The Doctrine of Regeneration - Birth After Death

Today is almost a part two of what we looked at last week. If you weren't here last week, we worked through a sermon called "The Improbable Prayer for Impossible People". And we looked at in that message how we are encouraged to pray bold prayers asking God to change hearts. And we know how hard that is, don't we?

Those hearts that just seem so stubborn. Those hearts that just seem so cold to any work of God, any chance of redemption. But we saw that God has the sort of incredible power that can reach into the lives of people to completely overhaul them. That is the God we believe in. The God who can change hearts.

Now this week, I want to focus on what it looks like in practicality. What God actually has to do when He answers that prayer to change hearts. What is God doing when we pray for hearts to be changed? What are we hoping, in fact, will happen to those people? Well, in short, what we are asking God to do is nothing less than resurrect the dead.

That's why we call it a bold prayer. When we are asking God to change people's hearts and minds, we are asking Him to bring life to dead bodies. And so this morning, we're going to be looking at the theological concept called regeneration. Regeneration. The doctrine of regeneration.

And it's a phrase that has been used for two thousand years in the history of the church. It has probably gained a bit of a nuance in the last century, predominantly from the side of the US Christianity that has coined the term "born again". A born again Christian means a regenerated, come to life Christian. And today we're going to look at where that phrase comes from in the Bible. But what is the doctrine of regeneration dealing with?

Theologian Wayne Grudem defines regeneration as the inward act of God in which He imparts new spiritual life in us. In other words, there's physical life, as we understand life, but there is such a thing as spiritual life or the opposite being spiritually dead. And God is in the business of taking spiritually dead people and breathing life into them to resurrect dead spiritual bodies to live for Him. To be awake to Him.

And I want us to look at this morning passage where Jesus gives some very direct teaching on this idea. So if you have your Bibles, let's turn together to John, the Gospel of John chapter three, and we're going to read from verse one through to verse eight. John 3:1. Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus. He was a ruler of the Jews.

This man came to Jesus by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God. For no one can do these things that You do unless God is with Him." Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?"

Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again. 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."

So far, our reading. At the moment, at my stage in life, everyone is having babies. It's baby season. As you know, my brother has just had their first at the end of last year. Not so long ago, I was invited to attend a baby shower, in fact.

A bloke attending a baby shower. I didn't even know that was a thing. I had no idea what to expect or what to do so I gave cash. Here you go baby. Buy yourself something nice.

But it's a special thing. Especially that first child. When that first child arrives, isn't it? There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of discussion about who it's going to be, what they're going to grow into, who they're going to look like.

But I want to ask you, put up your hand if you remember the excitement of being born. Who here remembers the decision by your mum and your dad that caused you to be born? Yene in our church. Some of us may know her. Yene who is now living in South Africa for the next few months during her gap year.

Yanae believes that she was born in the wrong era. That if she had the choice, she would have been born in the seventies so that she could be in her high school years in the eighties, so that she could be listening to eighties rock in high school. It's the pinnacle of cool. And if she had a choice in the matter of being born, that's when she would have been born. Maybe the babies born in February had it right.

Some of you guys down here. Maybe you guys had it right. Owen, pretty much born with an iPod in your hand. With headphones on. Yeah.

Now you have access to any sort of music from any generation. But it doesn't work like that, does it? None of us had a say in how or when we were born. None of us contributed in any way to the decision making of being born. And yet this morning, Jesus gives a very significant teaching on how people must be born.

That they must be born again in order to be saved. He teaches how people will enter the kingdom of God and he says it is like being born again. You see in the context of this teaching, a man named Nicodemus, a very prominent teacher, a religious teacher of the time comes to Jesus. And Nicodemus begins by saying in verse two, Rabbi, which is the Jewish term for teacher, Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God because no one can do the miraculous signs that You have done. And then Jesus replies, doesn't He?

What does He say? Verse three, "Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." What an unexpected response. I mean, can you match what Nicodemus is saying and how Jesus responds in any sort of clear way? Nicodemus isn't even asking a question.

He's still sort of laying the groundwork. He's saying, we know you're a good teacher. We know that You have come from God. And then Jesus says, "Truly, truly, no one can see the kingdom unless they are born again." Before he comes to drop his question, before he comes to share what his thoughts are or what he's wondering, Jesus drops the bombshell or this concept of being born again.

