How to be born again — Eugene Higgins

Now, before reading the scriptures, we're going to ask God's blessing, shall we pray. Our Father, in the sacred name of the Lord Jesus, we bow in thy presence. We thank thee for the simplicity of the gospel's message.

It is a message unique. It is a message apart from all other messages that tells us of our ruin in sin, of the danger that awaits us, and yet tells us of the mighty provision that God made at Calvary in the death of our beloved Lord Jesus.

We pray that as we preach his gospel tonight and tell men and women that eternal life is available through Christ as the gift of God, that this may be the happy night in the experience of souls among us when they trust Christ and receive everlasting life.

Bless the gospel wherever it is being preached this Lord's Day evening. We commit to thee thy word that will be spoken here and humbly pray for thy help and blessing in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.

Jesus' Teaching on the New Birth

I'd like to read with you in the gospel of John chapter three, please. And we'll commence at verse one. John chapter three and verse one. There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

The same came to Jesus by night and said unto him, "'Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God, "'for no man can do these miracles that thou doest "'except God be with him.'. Jesus answered and said unto him, "'Verily, verily,' that just means truly, truly, "'I say unto thee, except a man be born again, "'he cannot see the kingdom of God.'.

Nicodemus saith unto him, "'How can a man be born when he is old? "'Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb "'and be born?'. Jesus answered, "'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, "'except a man be born of water and of the spirit, "'he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

"'That which is born of the flesh is flesh, "'and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. "'Marvel not that I said unto thee, "'ye must be born again. "'The wind bloweth where it listeth, "'and thou hearest the sound thereof, "'but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.

"'So is everyone that is born of the spirit.'. Nicodemus answered and said unto him, "'How can these things be?'. Jesus answered and said unto him, "'Art thou a master of Israel and knowest not these things?

"'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, "'we speak that we do know, "'and testify that we have seen, "'and ye receive not our witness. "'If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, "'how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?

"'And no man hath ascended up to heaven, "'but he that came down from heaven, "'even the Son of Man which is in heaven. "'And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, "'even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, "'that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, "'but have eternal life.

"'For God so loved the world "'that he gave his only begotten Son, "'that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, "'but have everlasting life.'". And finally, the last verse in the chapter, verse 36, "'He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, "'and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, "'but the wrath of God abideth on him.'".

Tonight, what I would like to do is take this man's question, when he says, how can a man be born or actually born again once he is old? And how can these things be? And I want to use them as a springboard to actually consider with you the Savior's answer.

And for a short time tonight, I'd like to ask you to just not only carefully consider, but weigh with me the importance of every word he used in answering this man and telling him, ye must be born again.

The Necessity of Being Born Again

Now we use the word must in more than one way. For instance, you would understand what I meant if I said to you, you must breathe, you must breathe. And yet it would be in a totally different context that I might say, you must pay taxes.

Or if you were driving on the highway and you see a sign with maybe two little lights blinking, and the sign says, all trucks must pull into inspection station if these lights are blinking. Now you understand that when somebody says, you must breathe, what he's talking about is a need that you have.

A need that you have, it's your condition that entails this need. You have to breathe if you're gonna live. But the truck now, we're talking about a law that enforces this and paying taxes. We're talking about a must that comes from a law that has been established.

You must pay taxes. Now both of those things are implicit in the Savior's statement. You must be born again. You and I have a need that demands a new birth if we're gonna be in heaven. And God has issued this statement that it is impossible to enter heaven unless a person is born again.

So however you approach this word, you will understand it came with tremendous weight to this Pharisee Nicodemus when the Lord Jesus said, you must be born again. Now I want you to notice, first of all, how personal this need is.

The Personal Need for the New Birth

When the Lord Jesus says to Nicodemus, don't be surprised that I'm saying to you, you must be born again. You must be born again. I think that those five words should be a loud voice to every preacher, the present speaker included.

No one should dare to stand before an audience of men and women and purport to tell them the gospel of the grace of God unless that speaker, that preacher himself has been born again. And history is filled with examples of people who merely turn to the preaching profession as a way to have a career or to make money or to serve their neighborhood.

