Essentials: Regeneration (Being Born Again)

Introduction

Video: Sin and Grace

Good Morning, how are we doing this morning?

So for the past several weeks we have been looking at what “We believe...” about God. We began with what we believe about the “Word of God” and then God’s Trinitarian nature followed by a closer look at each of the three person’s in the God head: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

Today we are going to turn our focus a little in that we are going to look through the lens of “What we believe about God” and see how that shapes what We believe about us. The only way we can really ever know who we are... is to look at ourselves through the lens of God. He is our creator and sustainer. He began us and He is the one who keeps us going, so there is no true understanding of who we are apart from Him.

Even though we keep trying.

Tension

Over the course of Human history mankind has always looked for ways to understand ourselves without having to submit to who the one true God says that we are. Ever since our first parents Adam and Eve, the human race has always been trying to see ourselves apart from who God made us to be.

Adam and Eve knew God. They knew the sound of His footsteps in the garden. They understood that they were a part of His magnificent creation and they experienced the glory of this perfect creation in the garden of Eden. They knew God’s Word…they knew God’s command to them…but when the serpent showed up and told them that they could be something apart from who God told them they were…they believed Him.

They began to think that this God who said He loved them was really keeping them back from their full potential. They began to doubt that His commands were rooted in His love for them and instead began thinking about it would be like to be the one giving the commands. Maybe He doesn’t have their best interest at heart. Maybe His commands are not rooted in our flourishing according to His perfect design but actually keeping me back from something better. Maybe His word is not trustworthy. Maybe He is just trying to keep me from becoming like Him - knowing things that I do not now yet know.

Genesis 3:4–6 NLT

4 “You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. 5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.” 6 The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too.

And in this event everything changed for the human race. The serpent told a mix of truth and lies that day, because we did in fact begin to know all kinds of things that we previously did not know. From Adam and Eve forward we began to know pain, heartache, lies, toil, distrust, disease, conflict, war and death. None of these things were a part of God’s good design in the garden. They are all the effect of Adam and Eve’s decision that day to ignore God and reject His Word in the world that He created.

Do you know what we call that? When someone...anyone...ignores or rejects God in the world that He created? We call that Sin.

And every single person is born with this same problem. The “Sin” problem. We all have it. We were born with it, because of the decision of our first parents, and we live in it, because of the decisions that we have made. From Adam and Eve forward, every single person on earth has to deal with the penalty, power and presence of Sin in their life.

That does not exactly make Genesis chapter 3 one of our favorite chapters in the Bible. We wouldn’t want to skip over it entirely... but we may be tempted to read through it really fast to get it over with. If we do that, however, then we will miss a beautiful picture of God.

Genesis 3 is certainly about how our first parents messed up big time, and we inherited their sinful nature, but even in this rather depressing chapter God shows His great love for us. Because right after our parents blatant rejection of God, He began working out His plan to bring us all back to Himself.

For one thing we have the promise of the demise of the great tempter Satan. Before God handled the consequences for Adam and Eve’s rebellion He said to the Serpent:

Genesis 3:15 ESV

15 I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

In other words the serpent was going to be allowed to trip us up, to “nip at our heals” so to speak, but that is all the room he is given. And this will prove to be just enough rope to hang himself, because eventually there will one who comes to execute a death blow to the head of this tempter and He will no longer be tempting anyone anywhere. This is the first beautiful hope that we are offered, but the second is more subtle.

Genesis 3 ends with God driving Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden, but this is about more than just loosing their awesome place to live. Listen to how this chapter ends and see if you can find the hope offered in it...

Genesis 3:22–24 ESV

22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” 23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. 24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

(cool…a flaming sword) What is the angel with the flaming sword guarding? The garden of Eden? No, not specifically. What is He there to guard? He is to guard the “way to the tree of life”.

Adam and Eve were told not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they were to eat from the “tree of life” otherwise they would grow old and die - which is what will now happen. Why would God want that? Why would God want the pinnacle of His creation to experience death?

