There's a man in the Bible named Nicodemus. He was a Jewish leader who may have considered himself favored by God. he secretly approached Jesus at night, and he was told truly, truly, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. Today on Truth for Life, Alastair Begg explores Jesus' Declaration and explains how our lives are changed when we're born again. Let's open our Bibles to John chapter 3.
Um Human birth. produces people. who belong to humanity. Human birth produces people who belong to the earthly family. of humanity.
Jesus says spiritual birth gives birth to spiritual people. That's the contrast. This is a supernatural reality. It is the work of Almighty God. bringing about a radical Change in the nature of an individual.
A change that the individual cannot bring about by themselves. That's what Jesus is saying. It's not external renovation. It's not cleaning your act up. It's not even illumination.
being attracted, being intrigued. It's certainly not baptismal regeneration. which some of you still hold on to. A dangerous position. in which to take your security.
as if somehow or another our condition before Almighty God could be made right by the activities of some inferior being in the course of earthly ministry. Not for a moment. Becoming a Christian is always and in every case A miracle. Because God is the cause. Of the change.
It is God who does it.
So, what then is the regeneration of being born again? It is essentially this. It is the bringing of that cosmic reality. into the present experience of an individual. The same power by which God will recreate the entire universe is the power that is brought to bear in the life of an individual when He recreates us as the children of God.
So that being born again in terms of New Testament theology. is essentially our participation In the inauguration of that great final cosmic renewal.
Now we are the children of God, but it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Because when he appears, we shall be like him. In the new birth, What God did Cosmically which will eventually be appearing. He does. Personally.
It is a complete change. of heart and character, produced in a person by the Holy Spirit. It is the power of God to regenerate the entire world brought into your heart.
Now It is miraculous. And it is at the same time mysterious. The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound? You don't know where it comes from.
or where it goes.
So it is with everyone. Who is born of the Spirit?
Now let me see a third thing. Incidentally, when the wind blows and you don't know where it's coming from or actually where it's going, what it's doing, if you if you have umbrellas up on your back patio and it blows good enough, you see the effect of the wind. You can't go, hey, wind. Yeah. stop that.
Jesus can. This is got something to do with paling Genesea, incidentally. But the fact of the matter is, we can see the evi we can see the effects of the wind.
Now let me say this, and then I'll have one final point, and don't get these two in the wrong order. It is absolutely essential. It is supernatural. and its effects are experiential. Its effects are experiential.
So we're talking about the impact. The wind we cannot grab a hold of, but we see what it does.
So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.
Well, we could spend an entire series working on the effects, the impact of the new birth. But let me just say three things. Experientially what happens Is that we get a new family. We get a new family. That's John 1 again.
He gave them the right to become the children of God. This is who you are. You are a child of God. You are a child of the king in Jesus. You have been adopted into his family.
That is it, right there. A whole new family.
Now, you think about this, even though churches are weird places and we're not unique in that regard, and there are all kinds of strange people there, at the end of the day, you're still my family. You're my family. For here my friends and family dwell. You're stuck with me. This is an eternal stock.
I mean, you can move out of the neighborhood, but you can't get away because of what is done. You see, Saul of Tarsus was born again. And then he had a whole new family. In fact, his family was the company that he thought were a bunch of nuts. He was going to kill them, destroy them, imprison them, and now he's in there sitting with them.
And anybody's going, what happened to you, Saul? He says to me to live is Christ. It's dye your skin because you eye. Fool. A new family.
Secondly, a new identity. It's almost the same thing, isn't it? God so loved the world, you see in verse 16 we didn't read that far, that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. I met with a very elderly man some weeks ago now. We talked about heaven, we talked about life, we talked about things.
And he said, What am I to do? I said, Well, in some senses, there's nothing you can do. I said, but do you believe? Do have you ever put your name in John three? I said, he said, I don't know what you mean.
I said, well, it would be like this. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, That James Jenkins, Who believes in Him? should not perish, but have everlasting life. You see Identity is a huge part of our existence, isn't it? You come into a setting like this as a stranger, or go into a new office, or to a new lab, or to a new school.
And we want to make sure that we have the requisite identity. people spending a fortune to manufacture ourselves in in the right way. The identity that we have in Jesus is not an achieved identity. It is a received identity. New family, new identity, and new mentality.
New mentality. You see it? When our nature is renewed by the Spirit of God, it inevitably changes. All kinds of things. our view of the world.
our understanding of our place within the world. the the nature of significance and so on. One of the songs that we could have sung this morning was one that we haven't sung in a while, which has the lines. All I once held dear built my life upon. all the things I yearned and longed to own, All these things are now count in an entirely different way.
Because of Jesus, essentially coming out of Paul's words. I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, I was a Pharisee, I had a good school, I had a good intellect, had a good background, and all those things. He said, but you know, this has changed. This has changed. What happened to him?
He became religious? No, he was religious. He was completely religious. Nicodemus didn't need to become religious. Nicodemus didn't need to become intelligent.
