Ye Must Be Born Again

Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. JOHN 3:3

Of all the subjects Moody preached on, none came back more often than the new birth. There are two versions of the sermon in the Ochorus library — The Gateway into the Kingdom, the second chapter of The Way to God, and a separate sermon called The New Birth — and they say the same thing with the same urgency. This, Moody said, is where everything begins. “It is really the A B C of the Christian religion.” A man who is wrong here, he added, will be wrong nearly everywhere else.

Said to the best man in Jerusalem

Moody never tired of pointing out to whom Jesus first said these words. Not to the woman at the well, or to Zacchaeus, or to a thief, but to Nicodemus: a Pharisee, a ruler of the Jews, a teacher of Israel, one of the most respectable men in the city. If the Lord had kept this teaching for publicans and harlots, respectable people would have assumed it was not for them. Instead He said it to the best of them, and so He said it to everyone.

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. JOHN 3:7

What it is not

Moody was a practical man, and he found that the quickest way to explain the new birth was to clear away what people mistook for it. He had met them all in the enquiry room.

It is not church-going. Many told him they were Christians because they went to church every Sunday. It is not trying to do right, or turning over a new leaf, or making a good resolution. It is not saying one’s prayers. It is not the Lord’s Supper. And it is not baptism. Here Moody is careful. Baptism, he says, is all right in its place, and God forbid that he should say anything against it. But if it is put in the place of the new birth, it is a terrible mistake. A person may be baptised into the church without ever being born of the Spirit.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. JOHN 3:6

The reason all these things fall short is the same. They are things we do. The new birth is something God does.

A new creation

This is the centre of Moody’s teaching. The problem with human nature is not that it needs improving but that it needs replacing. “God never mends, He creates anew,” he told one congregation; therefore do not try to patch up the old Adam nature. In The Way to God he makes the same point from Genesis. When God made the world, man was not there to help. When Christ redeemed the world, He was alone. So it is when a soul is born again. “Regeneration is a new creation; and if it is a new creation it must be the work of God.”

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

That is humbling, because it means we cannot make ourselves Christians. It is also hopeful, because it means that no one is too far gone. If the new birth depended on the raw material, the drunkard and the thief would have little chance. Because it depends on God, the worst have as much hope as the best. Moody filled his sermons with drunkards whose children had hidden from them in terror and who now sat at home singing Rock of Ages, and he offered them as evidence: not reformed only, but regenerated.

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost. TITUS 3:5

The wind

People often told Moody that they could not understand the new birth and would not believe what they could not understand. He did not pretend to explain it. He pointed, as Jesus did, to the wind.

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 every one that is born of the Spirit. JOHN 3:8

No one, he said, can fully explain the wind. It may blow north here and south a hundred miles away. But a child who has had her umbrella blown out of her hands knows that there is such a thing as wind. “I have felt the spirit of God working in my heart, just as really and as truly as I have felt the wind blowing in my face.” We believe in the creation without understanding how God made something out of nothing; we may believe in the new birth without understanding how God makes a new creature.

Why it is necessary

Moody gave a reason for the new birth that is easily forgotten. It is not only that God requires it; it is that heaven would be unbearable without it. Take a man whose heart is full of corruption, he says, and set him down among the redeemed, and he would not want to stay. He cannot spend one Sunday on earth among God’s people with pleasure; what would he do with an eternal one? “Heaven is a prepared place for a prepared people.”

That is a searching thought. The new birth is not an arbitrary entrance fee. It is the giving of a nature that can enjoy God. Without it, heaven would be a foreign country, and its joy a language one could not speak.

How it happens

Having said that the new birth is God’s work, Moody immediately says what the sinner must do: look. He goes straight on in John 3 to the brazen serpent.

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. JOHN 3:14–15

The new birth and faith are not two separate events, one God’s and one ours. When a person looks to Christ lifted up, the Spirit gives life. The next chapter takes up that look in detail.

A word of care is needed. Moody’s way of speaking — nearly always of a definite moment, often in a meeting — could leave the impression that a person must be able to name the day and hour of the new birth. He himself denied it. Some, he says in The Way to God, are converted so gradually that, like the morning light, it is impossible to tell when the dawn began. A child raised in a godly home may never remember a time when he did not trust Christ. What matters, Moody said, is not being able to prove when you were converted, but knowing that you have been. It is a good test for anyone. The question is not whether you had an experience like someone else’s. It is whether you have been born again.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Go through Moody’s list of what the new birth is not: church-going, good resolutions, prayers, sacraments. Which of these have you been tempted to rest on?

2. Nicodemus was a good man who still needed to be born again. Who in your life is in his position? Pray for them.

3. Ask yourself plainly, not whether you can name the day, but whether there is new life in you: a love for God and His people that you did not make.

4. If you are not sure, look today to Christ lifted up, and ask the Spirit to do what you cannot.

5. Read The Gateway into the Kingdom in The Way to God, or Moody’s sermon The New Birth, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord, I cannot make myself new. I have turned over leaves and made resolutions, and my old nature is still there.

Do in me what only You can do: give me a new heart and a new spirit, born from above.

Let me not rest in going to church, or in anything I do, but only in what You have done.

And make me fit for heaven, so that when I see Your face it will be home, and not a strange country. Amen.