Tag: born again

Being “born again”?

“Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of heaven”, is Jesus’ categorical teaching. He insisted, “You must be born again” (John 3.3, 7). God operates this new spiritual birth, granting new life to people who turn in faith and repentance to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is the indispensable doorway into the kingdom of God; and it happened to you if you believed.

Another verse in John’s Gospel (1.12-13) makes this clear: “To all who did receive [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born … of God”. To be born of God (not by human descent) makes you a child of God.

How is a person born again, born of God? What does this verse say? By “receiving the Lord Jesus and believing in his name”. Have you trusted in Jesus for your salvation? By that faith you were born again.

The apostle Peter picks up this idea in his first letter as he writes to encourage believers: “Blessed be God! … According to his great mercy he has caused us to be born again” (1 Peter 1.3). He encourages his readers further on in verse 23: “you have been born again… through the living and abiding word of God”. This verse fleshes out the image of being spiritually like a new-born baby, born however not by a human process, but “born of the Spirit” (John 3.8) through the “seed” of the word of God.

The concept of being “born again” means that as the Gospel is received by faith, so the Holy Spirit of God communicates new life to the believer.

When this happens to you, what are the consequences? There are at least two: a new life has begun for you; you have become a child of God.

Let’s consider the first of these. When a baby is born he or she receives physical, human life. When you as a believer are born again, you receive life of a different kind: it is spiritual life, called “eternal life” and also “abundant life” (John 10.10). It adds an extra dimension to the life that you lived up till now. As physical life starts out very small, so new life in Christ has humble beginnings. Some babies are born screaming, while others are calm. Even so, some new believers are so overwhelmed by their experience of God’s saving power that they are instantly transformed by God’s saving love. Others, also born again by faith in Christ, experience God’s presence more quietly, almost imperceptibly.

But as the new-born baby slowly grows, so the new-born-again believer is called upon to grow. Peter continues this theme: “Like new-born infants, [you should] long for the pure spiritual milk [the milk of God’s word], that by it you may grow up into salvation” (1 Peter 2.2). We will look again at the whole aspect of spiritual growth, but here, the key element that Peter underlines is God’s Word, the Bible. It was the seed of God’s Gospel that fell into the prepared ground of your heart and began to bring forth fruit in a new life; that life is nourished by reading, studying, and meditating on further truths revealed in God’s Word.

So the Holy Spirit communicates a fresh upsurge of holy life in newly born-again Christians, promoting spiritual growth as they read the Bible and apply it in their particular circumstances. 

The Christian life is not therefore just acquiring new religious practices: it is the uprising of new life that needs to be nourished and encouraged.

Clive Every-Clayton

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How to believe in Christ?

Whatever may have been your previous acquaintanceship with the person of Jesus, you have come, as it were, to hear his call, “Come, follow me”. Like those in the Gospels, you arose and followed him. It was a personal decision; you may not have understood too much about what it all involved, but you decided to open your heart and you asked Jesus to be your Saviour.

When out for climbing in some great mountains, it is indispensable to procure the services of a guide: the situation may prove perilous ahead. As you journey through life you may now have the services of Jesus, the only reliable Guide to human living at its best. You may trust him to lead you in the right path. There is no better Spiritual Master.

Jesus made numerous promises to those who would believe in him. That’s not simply to believe he existed, nor even to believe he was the Son of God, though these facts about him are foundational. Rather he was referring to a personal commitment between the believer and himself.

When I came to believe in Christ, the evangelist compared what I was about to do to the way a young couple get together. He said that the guy likes the girl and wants to get to know her over time, learning to love her, and desiring to enter a long-lasting relationship. “But,” he said to me, “the two are not married until they stand before the minister who asks them “Do you want to have this woman (or man) to be your lawfully wedded spouse?” In the same way, he said, Jesus says to you, “Do you want me to be your personal Lord and Saviour?” Then he asked me, “What do you want to say to him?” I acquiesced: I wanted to believe. Then he added, “Whenever anyone asks Jesus, ‘Do you want to accept this sinner as your disciple?’ He never says no!”

Maybe like me, you prayed that the Lord would “come into your heart” and save you. After I left the evangelist, I went for a walk, thinking that I had made an important decision that day. It was Easter Sunday afternoon, and I felt that as one “dead in trespasses and sins” I had now become alive in and with the risen Christ (Ephesians 2.5). 

So to “believe” in Jesus has that kind of meaning. He promised “eternal life” to those who believe in him (see John 3.16, 5.24, 6.47, 11.26). Eternal life is the gift of God; he gives it as we believe and receive Christ as Saviour and Lord, committing ourselves to him, to follow and obey as our new friend and Master. 

If I asked you, “Have you believed in Jesus like that? Have you received him as your Lord and Saviour?” – how would you reply? It helps our faith when we tell someone else that we have decided to follow Jesus. This is sometimes called “confessing Christ” and it allows you to exteriorise before a friend the decision that you have taken in your heart.

If you’re not sure if you’ve actually taken that step, there’s no harm in turning in prayer, just by yourself, and saying, “Lord Jesus, thank you for coming into the world to seek and save the lost like me; I open the door of my heart and receive you as my Lord and Saviour. Help me from now on to grow in my faith and to live as a Christian. Amen”

Jesus will gladly welcome you as his follower. 