Nicodemus needed what only God can give. He needed to be born again. Charles Simeon, for 55 years or 54, the minister in the church in Cambridge. Was asked by a member of his congregation, well, what then do you think is the indispensable sign of regeneration? You know what he said?
A humble contrite spirit. Self-abasement. Self-abasement. Amazing grace. How sweet the sound That saved a wreck like me.
A rich You're wretched by nature, and so am I. He doesn't set his love upon us because of who we are, or what we've achieved, or what we've done, or where we're going. Not for a moment. And you will notice it in the text when you read it on your own at home. Nicodemus comes back to him and he says, How can these things be?
It's a good question. It's the right question. And Jesus said, Are you the teacher of Israel and you don't understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and we bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. Nicodemus' failure wasn't a failure of intellect.
It wasn't that he couldn't understand. It was a failure and unwillingness to believe Jesus' testimony. That's why he says, you do not believe. You do not receive our testimony. And he says, if I've told you about earthly things, What I'm telling you now is the entry is the entry thing.
And if you can't even get the entry thing, If you stumble at the at this point, What use is there going to be for me to start to explain to you? the details of life in the kingdom. Why would you be concerned about life in the kingdom? You're stumbling over what I'm telling you about the only way of entry into the kingdom. It's like people, when you're talking to them over coffee or something, they want to talk to you about, well, what about the state of UFOs?
What about the thing over two of those, five of those? They said, for goodness sake, come on Friday night, we'll help you with that. But for now, let's talk about what Jesus says. What does he say? Truly, truly, I say to you.
Unless One is born again.
Now finally, and just quickly.
So I wrote down these words. I wrote essential uh supernatural experiential and individual. Uh individual Uh to make a point, That This is not This is not like Sung Young Moon. That you go away to a conference somewhere and all of a sudden you're all swept in some great surge or something. No, the reality of this is individual.
Everybody is born as an individual. John Stott has a wonderful little piece where he says, No infant has a say in being born. True. You remember on the Johnny Carson show, he said he was arguing with his son, and his son said, I didn't ask to be born. And Johnny Carson says, Yeah, and if you'd asked, I would have said no.
No infantry. contributes in any way to their birth. Their birth is not conditional upon their acceptance of it or their rejection of the idea.
Some arrive kicking and screaming, some just seem to emerge without fuss or bother. We would never know the date of our birth. if our parents hadn't told us. The reason we know we're born. Although we don't remember the occasion.
is that we're enjoying life today. That's how we know. It doesn't matter at all. Yeah. Although you know you have turned to Christ, You do not know the date.
When you did so.
Some do. And some don't. But here's the deal. The new birth is not something we do. It is something God gives.
Because you will notice that Jesus is not here demanding. that Nicodemus experienced the new birth In the instant, he's not saying that to her. What he is actually saying to Nicodemus and forcefully articulating it. He's saying this is what must be experienced to enter the kingdom of God.
So if you ask, how can I be born again? What can I do? Technically The right answer is there is nothing you can do. If you ask the question, What must I do to be saved? The answer is To believe.
What God does by way of initiative. And what we do by way of response is inextricably woven together. Professor John Murray Who was Sinkler's great idol and teacher, says the Gospel of Christ is sovereign Efficacious. irresistible regeneration. unless God by sovereign operative grace had turned our enmity to love, and our disbelief to faith.
We would never yield The response of faith And love. You see, Jesus is reminding His Friend Again, from the Old Testament. Nicodemus would get this. This is famous. Numbers 21.
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. You remember that, he says to Nicodemus. You remember that the that they had been all bitten by the snake? that they were all filled with uh the venom of the snake? And God, in His mercy and His grace, using the menes of a serpent, says that everyone who looks to the serpent We'll be free.
Who looks? Says Calvin, the true looking of faith. is placing Christ before one's eyes. And beholding in him the heart of God, Poured out. in love.
Now when you think about birth, you think about the nature of birth, you think about even the way Jesus called his disciples in chapter one, all these different ways and backgrounds and bits and pieces. Wesley was a preacher of the gospel before he was converted. He was a graduate of a fine university. He had the Bible under his grasp. He was moving around in America, teaching people everything.
And then he goes one evening to a Bible study in uh Aldgate Street. And he says, And there my heart was strangely warmed. You couldn't explain it. They said, Well, what does that mean?
So well I can't really tell you all about it, but I know that I was once this. You say the man born blind in John chapter 15. N nine, maybe. And you've got a big fuss and a bother, depressing on his parents. What's going on with this guy?
What has Jesus done to him? And what about you? What do you have to say for yourself? He says, I don't know what I have to say to myself. I can say one thing.
I know one thing. Once I was blind, but now I can see. That's all I can tell you. That's my testimony. I was a blind man, I am a seeing man.
That's what happens. You see, people are listening to me and my colleagues teach the gospel. They're going to one day say, I was in a gospel church, I heard this Scottish guy preach, but I never heard the gospel. Why? Because I didn't preach it?
