” challenged me to “Real Change in 2008”.

I want to read part of it to you now: /“Which of the following quotes are in the Bible?/

/   1.

Cleanliness is next to godliness.

/

/  2.

God helps those who help themselves./

/  3.

Confession is good for the soul.

\\    4.

Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward./

/   5.

Money is the root of all evil./

/   6.

Honesty is the best policy./

/ /

/   Believe it or not, only one of those quotes is found in the Bible?

The * *fourth one is from   Job 5:7./

/ /

/  George Muller, a pastor and orphanage director in the 1800s,    wouldn't have had trouble knowing which of those* *quotes were from the Bible.

Why?

Because he read through it more than 100 times!

He said: "I  look upon it as a lost day when I have not had a good time over the Word of God....

I have always made it a rule never to begin work until I have had a good season with God and His Word.

The blessing I have received has been wonderful."/

/  We don't need to feel guilty if we don't read the Bible as much as Muller did.

But consider with me reading it through at least once this coming year — not so that we can answer  some trick questions about it, but because it was given to us by God and is profitable for our spiritual growth”/

There is a schedule in your bulletin to help you.

I challenge you to resolve to read through the whole Bible this year.

What better way to grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

My message this morning echoes a resolution I made over twenty years ago.

I resolved to believe what God’s Word says, that in order to be a child of the King of Kings I would have to be born again: born of the Spirit of God: my second birth.

When we studied Ephesians together in 2007, we touched on our key passage in chapter 2, but today I want to delve deeper.

So, turn to Ephesians chapter 2 in your Bible and while you’re turning I will relate to you something else I read very recently from Our Daily Bread.

/“Would you give 20 minutes a day to lose weight?

To get in shape?

To finish your degree?

To learn a foreign lan­guage?

To learn a musical instrument?/

/Would you dedicate 20 minutes each day (with a half-hour on Saturday) to transforming your entire life?/

/Twenty minutes a day is all it takes the average reader to read four chapters of God's Word — less than 5 min­utes for a typical chapter.

By investing 20 minutes a day, you can cover the entire Bible in one year!/

/Genuine commitment is difficult.

But twenty minutes a day?

That’s easy!

In 2008, let’s read through God’s Word together for real change in our lives.”/

Now, on to Ephesians, chapter 2, and verses 1 through 10:

/And you were dead in the trespasses and sins  in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace you have been saved through faith.

And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,  not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

/

One of the greatest books about God ever written, namely, John Calvin’s /Institutes/, begins with this sentence: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”

What we may need reminding of is not that the knowledge of God is difficult to comprehend and to embrace—that’s more or less obvious—but that the knowledge of ourselves is just as difficult to comprehend and to embrace.

Indeed, it may be more difficult, first, because a true knowledge of ourselves assumes a true knowledge of God, and, second, because we tend to think we /do/ know ourselves, when, in fact, the depths or our condition are beyond our comprehension without the help of God.

Who Can Know the Human Heart?

The prophet Jeremiah wrote, /“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”/

(Jeremiah 17:9).

David said in Psalm 19:12, /“Who can discern his errors?

Declare me innocent from hidden faults.”/

In other words, we never get to the bottom of our sinfulness.

If our forgiveness depended on the fullness of the knowledge of our sins, we would all perish.

No one knows the extent of his sinfulness.

It is deeper than anyone knows.

But the Bible does not leave us without help to know ourselves.

The fact that we cannot know /fully/ how sinful we are, does not mean we cannot know /deeply/ how sinful we are.

The Bible has a clear and devastating message about the state of our own 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.

/Why/ Must We Be Born Again?

We hear Jesus say in John 3:7, /“You must be born again.”/

And in John 3:3, /“Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”/

In other words, being born again is infinitely serious.

Heaven and hell are hanging in the balance.

We will not see the kingdom of God unless we are born again.

So today the question is /Why?/

Why is it so necessary?

Why isn’t some other remedy sufficient, like turning over a new leaf or making a New Year’s resolution or positive thinking or moral improvement or a self-help course?

Why this radical, spiritual, supernatural thing called new birth or regeneration?

That’s the question we try to answer today.

Diagnosis: We Are Dead

The text where we take our beginning is Ephesians 2. Two times, in verses 1 and 5, Paul says that we are dead in our trespasses.

Verse 1: /“You were dead in the trespasses and sins . .

.”/

Verses 4-5: “/But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.”/

So two times Paul describes us as “dead.”

And the remedy for this in verse 5 is/: “God made us alive.”/

You will never experience the fullness of the greatness of God’s love for you if you don’t see his love in relation to your former deadness.

Because verse 4 says that the greatness of his love is shown precisely in this: that it makes us alive when we were dead.

/“God, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead, made us alive together with Christ.”/

Because of his great love for us, he made us alive.

If you didn’t know that you were dead, you will not know the fullness of the love of God.

I take this miracle, /“he made us alive,”/ to be virtually the same as what Jesus calls the new birth.

Once we had no spiritual life, and then God raised us from that state of spiritual deadness.

And now we are alive.

This is the same as Jesus’ saying that we must be born of the Spirit (John 3:5) and /“It is the Spirit who gives life”/ (John 6:63).

So we can say then that the work of regeneration, the work of new birth, the work of being made alive, flows from the richness of God’s mercy and the greatness of his love.

/“But God, (1) being rich in mercy, (2) because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were deadin our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”

/This is new covenant love.

This is the kind of love God has for his bride.

He finds her dead (Ezekiel 16:4-8), and he gives his Son to die for her, and then he makes her alive.

And he keeps her forever.

/“I give them eternal life,”/ Jesus said, /“and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand”/ (John 10:28).

Isn’t that encouraging?