Word of Grace > Regeneration Chapter 2
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Regeneration:
The New Birth, Changed Lives, and Sin In the Church

Chapter Two
The Necessity Of Regeneration: Sin, Depravity and The Gospel

The Lord Jesus Christ calls for a new birth. Apart from God's recreating work of regeneration no one will enter or see the kingdom of heaven (John 3:3, 5). Christ's call for regeneration is understood in the light of two realities about man's sinful condition.

Man's Inborn Sin and Depravity
According to Scripture, man is born with a sin-corrupted nature, depraved in his essential being. David, when acknowledging his double sin of adultery and murder, said, "Behold I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me" (Psalm 51:5). He recognized the truth that man’s nature is conceived in sin. He is born with a disposition to evil and rebellion against God. Job said, "Man who is born of woman is short lived and full of turmoil, who can make clean out of unclean?" Solomon said, "Who can say ‘I am pure, I have cleansed my heart’?" (Proverbs 20:9). The biblical teaching is that man, from the point of conception, is morally unclean and depraved in his fundamental nature.

Man’s depravity is essentially a heart attitude and disposition toward God. It finds its primary expression in his response to God’s person and authority. His fundamental disposition—his inmost desires and motives—are all inclined to evil and self-will and away from God. Paul says, "There is none righteous, not even one. There is none who understands. There is none who seek for God" (Romans 3:10, 11). Jesus said, "you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God" (John 5:44). Man simply will not seek God or His glory.

Man’s evil nature is pervasive, affecting all his faculties. His will, intellect and emotions are predisposed toward sin and against God. He is an incorrigible rebel. Paul describes it this way, "the mind set on the flesh is hostile to God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God for it is not able to do so" (Romans 8:7). Man has a fundamental hostility to God. He is a hater of God (Romans 1:30; 5;10). He often cloaks it, hiding (either consciously or unconsciously) behind good deeds and religion. However, confront him with the claims of Christ and the authority of God and he will manifest his true nature every time. The self-righteous Pharisees hid behind their religion and pseudo spirituality until confronted with Christ and His claims. However, they were intolerant of Christ’s demand for repentance, and eventually revealed their true character when they nailed Christ, who was God-incarnate, to the cross. The Bible says this is the latent heart attitude of all men toward God that simply has to be exposed and provoked to full expression.

Man’s sinfulness and insubordination to God makes him, by nature, an object of God’s wrath. Paul writes, "among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest" (Ephesians 2:3).

Apart from any specific concrete acts, man arouses God’s indignation. His very disposition to sin, his self will, and his obstinate refusal to acknowledge God’s rightful authority makes him a worthy object of God’s wrath.

The concise biblical analysis of man’s sin problem is in Ephesians 4:18, "being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them because of the hardness of their heart."

Paul traces man’s root sin problem to his hard heart. The heart, in this context, is referring to the basic disposition, motives and desires, which influence the mind. The problem is not just that man needs the truth, or that he lacks spiritual understanding. The problem is a heart that won’t receive the truth. Man has an inward non-susceptibility to God and His truth (1 Corinthians 2:14). Affection for God simply cannot be excited within him. A woman’s view of Black Widow spiders will never be changed by bringing them closer to her or giving her more information about them. Neither will man’s view of God change by simply exposing him to truth. There must be regeneration: a mighty recreating of his root desires and nature. Jesus said the same thing Himself: "…and this is the judgment that the light is come into the world and men loved the darkness rather than the light for their deeds are evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light lest his deeds should be exposed" (John 3:19, 20). Jesus says it is the heart’s love of darkness that prevents men from coming to the Light. Notice the problem is not a lack of light. In fact, in Jesus’ case, the light was right before them. The reality of man’s spiritual depravity is that his mind cannot welcome truth that his inner disposition of heart detests.

Therefore both Jesus and Paul are agreed. The root problem is a hard, God-hating heart. Therefore, the need is for the recreating and reworking of man’s core nature through regeneration by God himself.

Man’s Inability to Change
Man is helpless and incapacitated in his sin. He cannot bring himself out of it. Paul described man’s state like this: "…and you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:1, 2). Man is dead in his sins. Obviously man’s deadness is not physical nor is it that he does not have the required faculties and capacities. His deadness is in the moral bent of his motives and will. His moral state is fixed in its alienation and hostility toward God.

Man is spiritually dead. There is no spark, nothing left to revive. A corpse does not initiate or even participate in its own resurrection. A body cannot re-animate itself. Man’s moral bent is so fixed to evil and self-will that only a direct intervention of God can raise him out of it.

Man is spiritually blind. "And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God" (2 Corinthians 4:3, 4). Darkness cannot dispel darkness. Turning on the light does not produce light to the blind. The eye blinded by cataracts cannot be restored simply by providing more light. The obstruction must be removed by the skillful hand of the surgeon. God must operate directly on man’s moral nature. Only the mercy of God operating in regeneration will suffice. As Paul says, "God, being rich in mercy because of great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved" (Ephesians 2:4). The amazing marvel is that God has any concern for man, the defiant rebel that he is. God’s love and mercy and His great saving work is only fully appreciated when man’s self-willed, morally destitute state is fully understood.

The Heart of the Gospel
The church must reclaim and reaffirm the doctrine of man’s sinfulness. It must once again recognize that God does not approach men simply as men in the abstract. He deals with men as sinners, those in hostile self-willed rebellion against His rightful authority. The church has ignored this fact to its own great peril.

The underlying spirit of self-will and resistance to the authority of God that characterizes man’s nature has not been taken into account. People are flocking to churches to have their felt needs met while their core hostility to God is still unchanged and unchallenged. This is evidenced by the incapacity of multitudes of professing Christians to give true obedience and allegiance to Christ. The Church has minimized the doctrine of the sinfulness of man. In its effort to "relate" culturally to man it has only catered to his innate selfishness and self-will. Men quickly and casually give profession of faith to a message that ministers to their felt needs while also allowing them to remain unbowed in their sin and pride. Ignore or minimize these central doctrines of the gospel and the church can expect to see a crop of tares among the wheat: people who outwardly parrot all the right things but inwardly their pride is unbroken and their hostility to Christ’s authority is unchanged. I believe this is what has occurred and on a large scale in the evangelical church in America today.

While congratulating herself on her new "insight" into reaching the culture through marketing, business techniques and "user-friendly" churches, the church of the 90’s has actually accommodated to the culture. Unwittingly, with its obsession to make Christianity palatable to a "baby boomer" culture, it has brought the world into the church in the legions of people who give lip service to Christ but whose unchanged hearts still cherish sin. The church must be indeed flexible within biblical principles as it ministers in our culture. We must never ignore the realities of man’s sinfulness and his core heart hostility to the authority of Christ. We must never ignore the fact that the gospel assumes the sinful, self-will of men and God’s merciful recreating work of regeneration.

Therefore, under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, the church must call men to repentance and faith that only comes through regeneration. Anything less is to accommodate a culture that in its rebellion will not acknowledge its sin or the Lord’s authority. But worse, failing to do so is to abandon the essence of true Christianity.