But this is a loud voice to everyone who wishes to preach the gospel that each person who dares to speak to others about Christ, he himself should be born again. John Wesley, the very well-known English preacher said in his diary, I came to America to convert the Indians and I found out I am not converted myself.

Who shall convert me? Here he was serving God, coming from England to the United States to the colonies to speak to Indians about their spiritual need. And he discovers that he himself had never been born again.

Dr. Albert Cooper served as Prime Minister of Holland from 1901 to 1905. He had graduated from the University of Leyden with honors in theology, but he was never born again himself. He was, he assumed a ministry at a church in Biest and one Sunday after he had given his homily, a woman came to the back, an older woman came to the back of the service and said to him, Doctor, that was a fine sermon, but you need to be born again.

Doctor, that was a fine sermon, but you need to be born again. And those words set Dr. Cooper on a search. It was like an arrow that went to his own heart. They set him on a search of the Bible to find how could he be born again?

If the Lord Jesus said he must be born again, then how could he, Dr. Cooper, who thought he could serve God and preach to others, how could he be born again? Maybe my favorite character from the past along with Charles Wesley would be George Whitefield.

He belonged to what was called the Holy Club in Oxford. Just a group of men, in fact, John Wesley was one, Charles Wesley, George Whitefield and others, and they met together to read the Bible, to pray, to discuss how to live a proper Christian life in the Oxford University where they were.

They were called the Holy Club. In fact, to give you some idea of the lengths to which Mr. Whitefield went, he felt that since the Lord Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, that he could perhaps be more like Christ if that's what he did.

It was the dead of winter. Snow, yes, in England, snow had fallen, and yet Mr. Whitefield went out into the garden, prostrated himself in the snow, and prayed out there, trying, longing to be more like Christ.

This is what he said as he read a book written by a Christian named Henry Scogle called The Life of God and the Soul of Man. He wrote, God showed me that I must be born again or be damned. I learned that a man may go to church, say his prayers, receive the sacrament, and yet not be a Christian.

I love the way he described it now. He said, how did my heart rise and shudder like a poor man that is afraid to look into his account books lest he would find that he is bankrupt? And after much misery as he realized he'd been trying to make himself into a Christian and he had never had the first step, never even had been born again, this is what he wrote.

Years later, he said, I know the place. I know the place. It may be superstitious perhaps, but whenever I go to Oxford, I cannot help running to the place where Jesus Christ first revealed himself to me and gave me the new birth.

This is a loud voice to every preacher. Therefore, it ought to be a loud voice to every audience, to this audience. You see, I'll tell you what we're prone to. We are prone to attending a meeting like this, imagining that we are disinterested, uninvolved bystanders, watching the flow of traffic to eternity, that we're learning what this church believes or I've come to this meeting and now I'm hearing what this man says and this is what this church presents to the public or the people who come here regularly, this is what they believe.

But you see, this ought to be a loud voice to every audience because the Lord Jesus says, you must be born again, you must be born again. So there's something that brings it right down here into this meeting, into this gospel hall, into this section of the hall and this section because you see, it ought to be a loud voice to every person.

There's something very personal and individual about this. When the Lord Jesus looks into the eyes of his old man, to me, there's something very poignant about this. This man has spent the most of his life on the wrong road.

He has memorized the Bible. He has taught it to others. He has served God diligently, fervently, earnestly, sincerely. He's now an old man and the Lord Jesus looks into his eyes and says, you can't go to heaven the way you are.

You need to be born again. And Nicodemus, I'm so glad that that was his attitude. He doesn't say, why should I need to be born again? His question is not why, but how, how can this take place now at my stage in life?

How can I ever be born again? How can these things be? And so it came with great personal impact, personal influence to this man. I had a very good friend, an older woman in Manchester, Connecticut. And a couple of times she would have been, she'd invite the preacher I was preaching with, he and I to have dinner with her.

And she told us once how she was saved. And she described that she was a faithful church attender, a Sunday school teacher, a moral person, trying to keep the 10 commandments. And she said, there were two words in the Bible that I couldn't get around.

And she said, if it was not for those two words, I would have been able to convince myself I was going to heaven. The two words, born again, born again. You must be born again. So look now at Nicodemus.