So we're left to answer the question, why does Jesus give this response from an seemingly innocent opening statement by Nicodemus? Well, because Nicodemus wasn't speaking the truth when he said, we know you're from God. You see verse two begins by saying that Nicodemus comes by night to come and see Jesus. That John makes that specific detail known to us. Nicodemus comes under the shadow of the evening to come to see Jesus.

Why? Probably because he's scared of what others might think of him being caught being taught by Jesus. Nicodemus says, we know you're a teacher from God because no one else does these miracles unless God was with them. But that is actually a lie. If Nicodemus and the other Pharisees, because he says "we", believe.

If Nicodemus and the other Pharisees really believed this statement, would Nicodemus have waited until nighttime to not be seen to see Jesus? If Jesus was from God, if Jesus was God, would we wait? I would go. Whenever it was possible, I would go. If the Pharisees really believed, would they have attacked Jesus' authority?

See, Nicodemus' opening statement is untrue because he doesn't really believe Jesus is from God. And so this is where the born again bombshell comes in because no one can see the invisible kingdom of God, let alone enter it without being made new. Nicodemus says, we know you're from God and Jesus says, you don't. And we might ask why this analogy, this born again concept. Why does God give us this picture when He wants to teach us about salvation, coming and entering His kingdom?

Well, this is a concept that has actually been introduced far earlier in the Bible in the Old Testament. In Ezekiel 36 and 37, we find God talking about a people who are dead, like dry skeletons. And they are needing to be given a breath of life so that their rattling bones can come together. That over those bones are grown ligaments and muscles and skin. Ezekiel 36:26-27 talks about hearts that are so dead that they are stone.

And that these hearts of stone, which is where we get the phrase we use to have a heart of stone, this heart of stone must be turned into a heart of flesh. Dead, cold, lifeless hearts and bodies starting to beat and be vital, produce vitality again. And so Jesus picks up on this concept. This idea that just as physical life is marked at the point of birth or conception, and just as lifeless as we were before being born. So spiritual life starts with the process of a life giving birth.

But the first thing we need to address this morning is the question, why do we need to be made alive in the first place? If we pray for God to change someone's heart, why should we be praying that they are born again? That they are regenerated? That they are made new? Why should we pray for that?

Well, to put it plainly, we need to be made alive again because we were dead. Very, very dead. Romans chapter three paints a picture of humanity's total depravity. That's also what the theologians of centuries past called it, total depravity. Our total inability to choose God.

Our total inability to please God. To do anything that could save ourselves. Romans 3:10 says this, "There is no one righteous, not even one. There is not one who understands. No one seeks God."

Is that a universal statement? Yes. No one. Not some. No one seeks God.

Verse 12 of that same chapter says this, "There is no one who does good. Not even one." These verses explain just why the work of regeneration is needed. Because Paul in Romans three is saying, this is the default position of every single human being. And without the supernatural intervention of God, we remain dead, hardened against God, not adhering to good, not seeking what is right.

To put it another way, Romans 8:7 says this, "The sinful mind, the way we think about everything is hostile towards God. It does not submit itself to the law of God." We read God's law at the start of this morning. It does not submit itself to that law nor can it even do so. There is nothing in the heart of a person who is outside the kingdom of God to do what God wants of us.

There is no ability to do so. Where we do good, it is faltering and failing. Where we do good, apart from being in the kingdom of God, it is with motives that may be questioned. And for many of us, when we are praying for God to make Betty in the office a bit nicer, to help so and so become free from their drug use or their alcohol abuse. When we pray for so and so to be less self absorbed.

This is the reality. Unless people have put their trust in Jesus Christ and been broken out of that kingdom of the old person, the dead person, you are praying for no less than God to take a dead corpse and breathe life into it. If we're just hoping for God to sprinkle a little bit of magic dust to change them, just a little bit, just to make them a little bit nicer, that's not deep enough. That's not a prayer that will actually change very much. We are asking for God to breathe life into a dead body.

We are dealing with dead corpses. And the reality is, before you became a Christian, you were also a dead corpse. It does not mean we are any higher than them in any sort of ranking. There is no pride in that statement because this is how the Bible explains it. Ephesians 2:1.