Because He did not want us to live on forever in this condition. He did not want us to suffer under the penalty, power and presence of Sin for all eternity and so He enacted His plan to bring us to death…in order for us to come to life again. Something the Bible calls being “Born Again” or “Regeneration”

And that is the Title Heading from our Declaration of Faith that we are going to handle today as we take what we have already looked at in who God is and use it as a lens to see who we are through it.

So let’s pray and then we will dive into these things together.

Truth

So under our title heading of “Regeneration” we find the following statement:

We believe that all people are sinners by nature and choice and are therefore, under condemnation. We believe that the Holy Spirit regenerates those who repent of their sin and trust in Jesus Christ as Savior.

You can probably see that the statement is laid out in two sentences that really handle two sequential topics. Firsts we have the problem and then we have the only solution.

So first let’s look at what believe is the problem:

We believe that all people are sinners by nature and choice and therefore under condemnation.

So we have already talked some about how we have all inherited this “Sin Problem” from our first parents. It is a part of the nature that we are each born with. So even those of us who believe we are doing really well can still never say that we have no sin because our very nature condemns us.

This is not the most popular doctrine of Christianity. Even though we all can sense that there is something wrong with this world, we don’t want to be told that we have a responsibility in that. Still the Good News of Jesus Christ doesn’t really sound like “Good News” if you were never aware of the bad news of our Sin.

It would be like telling someone you know the good news that their is a treatment for Necrotizing Fasciitis. They may find your announcement curious but they have no idea what it has to do with them until you tell them that you noticed their skin knee and how the cell tissue around it shows signs of this rare but very severe type of bacterial infection that can be sudden, vicious and fast-spreading, and if not treated quickly, it can kill you.

Your “Good News” wasn’t really “Good News” before they knew the bad news...but now they are paying close attention.

That is why if you open up an evangelism Bible like this, it doesn’t start with the good news. The first verse you come to is Romans 3:23 and it is an unapologetic declaration of very bad news.

YELLOW

Romans 3:23 NASB95

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

We can start there because the solution isn’t really all that interesting unless you recognize the problem. Not only do our choices count against us, but we have our sinful nature to deal with as well. As Paul says a few chapter later...

Romans 5:12 ESV

12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—

Our primary problem is our Sin. Sin is any and every way in which we “fall short of the glory of God” Whenever we are in any way less than God created us to be that is Sin and Sin always leads to death.

Most of us are honest enough to admit that we are in many ways less than God created us to be. That there are times when we ignore God or just outright reject Him...but even if you think you are doing really well…on your own you still fall short.

When writing to the Church in Ephesus, the Apostle Paul told them this:

Ephesians 2:1–3 ESV

1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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— 3 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.

“children of wrath” by nature Paul says, and he is not preaching late at night on some street corner to the cold hard hearts of Ephesus…He is talking here to the Church-going folks and he includes himself, “we all once” lived like this because we are sinners by nature and choice.

But we never want to just bring people the bad news. We want to bring people through the darkness of the bad news of sin so that they can rightly respond to the brilliance of the Good News of Jesus. So the very next tab we turn to in these New Testaments is Romans 6:23

BLACK

Romans 6:23 NASB95

23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

As we saw in the words of the opening video…there is a payment due for our sin. There is a cost. But in Jesus Christ, God paid the price for us so that He could give us the gift of eternal life. So that He could give us GRACE.

In a similar way, the Apostle Paul didn’t want to leave the Ephesian Church wallowing in their sin and guilt. After he speaks of them once being children of wrath, he goes on to the “good news”

Ephesians 2:4–7 ESV

4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

It is not really about us, it is all about God! We will never really know ourselves until we see ourselves through that lens.

So we go back to what “We believe...” about God the Father and we read of how He “concerns himself mercifully in the affairs of man…and that He saves from sin and death all who come to Him through Jesus Christ”. God does this.

Who we are is rooted in who God is and how He acts in this world that He created.

