Regeneration: God's Doing

We preach Christ crucified. We preach the death of Christ for sinners and the necessity of repentance and faith. Many times we preach like this: you need to repent and believe so that you can be born again. The truth is, you must be born again in order to repent and believe.

The reason why? The new birth cannot be controlled by man. A person repents and believes because the Spirit makes it happen. The Spirit makes it possible for sinners to be saved by giving them a new heart through regeneration. The new birth is always the work of God. Repentance is what we do (Acts 26:20) and it too is a gift of God (2 Tim. 2:25).

Jesus said "you must be born again". So it is easy to think that is a command we are supposed to obey. "Be born" is a passive verb, not active. "Repent" and "believe" are actions. But we receive the new birth. It is done for and to us. A birth happens. You don't choose to be born, it happens to you. You don't birth yourself. We are born again by the will of God (James 1:18; John 1:12-13).

What difference does it make to anyone? You maybe tempted to ask, "as long as we are born again what does it matter?" The one who is receiving it won't even notice but to the one who is doing the work of an evangelist it can makes a huge difference in terms of trust, talking to God and telling the gospel. Knowing it is God's work and not ours gives abundant assurance and confidence.

We are preaching to dead people who can do nothing for themselves unless God first does a work of regeneration in their hearts. We depend on God to raise the dead!