Paul writes to Christians, to a church about their condition prior to salvation. He says this, "As for you, you were, what is that word? Dead. D e a d, dead in your transgressions and in your sins in which you used to live. You were dead."

And again, the picture is one of absolute inability. That is what characterised you and me. And so in all those passages, you picture this condition of the human soul before it meets Jesus. It is numb. It is cold.

It is dead. And so when we come to John three, Jesus makes a distinction and says, flesh will give birth to flesh. We have the grace of God that has still allowed us to continue living in these bodies. Flesh will give birth to flesh, but says Jesus, only Spirit gives birth to Spirit. And Jesus is insinuating that while we may be able to give birth physically because we are physically alive, spiritually, default is to be dead.

We are spiritually incapacitated, spiritually ignorant. We cannot understand. We cannot examine. We cannot apprehend or comprehend the message of life. Now this leads us to the next question.

What are we asking when we ask God to change dead hearts? What is God going to have to do? And what is the source of this regeneration? How can our friends and our family members be made alive again? Well, we have to realise that we cannot be the ones to give that birth ourselves.

We cannot give birth to those people and we cannot give birth to ourselves. The doctrine of regeneration as presented in Scripture is known as the first divine act of salvation. It is primary, theologians say, in what is called the ordo salutis, the order of salvation. And apart from what is probably the first preceding act before it, but it is without it is outside of time. It is outside of order is election.

In Ephesians one, God is said to have chosen His people from before the foundations of the earth. Before creation was even a thing, God called those who would be His. But now, in that timeline of salvation in time and space, regeneration happens way before faith, happens way before conversion. Regeneration is knowing there is a God. I'm aware of who I am in this world before this creator.

So regeneration is the first thing that happens in our time and in our reality. So the analogy of being born again or having dead dry bones coming to life has the presupposition that by definition, it states that a baby that is born or the skeleton who comes to life are both very unable to contribute in any way to them coming into existence. No one put up their hands about, I decided to be born in the eighties. Just like when we were born physically, we are all born completely apart from any consideration on our own part. I'm going to embarrass mum and dad here, but when I was younger, I was horrified to find out that I was born an accident.

Not in an unwanted way and very well, you know, mum and dad were married, so you know, that's all good. But there had been no particular planning in my conception. Quickly mum tried to make me feel better by telling us all that we were all kind of accidents. And that did not help because none of us felt very special after hearing that. But regardless of the fact, mum and dad had a fair idea what the possibility was at the moment.

But I had zero say in the matter. I had zero influence on how and why I was born. And Jesus is teaching in John three that regeneration is similarly a work of salvation done by God alone. No baby can decide I want to be born and no dead body can say to itself, get up and walk. After Paul tells the Christians that once upon a time they were dead in their transgressions, he adds this in Ephesians 2:4.

"Because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, has made us alive in Christ." This is so important for us to remember because as a driven person myself, as a person that feels the calling of God to be a pastor, a minister, a messenger of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as a person who wants to see people's lives being changed by this message, I need to hear this teaching often. To be reminded of the foolishness of thinking that by my cleverness, by my skill, by my fine tuning of a message, by the cleverness of my approach, by the way I craft my invitation for friends to come to church, or the way we play music at church, or the way that we smile at people in the workplace. That somehow we're going to induce dead people to come alive again. You may as well take your guitar, go to the cemetery down the road, play a few nice tunes to a gravestone and hope for something to happen.

How does this understanding of the powerful working of God to make people's hearts alive to Him? How does this teaching change how we pray? How we reach out to others? Well, firstly, and almost most importantly, it tells us to pray. We can do nothing apart from the life giving work of God.

It can only be the powerful action of a grace filled God who will change and save any of our friends. So we must be on our knees. Hoping does nothing. Waiting does nothing. We must be on our knees pleading with our merciful God to have mercy, but we don't despair either because Paul writes that in Ephesians, God is rich in mercy.

And so we know because He's had mercy on us, He can have mercy on whoever He pleases. We don't despair because we appeal to a merciful God. And so we also don't get complacent in our prayers and appeals to Him for those who don't know Jesus. And so our first and our foremost duty is to pray. We've mentioned that last week.

We can pray for those hard impossible people because we're praying for salvation. But then the third and the final point this morning is the question, what is the Christian's role in the regeneration of others? What is our role in that? Well I hope you can gather this morning that our role is quite insignificant in the great scheme of things. And yet God has called us to serve His redeeming purposes by calling us to be making disciples of our kids, of our friends, of people we don't even know at the farthest reaches of the earth.