We could go on to explain this with our little New Testaments here if we open to the color RED it says:

Romans 5:8 NASB95

8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

God the Son, Jesus Christ died for us. So here we can go back to what “We believe...” about Jesus Christ and we read how “We believe in His substitutionary atoning death”.

“Substitutionary” means that Jesus died in our place. He was our substitute. We were by nature the “Children of wrath” and instead of God pouring out His wrath on us, who deserved it, He aimed all His wrath on Jesus. To atone means to pay or cover a debt and Jesus paid our debt in our place. Again...

Who we are is rooted in who God is and how He acts in the world that He created.

And as far as how the Holy Spirit works in our “Regeneration”, we see that written right in the second half of our statement for this week.

We believe that the Holy Spirit regenerates those who repent of their sin and trust in Jesus Christ as Savior.

We see this represented under the BLUE tab in our little New Testaments where we read:

Ephesians 2:8–9 NASB95

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.

You see none of us can take any credit for our “salvation”, it is a gift of God’s grace and it is enacted in us through the Holy Spirit. We could never work our way back to a right relationship with God, so God had to make a way and then give it to us.

The truth is there is only one place in all of Scripture where we find the word “Regeneration” and it sums up this idea very nicely. It is found is in Titus 3:5, but to get the full idea lets read the surrounding verses as well:

Titus 3:4–6 ESV

4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior,

He saved us. Since the day Adam and Eve ignored and rejected God there has been nothing that we can do to fix our problem, and so God began enacting His perfect plan to bring us back to Himself.

There is nothing we can do to save ourselves, but the Bible does call on us to respond to the gift. We have to receive the gift. That is where the little green tab takes us...

GREEN

Romans 10:9–10 ESV

9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

This is the response that is required of those who would be saved, and the Christian Church has been calling for this response since the days of early Church.

It is the goal of resources like this New Testament where you can walk someone through the realities of our problem and the only solution and then give them an opportunity to respond.

Some people struggle some with this response because they see any act done on our part as constituting a “work” where in we have added to our salvation in some way, but I don’t see how this can be true.

Notice that our response involves two parts, one outward and one inward. We confess outwardly with our mouth, but our belief is a matter of the heart. The Bible talks about how God is the one who changes the heart and then brings a person to confess the lordship of Jesus with their lips.

1 Corinthians 12:3 ESV

3 Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.

Gospel Application

Let me close with a great example of this. We talked some last week of when the Religious leader Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night. Presumably he chose this hour to not be seen by others, but still he greets Jesus with a great compliment..but Jesus just blew right by his greeting to deliver to this religious man the good news of regeneration.

John 3:3 ESV

3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus was a little confused at this point, and concerned for what his mother might say on this subject so Jesus clarifies for him

John 3:5–8 ESV

5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The religious leader is still confused. He understand “Religion” but he cannot wrap his mind around this “Regeneration” thing. To be born again? To be born of the Spirit? He doesn’t understand.

And then Jesus delivers probably the most familiar Bible verse in the whole Bible. John 3:16

John 3:16–17 ESV

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Landing

I submit to you that Nicodemus had the same problem that many who attend Christian Churches today have. They know religion, but they have never known “regeneration”. They figured out the rules of religion, but they have never entered into a relationship with God through regeneration. They have never been “born again”.

That is why we preach the Gospel to each other every week here. It is not just because someone new might be joining us, but because some of us have been coming to Church for a long time but we have never been Spiritually “born again”. Like Nicodemus we know religion, but we have never recieved the gift of regeneration.

There were many Jews who came to Jesus like Nicodemus but then left without receiving what Jesus came to offer. John 1 tells us

Many of us have verse 12 memorized, but the thought doesn’t end there..it continues to verse 13 where it says that these are…Children of God...

Have you had that experience? Have you been born of God? Born again? Born of the Holy Spirit? Have you been “Regenerated”? If you wonder about this then please don’t wait. You can pray right now and ask God to do this in you. If you have any questions then I would love to talk to you... or one of the Overseers...

1 Peter 1:3 ESV

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,