And the Lord Jesus is telling him that. He would have every reason to assume that he was going to heaven. Are you assuming that you're going to heaven? I don't have widespread experience in dealing with hundreds of thousands of people, but I will tell you, I have met many, many people who will tell you that they do hope to be in heaven when life is done.

But if you press a little more, you'll find out that they've never really stopped to find out what they need to get there. And they really haven't found out what very much it's like. They're hoping it'll be like a picnic on the rolling acres of some heavenly CEO who every now and then might put in an appearance, but it'll be a family get together and they'll see husbands and wives and grandparents and children who predeceased them and somehow they'll be with people whom they know, but it's all very hazy and uncertain to them.

And yet it is the Lord Jesus who tells us, Nicodemus, your religion will not get you to heaven. Your sincerity will not get you to heaven. Your Bible knowledge will not get you to heaven. You must be born again.

Think of a man like Cornelius in Acts chapter 10, who was marked by prayer and charity, yet he needed to hear the gospel message to learn how he could be saved and have his sins forgiven. Or think of that rich young ruler that came to the Lord Jesus, a moral, Christ-respecting, influential young man who said that from his youth, from his youth, he had been endeavoring to keep the commandments of God.

And yet the Lord Jesus told him, there's something that you're lacking. And what he lacked, of course, to put it very bluntly, is this new birth. He had not yet been born again. So if it was true for Nicodemus that he needed to be born again, do you think it's not true for you?

If a man like Cornelius needed to be born again, his prayers and charity and good living would not get him into heaven, do you think you could go to heaven without being born again? If a man like the rich young ruler who could look the Lord Jesus in the eye and say to the Savior that he had tried to keep the 10 commandments from his youth up, if he needed to be born again, do you think somehow this doesn't include you?

We were speaking earlier today about a wonderful preacher who's now in heaven. His name was Mr. Clay Fite. I had to take the funeral for his wife and I was handed some papers to look over about her past and how she was saved and the family background.

I read with great interest about her mother. Her mother, I believe, was Welsh and they are great singers. And her mother was ironing one day with the hymn book open on the ironing board. And as she was ironing and every now and then just checking the words and making sure she was singing the right words to God, her hand bumped the hymn book.

And the hymn book fell off of the ironing board and as it fell, the pages fluttered and it fell to the floor. And when she picked it up, it had therefore opened to a different page. She picked it up and she put it back on the ironing board and the first words that stared at her were the title of the hymn, you must be born again.

The hymn we sang, number one in the hymn book. And she looked at the words and she thought to herself, I know those words. Jesus said that. That's from the Bible. Well, have I been born again? Now listen, right at that point, she could have done one of two things just as you will likely do one of two things with the preaching tonight.

At that point, she could have said, well, I don't know anything about that, but I think everything is all right the way it is. I think I'm fine. God knows I've done the best I can. And she could have gone on singing her wonderful hymns, beautiful isle of somewhere.

Or she could do what she did. She stared at those words and she thought, now, wait a minute, this is what Jesus says. And yet I don't know any time in my life when I was born again. Shut off the iron, put away the ironing, went into her room, got down on her knees, opened her Bible on the bed in front of her and said to God, God, I don't want to leave this room.

I don't want to leave this bedroom until I know that I have been born again. Wonder what you'll do with the Savior's personal message when he says, don't be surprised that I'm saying to you, you must be born again.

You say, but I've been baptized. You must be born again. He said, but I go to church on a regular basis. But the Savior says, you must be born again. This is a personal need that confronts every one of us.

And again, in his use of this word must, I learned how pressing, imperative, how indispensable it is. The Savior is impressing upon this man that he cannot do without this, that this is the thing that he needs.

I think I mentioned here once before that I had to go to Ireland for a wedding in 1998. And it was our anniversary and our family members and some other people got together. I mean, I didn't know they were doing this.

My mother-in-law said to me, I think you ought to get passports for your children. And I said, why would I get passports for my children? I'm the only one that's going. She said, I think you better get passports for your children.

