What Jesus Demands from the World - Demand #1
There are only two kinds of people in the world: the living and the dead. And there is only one kind of person in the world without the work of the Holy Spirit: the dead. Not the dying, but the dead. Not the almost-dead, but the dead. Not the mostly-dead, but the dead. If this is not true, then Jesus was a lunatic when He said to Nicodemus, “You must be born again” ( John 3:3).
That people are dead in sin is hard to believe in America where we doctor our bodies and worship our youth and hide the elderly and paint our corpses. We can’t stand to think of physical death. And we are even more intensely opposed to the thought of spiritual death. So we doctor our souls with self-esteem and worship our hip new ways of doing religion and muzzle those who speak the truth and put on the make-up of morality. But underneath it all we are hauntingly, miserably, biblically dead.
The fact that it’s so hard for us to accept this reality is evident in the dichotomy we often create between 3rd-world missions and ministry in our own backyards. Starving children in Ethiopia look more dead than self-proclaimed metrosexuals earning six-figure incomes from 65th-story corner offices downtown. Therefore we often have more of a passion to take the gospel to the jungles and villages than to the sidewalks and the skyscrapers. Yet people in both places are dead. This is not to say that God doesn’t have a special love for the poor and the destitute and the afflicted and the oppressed. Scripture is bursting at the seams with examples of His unique love for those whose present lives are pounded with a louder echo of death than others. There is no shame in having a heart for the most-afflicted and the least-reached. But still, all who are without Christ are dead, whether it feels like they are or not. Therefore, everyone who would enter the kingdom of God “must be born again.” Piper writes, “No one is excluded [from Jesus’ call to be born again]. No ethnic group has a greater bent toward life. Dead is dead–whatever our color, ethnicity, culture, or class” (WJDW, 39).
The frightening thing about this is that Jesus calls us to do something that we cannot do. He commands us to be born again, to be made alive, to be spiritually resurrected. If you think you already have spiritual life apart from God’s sovereign work, this command isn’t intimidating. But to those whose eyes are opened to see their deathly depravity, such a command is stunning. It leaves you utterly helpless and absolutely dependent on the only giver of new life. Anything less than salvation His way through His Son in His power is still death, no matter how religious or spiritual it sounds.
Understanding Jesus’ command to be born again also makes you realize that all those to whom God gives new life are entirely different than they were before. As D. A. Carson has said, “God doesn’t do touch-ups; He does transformations.” Or as Paul wrote, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Conversion is not simply a verbal change of allegiances. It is not just mental tweaking. It’s not based on moral resolutions or spiritual self-help or heart-felt human reformation.
Conversion is a fundamental identity-shift from dead to alive. It is a reality-shift. It is spiritual resurrection from the dead based on the perfect person and atoning work of Christ ( Colossians 2:13-14), fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit ( John 3:8), and appropriated through faith ( Ephesians 2:8-9). And it is manifested by radical and joyful obedience to the commands and the mission of Jesus.
Consider the first time you were conceived and born. You went from not existing to existing. You had nothing to do with your birth. And your entire identity is based on that birth. The same is true spiritually. I was dead, and I am now alive. God was the sole cause of my spiritual birth. And my identity is bound up in Christ in whom I was made alive. Christianity is not a religion or a way of thinking or a category or a priority. It is spiritual resurrection. It is new life. It is new birth. This is why Jesus said, “You must be born again.”
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