Clive Every-Clayton

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My spiritual birthday

This week I celebrate my spiritual birthday. “What,” you may ask, “is a ‘spiritual birthday’”? The idea comes from one of Jesus’ vital but rather obscure teachings. The Son of God declared categorically: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3.3).

One has to admit, it’s not obvious what Jesus was meaning, and his interlocutor responded with incredulity: “How can a man be born when he is old?” Jesus went on to explain he was speaking of a spiritual birth, the beginning of a new spiritual life in a person’s heart. Elsewhere in the Gospel it is called being “born of God” – born anew as God’s child when God grants new life to a human soul. 

In John’s Gospel (1.10-13) it says that when Jesus came into the world, there were many who did not recognise him nor welcome him; but “to all who did receive Jesus, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”. That is an amazing blessing, but the passage adds that those who believe in Jesus and receive him by faith as their Lord and Saviour are “born of God”.
What does that mean? Let me back up a little first. When a baby is born, all the family rejoices: it receives a human life which will go on to develop as he or she grows. Yet when it matures, albeit marvellously endowed, it becomes evident that there is selfishness and unkindness when bad attitudes and actions become visible in its life. In biblical terms, it is born with a sinful disposition that produces behaviour that is sometimes aberrant.

Human experience testifies that however hard we try, we cannot efface this sinful tendency from within us. That’s why the Bible says we are all “sinners”: we all know what it is to have a guilty conscience; no-one is perfect.

What can change us? Well, Jesus proposes giving us a renewed Christian life by a new spiritual birth. He means that his own Holy Spirit will make us born again. As the text above states, this is for those who believe in Jesus and who receive him as Lord and Saviour. This new birth occurs as people turn away from sin, trust in Jesus, and commit to following and obey him.

The day I was born again, it was Easter Sunday; I had heard a preacher explain that when Jesus died on Good Friday, he took on himself, out of compassion for the likes of lost sinners like me, all my faults and all their punishment. He suffered in my place; he died the death that was the “wages of sin” for my disobedience. He did it because he loved me; and now, alive and risen from the dead, he called me to receive him as my personal Saviour, to forgive me, to change me, to come and give me new life, to come and live in me by his Holy Spirit. So I prayed and committed my life to Christ.

Thus was I “born again”: in the weeks that followed I developed a relationship with Jesus as my best and closest friend, my helper to enable me to overcome the temptations that were on my path, and to put away various sinful attitudes and habits.

I cannot more strongly encourage all my readers to do the same. Become a “born again Christian” – that’s the kind of Christian Jesus wants and he will give you that new life if you ask him.

Clive Every-Clayton

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Don’t go down a dead end

It is amazing how often intelligent peoples’ thinking is self-contradictory. I have several pages of such contradictions – like this one that shows the impossibility of determinism: “If all our thoughts are determined, that must include the thoughts of neuro-scientists who hold to determinism. So determinism would mean we can never trust the conclusions of scientists as being true, including those of neuro-scientists”. Another one I like was put out in a TV advertisement for the Bank of Scotland, where a wise man said: “Some people say there are no right or wrong answers”. Then he added: “But what if they’re right? … Or wrong?”

So as we search for right answers, let us beware the dead end of self-contradicting theses.

It is normal to believe in free will – that our choices are real and that we have freedom to make our own decisions. Indeed, we consider it a “human right”, and we want the freedom of others to be acknowledged and respected. It is against this much-loved reality that determinism comes crashing.

The counterpart to freedom is responsibility: we may be held responsible for the use of our freedom. We will have to answer for any evil use of our freedom. There is unavoidable moral responsibility attached to human freedom. This instinct is written in our consciences and refers both to society’s and to God’s right to punish those who use their freedom to harm others. So freedom is not an absolute liberty to do all one may wish; it is best understood as the ability to do as one ought, despite the threat of those who would impede that liberty.

But there is a false form of freedom that is indeed illusory – and it is getting unfortunately quite invasive in society, though it will prove to be a dead end street: you don’t want to go down there, you’ll get nowhere. It is known as “expressive individualism”. 

This freedom, writes rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, “is embodied in words like authenticity, autonomy, self-expression, and self-realisation, to which we claim to have unfettered rights”. This extraordinary claim to quasi absolute freedom is a dead end street. It is at the basis of a lot of human pain in the lives of those who suppose they can define their own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life – of “who they are”, when this is in denial of what is “given”. It substitutes for the given-ness of our existence the mad dream that we can “invent ourselves”, alter the reality of who we truly are. Don’t go down that road.

If you want a different form of yourself, a better “you”, there is a preferable way, the right route to take. You can be “made over”, deeply and radically transformed into what you really ought to be. This is what Christian conversion is all about. When a person rejects his or her own reprobate inner self – those aspects of our personality that come under the description of “evil” – and when they turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, calling on him to be their Saviour and Master, a radical renovation takes place. Jesus called it being “born again”. When you invite Jesus to save you from all evil, to clean you up on the inside, it’s like being recreated – “old things are passed away and all things become new.” And all this is from God, “whose service is perfect freedom”. By such healthy transformation the Lord demonstrates that he is in the business of turning sinners into saints!

Clive Every-Clayton

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