And so through their kindness, it ended up that my family was included on this trip. So here I was, I'm the responsible man. So I have one of those packs that fits around your waist here and that's where all the vital documents are and the passports, I'm carrying them all.

So the day that we were leaving, now we're back in Heathrow. We've flown over from Ireland. We're back in Heathrow. We're heading home. The day that we're leaving, it was an absolutely miserable, it was a foolish mistake on my part.

We actually tried to get to the airport with our luggage and our youngest was in a stroller. So just the pack that hangs at the back of the stroller where you can put things. Well, that's where I had put, all we had time to buy were drinks for them from McDonald's.

So here are drinks right in the back there. And we're trying to get to Heathrow on the tube, on the underground. And people are staring at us like, how stupid are these Americans with their luggage and trying to go to the airport on the train.

So by the time we got there, it was a harrowing trip. And by the time we got there, neither my wife nor the kids had had a bite of breakfast. So we go through security, we go through customs. Now this is pre 9 -11, of course.

We go through all of that rigmarole and we get around to this empty sitting area waiting for the flight. I thought there would be something in there you could buy, get them something to eat, nothing. So I went out and I said to one of the guards, I said, listen, is there any way that I can get out to the shops to just buy some food without going through all of this stuff again?

And he said, there is. Now he said, you're gonna have to go through security, but you won't have to do the customs and all the rest of that. I said, that's fine. I said, I just wanna get them some breakfast.

Okay, he said, look, see that door there? A little while people are gonna be coming out of that door and be going down there. Now he said, when they come out, you go in. And he said, you will find yourself in a food court, one of the separated areas.

And he said, buy what you want there, then you actually can't come back through there. He said, you'll have to go around and you'll have to come through security again. So thanking them up and down, I head out, I buy the kids some things, I'm coming back now, I'm balancing those cardboard things that hold four drinks.

I've got that in one hand, I've got bags of baguettes or bagels or something in the other. I've got the pack with the flight information and the passports and I've come to the security and everything is out of my pockets and off and food there and going through, and they're checking you and wanting you, everything's fine.

And I get everything, pick it back up, I'm heading off, go over, get the food to the children, to my wife. Little while later, the call comes to board the plane. So we go to get on the plane and I'm putting the luggage up in the rack up ahead and I reach for the pack with the passports and it's not there.

So I did exactly what every man here would do. I turned to my wife and I said, what'd you do with the passports? See, she said, what did I do? She said, you were carrying them. And at that point, I got a mental image just flashed right before me.

I saw that security place. I remember taking it off, putting the food, the drinks, the passports. I remember on the other side, picking up the food and the drinks, but not the passports. So I ran out of the plane.

I ran out to where the lady was and she's still checking some people through. And I said, excuse me, did anybody find just like a small black bag? She said, is your name Higgins? So I knew at that point I was in trouble.

She said, is your name Higgins? I said, yes, it is. She said, sir, would you please sit down? So I sat down, she made a call. The next thing I know, within seconds, there is an officer of the law and an airline official from British Air.

And they come around the corner and they sit down across from me, see? And they want to know how did I get that far without passports? Of course, what they were imagining was that I had more than one passport and I was traveling under an alias and I had left one whole set of passports and had a whole nother set because it would have been impossible to get that far.

See, when I had gotten there, I checked in with the passports at that desk and now I didn't have the passport. So now you must understand my bags were on that plane. My wife was on that plane. My children were on that plane.

Plane, according to those people, if I did not have a legitimate passport, you may have a tremendous amount of baggage with you as you think of going to heaven. You may think I have spent years serving the church.

I have given the best part of my life. I have donated more money than you could ever imagine. I pray to God every day. I sincerely love him. I read the Bible. I sing to him. But if you do not have the one indispensable thing, you're not getting into heaven.

That's not my word or the Gospel Hall's opinion. That's Christ who says, you must, you must be born again. So why is it a necessity? Well, I think as you read through the chapter, if you bear in mind what it means to be born again, to be born again is not to be overcome by some mysterious power that causes you to babble in an unknown tongue or fall on the floor or lose control of your limbs, just as a birth into this world gave you life, a new birth, being born again, gives you eternal life or everlasting life.