But if we can't cause anyone to be born again, if only God can give life, then what is our role? Well, I like to see our role as nudging the corpse. That's what I call it. I've termed that phrase, nudging the corpse. To come along every now and then and to give it a good kick in the ribs.

By giving it a kick, I mean to preach the Gospel to them. To tell them about Jesus. 1 Peter 1:23 says to Christians, "You have been born again. That's that phrase again. You have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable through the living and enduring word of God."

You've been born again by the word of God. So when we kick the corpse with a message that we are dead and that we need Jesus to bring us life, when we kick and the corpse says, ouch, then we know something's up. We know something's changed because you kick a corpse and they don't respond. And I know sharing the Gospel with our friends can often seem like a hopeless cause because we get rejected a hundred times. We get no good response.

We only get a response that indicates that they are dead. But what do we expect? Corpses don't listen very well. But we keep believing that maybe the ninety ninth time, maybe the hundredth time, once we nudge that corpse again, it says, oof, that hurts. Tell me a little bit more.

Author Donald Miller writes about the powerful witness that this moment of regeneration is not simply for the person that was dead, but for us as well. He writes, "When one of my friends becomes a Christian, I see in their eyes the trueness of this story." In other words, we see with piercing clarity a powerful affirmation that this Gospel is true when we see a friend go through the supernatural transformation that could only have happened by God. That's how my youngest brother became a Christian. He saw someone's life changed and he said this, God is real.

For some of us, we have to be reminded this morning that while we may be very aware of our regeneration, we can say, yes, that has happened to me, that we are born again. It also means that while we have been made alive to Christ, we must remain dead to sin. Romans 6:6 says that our old self has been crucified and has died with Christ. And this was done so that our sin might be dealt with at the cross and that we should no longer be slaves to sin. If we died with Christ to sin, Paul says, we will also be alive with Him because we have been raised to life with Him.

And so for some of us, we need to remember this morning that having died with Christ, we now have life. You are alive in Christ, but you are dead to sin. You are alive with Christ, but you are dead to sin. Keep striving to kill that sin. I know it's a battle.

I know we're not going to get victory over it or all of them at the same time. But don't stop. Corpses stop. Living creatures keep moving. You've been given every strength to overcome it and for the first time, it's been slanted in your favour to win.

To my other friends, today might be the day where the Holy Spirit has opened your heart for the first time. For the first time ever. Holy Spirit may have opened your eyes to see your spiritual deadness, making you realise that you have fought for a long time to be good. You have fought and you have battled to be worthy, but you are losing that war. Maybe God has done something in your heart this morning to be softened to this news that you are now willing to believe.

And that is that the message of Jesus' death and His resurrection has been on your behalf for you. The message that says at one point, Jesus was made dead so that you may be made alive again. That an end has been brought to the life of Jesus so that you could live. And it was Jesus who took an awful punishment of eternal separation from a holy and perfectly justified God who has seen and who knows our lifeless sin ravaged souls. And this Jesus took that awful punishment on our behalf.

Today for the first time, you may be broken by that understanding. Today for the first time, it may all make sense. And it's as if your heart has been defibrillated into life. So I wanna tell you, stop living that lackluster Christianity. Stop living that false, fake, cultural Christianity.

I wanna call you up out of that grave and tell you to live for the one who has given you all that you will ever need. So I'm going to pray this morning as we wrap up. If you are willing to accept Christ as your King, if you are doing that for the first time this morning, please come to see me. Don't leave this place and go home because He is worth it. This truth, this kingdom, this door to open is worth opening.

Don't feel rushed. I'm here for most of the morning. Friends, can I say in response to this great news this morning, the news that it is all of God and it has been none of me who has caused me to receive this salvation? To have caused me to believe in this in the first place. We can't do anything more than to receive it.

And we can't do anything more but to be extremely grateful and extremely happy for what He has done. For those friends and family members we are hoping will still meet Jesus, we don't stop praying for them. We don't stop going to God on their behalf. Our God is merciful, scripture tells us, and He is inviting us to pray. But hear this, our God is so powerful that He makes the dead transform into life.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Our God is good.