God’s plan of salvation is making deliverance possible through what Christ did. We positively respond to what Christ did by faith in Him and obedience to His will. This involves Repentance and Regeneration. Yesterday, we looked at repentance. Today, we look at regeneration.
In this conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus speaks a sharp and penetrating sentence that must have gone like a sword thrust right into his heart: To experience God’s kingdom, we must experience new birth.
The word John uses is anothen, which points to a radical new beginning that comes from above. It signifies that God must do this—we cannot. And it results in a new creation, a new beginning. There is no way we can even see the kingdom of God without this.
To be in “the kingdom of God,” is a transfer of citizenship, a radical departure from what we once were. Paul speaks of being transferred from “the kingdom of darkness, ruled by the god of this world, into the kingdom of the Son of His love (Colossians 1:13).”
Jesus sensed in Nicodemus a deep hunger, an emptiness. Here was a man who was doing his level best to obey what he thought God wanted, yet he had an empty and unsatisfied heart that led him to seek out Jesus by night, at the risk of the displeasure of his peers, to talk with him about the kingdom of God. Sensing this, Jesus immediately puts him on the right track by saying to him, “You are wasting your time if you think you can enter the kingdom of God the way you are. You can’t. You must be born again.”
Spiritual rebirth is generated by God, who is Love (agapè). It is facilitated by Jesus, our Savior and Lord, who died that we might live. It is secured and shepherded by the Holy Spirit, who indwells and in-fills, edifies and inspires us. How we respond to such agapè determines whether we will receive what God has made available to us.
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