So if you bear that in mind, as you read through the rest of the chapter, even that golden text, John 3 and 16, you'll realize that the Lord Jesus has not somehow changed the subject. He's still talking about being born again.

He's talking about everlasting life. He's talking about eternal life. At the end of the chapter, the verse ends like a punctuation mark. At the end of a sentence, verse 36 is a punctuation mark to this massive chapter 3 of John.

He that believeth on the Son, he is born again. He has everlasting life. He that believeth not the Son, he is not born again. He will not see life. The wrath of God abides on him. So if you carry that simple thought with you, notice, please, that we need to be born again because of the poison of sin, the poison of sin.

Sin, Death, and the Need for Life

That's verses 13 and 14, where the Lord, or 14 and 15, where the Lord Jesus takes us back to that incident in Israel's past when they were bitten by the poisonous serpents and they were dying and they needed life.

They were facing death. They needed life. And Moses lifted up a serpent in the wilderness, this copper snake entwined or nailed to a pole. And whoever looked, whoever believed in what God said and looked at that copper serpent, lived.

Now that was an inanimate piece of copper. They were dying from snake bites. The life that they received when they looked at that serpent was just physical life. They were healed. But the Lord Jesus ramps everything up to the ultimate when he says, take that as an example.

And now let me tell you, it will be God's Son, the Son of Man who will be lifted up on the cross. What needs to be rectified is the poison of sin in human hearts. And the life that a sinner gets when he trusts me, says the Lord Jesus, is not just back to living on earth, but he gets everlasting life.

He gets eternal life. See, he's reminding us of the fact that sin was injected into the human race in the Garden of Eden, that it has spread its painful influence throughout history, that it affects every part of a person's being and that it inevitably ends in death and that you need eternal life.

You need to be born again. Some years ago, in fact, it was 1987, two unemployed men, basically they were thieves, they broke into an abandoned, partly demolished radiation clinic in, if I've got the right pronunciation for the town, it's Gaianaia, Brazil.

They found and dismantled some cancer therapy machinery that was left in that lab and they sold the parts to junk dealers. And one junk dealer, for the price of 25 reals, he bought a stainless steel cylinder about the size of a gallon paint can.

And when he pried it open, there was a cake of crumbly powder that emitted a mysterious sort of blue light. So he took this magical material home and he gave it to his family. His six-year-old niece, they were there having like a party, his six-year-old niece, when she touched it, she noticed, because it was night and they were outside under the stars, she noticed that when she touched it, it glowed on her hand.

She said, how cool is that? So she dipped her hands into the blue powder and she spread it on her arms, around her legs. And then she sort of like just twirled in the starlight and the family thought, how cute, how cute that is.

And she just glowed. Children, as well as adults, came in contact with that. Some of the other children smeared the stuff on their bodies. Now that magical blue powder was cesium -137, a highly radioactive substance.

The lovely light is the result of the decay of cesium atoms when she spread it on her body. And one of the other effects is an influx of invisible particles from that cesium with the power to damage living cells.

It's used to kill cells in cancer treatment. And here she's smearing it on her body. That six-year-old girl twirling herself under the starlight, thinking how cute she looks and how nice it is. She died, as did many others.

200 people were contaminated and fell very critically ill, thinking that what they were playing with was something that was nice and cute and attractive, and it was deadly. And sin, the Bible says, when it's finished, it always brings death.

You need life. And the Lord Jesus says, you must be born again. You must be born again. Look at John 3 .16, and you realize that it's because of the possibility of perishing. It's because each of us, as a result of our sins, each of us faces the dread possibility of perishing forever in hell, of being lost eternally.

That's the bad word of John 3 .16, isn't it? In a verse that tells us about God's global love, His love for the world, His desire for men and women to be saved, the gift of His Son, the offer of everlasting life, there it stands, stubbornly refusing to be erased.

Part of the reason why this Son of God went to Calvary and suffered as He did, part of the reason why God's trying to reach the world with this message of salvation is because men and women are perishing in their sins.

