I have a burden. In counselling so many Christians, I've now learned something and it's not to discuss the problem they've brought to me at the beginning. I now say to someone who wants counsel, tell me how you began the Christian life. Just tell me about your conversion. And I listen very carefully to find out if they had a good or a bad midwife when they got converted, whether everything that should have been done for the baby was done, whether they've really been fully born again.
[00:00:49]
Birth affects life. A bad birth can produce a sickly, unhealthy baby, and a long, protracted and painful birth is to be avoided if possible. Yet looking back over my Christian experience, it took me seventeen years to get all that I needed that should have been done for me when I was converted. It needn't even take seventeen hours. It could even be done in seventeen minutes if you have an experienced midwife.
[00:01:24]
The way we begin steers a course for us for the rest of our time, and for most of us our conversion has been the biggest influence in our Christian life. Now I'm afraid there are too many rushed births, Christians who are badly birthed, badly delivered, and the amazing thing I've found is this, that if we go back and put the beginning right, the problem they've come with either gets reduced or they say, do you know, I think I can deal with that problem myself now.
[00:02:07]
There are Christians staggering along because they're not firing on all four cylinders. I have discovered, and here I'm telling you the heart of the teaching I'm going to give today, that there are four steps into life. There are four aspects to the new birth. There are four things that need to happen to every baby.
[00:03:17]
Just as all those things need to be done at a physical birth, their equivalent needs to be done at a spiritual birth. For example, cutting the cord and tying it off is equivalent to repentance. That brings the past to a conclusion. It cuts you off from that which ties you to your previous existence. Washing the baby, which is important to get all the remains of its previous existence washed away so that it starts clean, is equivalent to baptism in the new life.
[00:05:08]
When we get away from Bible language, it usually means we're getting away from Bible principles and Bible thought. So we've now got into the habit of a whole lot of euphemisms which we use instead of biblical phrases. For example, we talk about people making a decision for Christ. We talk about people making a commitment. We talk about people opening their hearts to Jesus. We talk about people receiving Jesus into their life. None of that language is to be found in the New Testament.
[00:06:21]
If we're not careful, we take texts out of context and make them a pretext for our own thinking and the way we do it. I'm going to take you back into the New Testament accepting what it says and what they did to help people to become Christians.
[00:09:02]
We can actually watch the Apostles on location in the book of Acts. We can watch them doing evangelism. We can hear what they said to inquirers, so it's with the book of Acts that we must begin when we ask the question, how do you become a Christian?
[00:13:30]
In these two passages that they carefully took enquirers through four simple steps, and in the same order on both occasions. And the steps were, repent of your sins toward God, believe in the Lord Jesus, be baptized in water, and receive the Holy Spirit. And here are the four subjects I'm taking today. Together they make up what the New Testament understands by being born again, or becoming a believer, or entering the kingdom, or having eternal life.
[00:14:17]
If you put all the accounts together, there is no exception to these four basic steps. There is nothing ever added to these steps, nothing ever taken away from these steps. This is how they became a Christian in the early church. They repented of their sins to God, they believed on the Lord Jesus, they believed on the Lord Jesus, they were baptized in water, and they received the Holy Spirit.
[00:17:22]
One of the most striking things that you notice about this is that they began the Christian life in a personal relationship with three persons in the Godhead. They knew from the very beginning that God was a Trinity, whereas many Christians have started their Christian life today with no relationship with the Holy Spirit, no conscious knowledge of him, and sometimes they wait years before they get into that relationship.
[00:17:50]
We should introduce people from the very beginning to all three persons and say, repent toward the Father, believe in the Son, and receive the Spirit.
[00:18:36]
If you see all fours belonging together, you are thinking more like the apostles in the New Testament. Of course, of the four, faith is the most important, and it's the one that receives the greatest emphasis. But it lies behind the other three.
[00:27:04]
We need to see all four as parts of faith when we say we are justified by faith alone. That doesn't mean faith without repentance. It doesn't mean faith without baptism. It doesn't mean faith without receiving the Spirit. It means the kind of faith that encompasses all four.
[00:27:59]
It's very dangerous to say we are saved by faith alone if it means cutting out those other three. We're saved by a faith that repents, a faith that submits to baptism, and a faith that receives the Holy Spirit.
[00:28:21]
Conversion is a human act and has four stages to it. I convert when I repent, when I believe, when I'm baptized, and when I receive, and I'm facing the other way. So that all four are acts of men.
[00:32:18]
But now comes the surprising thing. In the New Testament, all four are also acts of God. It says God grants us repentance. It says that faith is not of ourselves, it is a gift of God. It says that it's God who washes my sins away in baptism. It says it's God who pours out the Spirit upon me.
[00:32:41]
It is a beautiful cooperation between God's activity and my activity. When I repent, God is giving me repentance. When I believe God is giving me faith. When I get baptized, God is going to wash me clean. When I receive the Spirit, God is pouring out His Spirit upon me. It's both. It's both conversion and regeneration.
[00:34:32]
We've got stuck with the idea that regeneration, being born again, must happen in an instant. Now if that is true, you have to look at the four steps and say, at what point in that process is the instant of regeneration? The Calvinist says it comes before number one, because you can't do the other four until you're born again. The Arminian says it comes between two and three. It comes after you believe and before you baptize. The Catholic says it comes at the moment of your baptism, even if that happened before the others. They're all wrong because they all assume that regeneration is an instantaneous miracle. But you study the word regeneration in the Bible and you'll find it always refers to a process of a number of stages which needs to be completed. It is not an instantaneous event. It is a process, as physical birth is a process.
[00:34:58]
We should be far more concerned about getting Christians alive than getting people born again. Do you understand what I'm saying? Because birth is only the beginning of life. The most important part of being a Christian is not to have been born again, but to be living, to be alive in the kingdom and alive in the Spirit.
[00:36:24]
As you go through this whole process of being born again, there's less and less of you and more and more of God in the process. This is why the texts on conversion are mostly about stages one and two, and the texts on regeneration or being born again are mostly about three and four, which is why Jesus said, you're born again of water and Spirit.
[00:39:11]
The beginning of new life, that's the end of your old life and this is the beginning of your new life, and that's the essence of birth. It's a change.
[00:40:20]
