Unless You Are Born Again

Tuesday, December 17, 2013     Unless You Are Born Again      John 3: 1-13

Sometimes people are tempted to put too much emphasis on Jesus’ statement, “You must be born again.” By too much, I mean their focus is on identifying a particular time and place where a person confessed faith in Jesus as though the whole point of Jesus’ statement was that we needed a once in a lifetime experience. Notice Jesus said we must be born of water and the Spirit. Some people take his reference to water as our earthly birth because there is a discharge of water as a natural part of the birthing process. I believe Jesus has in mind our water baptism.

Water baptism marks our initiation into the Kingdom of God and into the church, through our confession of faith. The Apostle Paul expounds on our being born of the Spirit in Romans 6 where he discusses our being baptized by the Holy Spirit into the life of Jesus. When you bring these two together, baptized by water and the Spirit, you can see that Jesus anticipates that the evidence we have been born again will be the life we are living, as opposed to only identifying a particular time and place where we made our confession of faith.

Jesus underscores this point by reminding Nicodemus that God’s ways are not the ways of humankind. When we are born into the Kingdom of God, we then begin the process of learning the ways of God. We learn how to come out of the darkness of sin and live in the light of God’s love. Jesus was also pointing to one of the distinguishing characteristics of living in God’s love: “the Holy Spirit gives birth to spiritual life” (John 3:6). This witness of the Holy Spirit was also pointed out by Jesus in his response to Peter’s confession that Jesus was the Messiah, “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Matthew 16:17b NRSV). (The Apostle Paul also affirms the witness of the Holy Spirit in Romans 8:15b-16 NRSV: “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”)

We will come back to this teaching in John 10 where Jesus affirms that we follow him, our Good Shepherd, because we know his voice. For now it is good to give thought to all the many voices that bombard us each day. Have we learned to listen for and distinguish the witness of the Holy Spirit in our lives?

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  The meditations are published on the BLOG, http://seekingthelifeinchrist.blogspot.com/ and they are also distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription.

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

·        The second edition of  First Think – Then Pray is available on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188.