Is Your View of Regeneration Wrong?

All those wrong ideas of regeneration have one thing in common. We do the great work.

We fix ourselves. We use religion to either get ourselves started on the right track or to kind of scrub ourselves up.

But I think that that's probably rooted in a wrong idea. Yeah, the depth of our ruin, our depravity, is a great biblical doctrine.

And again, you see the importance of order here. If you don't see that, if you don't think that your sin is that awful, if you just need a little bit of help, then why couldn't you make a reformation?

Why couldn't you make a decision? But if you are so foul that you will not choose

God unless He works upon you, then a decision or reformation isn't enough. And it's one of the reasons why, as we've gone through these sermons, we're in what week?

One, two, three, four, five, six. We're in week eight and we're just now talking about regeneration because there's that groundwork that's come before it to make us feel something of the weight of our sinfulness and the need for God to perform this great rescue.

Dickinson has a great quote on page 139. Do you want me to read the entire paragraph or cut out those questions?

Whatever you want. He points to a number of scriptures and he asks the question,

Are we not by nature spiritually dead? Can a dead man by the force of any persuasion be prevailed upon to reassume his life and vital actions?

Are we not naturally without strength? And can the force of persuasion prevail with an enfeebled cripple or an...

I almost skipped that one.

A paralytic. Can the force of persuasion prevail with an enfeebled cripple or a paralytic to arise and walk?

Are we not naturally blind? And can the power of persuasion enable a blind man to open his eyes and see?

Are not our minds naturally not only enemies but enmity itself unto

God? And can mere persuasion change all the powers, faculties, and dispositions of the mind from enmity to friendship, from hatred to love, and from an habitual opposition to godliness unto a delight in the ways of God?

Are we not naturally polluted and guilty creatures? And can any method of mere persuasion bring a clean thing out of an unclean or bring a guilty rebel into an estate of innocence or into peace and favor with God?

Yeah, if we think of it this way, if all we had was the good news of Jesus Christ and His finished work for sinners and then the command to turn your back on everything that you can touch and feel and see that you think is so necessary for life and then to leave it all, even your own righteousness and embrace

Christ. If that's all you have in Christianity, you're without any hope because none of us would do it.

There is in between that command and that response that infinite might of God in the person of the

Spirit making you able and willing to turn your back on the lies and to believe

Christ. One of the beautiful pictures is found in Psalm 110 where it says in verse 3 that in the day of Christ's power

His people are made willing. Such a simple picture. Think of an army and the king is gathering an army.

It's not a press game. It's the old way of drafting where basically you would just show up and you say to a guy, you don't look like you have a job.

Well, now you do. You're in the army, you know. Which happened. It happened to John Newton. But it's not that.

It's that the king works in the heart in such a wonderful way that now you volunteer in the day of His power, in the day of that powerful working in the soul, you gladly count

Him worth more than all the world. So, really sweet picture.

One thing I think, one reason why we don't understand the doctrine of regeneration as clearly as we should and we tend to think that we do this instead of God doing this part is found in Christ's statement to the

Pharisees of His day in Mark chapter 12, verse 24. He's correcting their mistaken views of the resurrection and he says this,

Is this not the reason you are mistaken that you do not understand the Scriptures or the power of God?

So, when you think of an average evangelical church and its practical definition of a

Christian, what it really expects, when a person says, I'm a Christian, when you see the low, low standard we have accepted, and I don't mean to be legalistic about that, but when we see a person, as Tozer said, that there's no mighty jarring to the old life when they embrace

Christ. One of the reasons we're okay with the wrong definition is because we don't understand the

Scriptures and we have such a small view of the power of God. One of the evidences of that is seen when we receive people into membership, especially if you have a view that expects a regenerate church membership, that they have been actually born again.

Well, when they come and want to be made a church member, what do you expect? What do you ask?

What do you look for as evidences of that? Or do you look for evidences at all? Or are you just, okay, just add a number to the row?

Yeah, and so we fill churches with men and women who are operating under the old nature's influence or the old principle of self.

And then as Congregationalist churches, we have votes. You think of the average Baptist church.

We have votes and you have all these people with an equal influence on the church decisions, but these are people who may be spiritually dead.

No love for Christ and their life is not under a new energy and a new guiding principle.

It's under the old. So it's impossible to imagine a church like that really following the

Lord Jesus Christ. A third thing he says is that the Spirit of God is the immediate agent of this spiritual principle.

And we don't want to go too long in our podcast. So that just means this. The one who acts upon us and does this work is the

Spirit of God. The instrument, the tool in his hand is the gospel or the Word of God. Again, James 1 verse 18, in the exercise of his will, he brought us forth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of first fruits among his creatures.

So wonderful picture there. God bringing us to life by the word of truth. The Spirit using the gospel to wake us up, to make us alive.