No, because you never heard it. Because God didn't unstop your ears. He didn't open your blind eyes. You can stare at it in your face and read it in the text. and stand back from it.
Spurgeon probably is the greatest illustration of how Jesus ends here, and with this illustration, I will end too. Spurgeon was fifteen years old. He said it was a day never to be forgotten. When I first understood that salvation could not be of myself, but must be through one stronger and better than I. I heard that the Son of God had taken upon Himself our human nature, and had by His life and death provided a perfect salvation, finished from top to bottom.
Which he was ready to give to every soul that was willing to have it. And that salvation was all of grace from first to last, the free gift of God through the blessed Son, Jesus Christ. january the sixth, eighteen fifty. His school is closed. And the winter has taken a bite in the greater London area.
He's going to church, but he can't get to the original church. He goes to a different one. uh um primitive Methodist church down a street in Colchester. He enters the room. There were no more than a dozen or 15 people present.
Even the minister had failed to arrive because of the weather. It was the wrong church, the wrong congregation, the wrong weather, and the wrong preacher. Into the pulpit climbed a thin-looking man. Spurgeon was never to know anything about him. He announced his text as Isaiah 45, 22.
Look. Unto me. And be ye saved all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is none else. Spurgeon records he hadn't much to say. All that he could really do was cook.
continue to quote the text. My dear friends, this is a very simple text indeed. It says, Look.
Now looking don't take a deal of pain. It ain't lifting your foot or your finger. It's just look.
Well, a man needn't go to college to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool and yet you can look. A child can look.
However weak or however poor a man may be, he can look. And if he looks. The promise is that he shall live. And Sportius says he went on in his broad Essex accent: you'll never find any comfort in yourselves. No, He says, look at me.
The preacher managed to spin that out for ten minutes. And then, running out of anything fresh to say, he looked at his congregation and picked on Spurgeon. Young man. You look very miserable, he said.
Well, says Spurgeon, I did look miserable. But I hadn't been accustomed to have remarks made from the pulpit about my personal appearance before.
However, it was a good blow, and it struck right home. The preacher went on, and you will always be miserable. Miserable in life and miserable in death. If you don't obey my text, but if you obey now, this moment, you will be saved. And then he shouted at the top of his voice, as I think only a primitive Methodist can.
Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look, look, look. Look, you have nothing to do but look and live. Spurgeon said I at once. Saw the way of salvation.
I know not what else he said. I didn't take any notion of it at all. Oh, I could have looked until I almost have looked my eyes away. There and then the cloud was gone The darkness had rolled away. and at that moment I saw the sun.
and I could have risen that instant. and sung. of His grace and His mercy. Truly, truly. I say to you.
Jesus says. Unless one is born again. He cannot see. cannot enter. the kingdom of God.
How gracious of God. How good. How amazing is our salvation? Father, turn our eyes upon Jesus. Enable us to look full in His wonderful face.
That the things of the earth might grow strangely dim. in the light of His glory and grace. and may grace from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon and remain with each one who looks. Today and forevermore. Amen.
Yeah. Oh. You're listening to Truth for Life with Alastair Begg. As Alastair explained today, the new birth is not something we do, it's something God gives. And you may have seen the popular video that's on YouTube called The Man on the Middle Cross.
In this short video clip Alastair explains that the thief who hung condemned next to Jesus received this new birth.
So how did that happen? Once simple, he asked for it. Alastair continues the conversation from the video in a new booklet he's written with the same title He wrote this for you to be able to give it to others so you can introduce them to Jesus and the salvation He offers. The Man on the Middle Cross is a brief little book. It tells three stories: The Woman at the Well.
the healed paralytic and the thief on the cross, as a way of introducing those who don't know Jesus to His offer of healing and restoration. Alastair has included a prayer at the end of the book, so that unbelievers can pray to invite Jesus into their lives. The man on the middle cross is perfect for tucking into your church's Christmas box projects, for giving in lieu of a Christmas card this year, or, frankly, giving it to anyone you meet during the holiday season who needs to hear and believe the Gospel. Our prayer is that you'll distribute this book widely between now and Christmas. It's priced at just one dollar, less than the cost of a Christmas card, so you can purchase as many as you need, and together we can make this a season of gospel outreach.
You'll find the book online at truthforlife. org slash middle, or you can call us at eight eight eight five eight eight seven eight eight four to place your order. And on our website, you'll also find an interview between Alistair and the book's publisher. Alistair talks about his hopes for how this book will be used to expand the reach of the gospel. And if you haven't seen the video that inspired the book, you'll find it there as well.
Again, go to truthforlife.org/slash middle. Thanks for listening today. You would think that a miraculous healing would be a cause of celebration for everyone, but that wasn't always the case during the ministry of Jesus, as we'll see tomorrow. The Bible teaching of Alaska Begg is furnished by Truth for Life. Where the Learning is for Living.