He is the one who knows. He is the one who understands the real damage that has been done to every one of us by our sins. And the Lord Jesus tells us this awful word. It's not the loss of being, but the loss of well-being, the total absence of God forever.

God, the source of life, the missing of heaven eternally. I'm sure, except for the youngest here, you realize that part of God's plan for us is to enrich our lives with relationships, right? You understand that if you were just alone on an island somewhere, you might think you'd be happy for a while, but you understand how relationships have enriched your life.

Parent-child relationship, husband-wife, right? You come into the world, nobody has to teach you to love your parent. You're dependent on that parent, and you grow to love that parent. And amazingly, a parent never has to go somewhere to learn how to love his child.

If it's a normal human being, love springs, there it is in the heart of that mother or father for the first glimpse he or she gets at that little baby. And then as the child grows, it seems that the love grows.

And then as relationships fan out, to include grandchildren, nieces, nephews, see, you were made primarily to have this ultimate relationship, to know the living God, to live a life of knowing and loving and serving the great God of heaven who made you and redeemed you if you're saved.

Imagine not only missing that through life, not only making your way through this world for 60, 70, 80 years, whatever it may be, without God, but imagine living forever, existing forever without God, never knowing God, never getting a taste of what real life is like, always imagining as you live your life here, this is all there is, it's just nothing more than this, never knowing the peace that comes to the heart of a believer when he knows Christ as his savior, never knowing the quiet joy that a child of God often enjoys when he realizes how precious he is to God and to the Lord Jesus, never having a taste of that everlasting life, always imagining that there's nothing more than just the far off land, just the husks that the swine eat, and never getting a taste of that marvelous supper back home.

Another gospel preacher and I were having meetings in Barrington, New Jersey a number of years ago, and there was a woman coming to the meetings. She was actually coming from the state of Pennsylvania.

It would take her perhaps 40 minutes to get to the meetings when people would bring her. She was not well enough to drive herself. She was battling cancer. Her uncle had been a gospel preacher named Caesar Patrizio.

She had somehow gone decades through life ignoring the gospel, but now there was a death sentence on her. She knew she did not have long to live, and she was listening as she should have listened 50 years before.

One night, my wife invited her and the people who were bringing her to the meetings to come to dinner the next night on the way to the meeting. So that was all settled, but the next day she called, and she apologized profusely.

She said, I'm so sorry. She said, I cannot tell you how much I wanted to come, but she said, this is one of my bad days, and she said, I can hardly get out of bed. She said, I'm gonna have to miss not only the supper, but the meeting.

She said, I'm so sorry. I didn't want it to be this way. However, she called the next day to say she was slightly better, but she said, you know, when I stayed home last night, she said, all I did was just look through the Bible to find how I could be saved, and she said, I found that Jesus died for me, and I trusted him.

Now, a couple nights later, it's her first night back at the meeting. She's on the way out. She was about 78 years old. She would live, I think she lived perhaps another year and a half, and as she's going out, she said, I just want to apologize again.

She said, I felt so bad that I missed your supper, but she said, I'm so glad that I did not miss God's supper. I did not miss God's supper. Are you going to miss that? Are you going to miss heaven? Are you going to miss life?

Are you going to miss living forever with us? We want you to be with us. See, we want you to be with us in heaven. We want you to be saved. We want you to have a life that really is living. We want you to have the joy of the forgiveness of sins and peace with God.

We want you to spend eternity with us in heaven and never to be in the lake of fire. And that's why the Lord Jesus says you must be born again because you are in danger of perishing. And when you come to the end of the chapter, you realize that the prospect of wrath, this overwhelming flood, as if a storm of judgment is over the head of the person who has never been born again, and that person needs everlasting life.

The Urgency of the Present Moment

So here is this pressing, this imperative need when the Lord Jesus says you must be born again. Of course, one of the things that stunned Nicodemus is that the Lord Jesus presented this as a present need.

He tells him, I'm telling you about earthly things and you don't understand this. And of course, that's why he says you must be born again. He's telling him about something that Nicodemus needed now and could obtain now.

And Nicodemus is mystified. He's mystified. But here is something that you need presently. Here, tonight in this meeting, you need to be born again. See, something can be important without being urgent.