"The God Who Grants New Birth"

The God Who Is There
Written by D. A. Carson

“The God Who Grants New Birth” – Chapter Eight

Our Ultimate Need

• We are in rebellion against God.
• Instead of wiping out the whole race, God has mercifully chosen to save a remnant by grace.
• We deserve death, but God provided atonement-provisionally in animal sacrifices, but finally in Christ Jesus our Redeemer.
• We have rebelled, and God’s wrath is against us-we need to be reconciled to God.
• We need to be morally transformed, or we will just go on sinning.
• We need all of the effects of sin to be overcome and reversed.

The New Birth

• The new birth is not a name change, a human decision, or a religious experience.
• The new birth is a powerful regeneration, by God himself, in the human life, such that those who are born again are necessarily transformed.

What Did Jesus Say?

• “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”
• “No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.”
• “I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean” (Ezek 36:25)
• “I will put my Spirit in you” (v. 27)
• The new birth is bound up with the dawning of a new covenant that would be characterized by moral transformation and by the power and life of God to transform and renew.
• “Spirit gives birth to spirit.”
• “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
• We may not be able to explain exactly how the new birth comes about, but we can see its effects.
• Where there is genuine new birth, you always see the results.
• Where the new birth has genuinely come from God, you will see transformation-a changed life.
• Not perfection, but the beginning of life from God that shapes our existence in a new direction.
• Christianity is not about ritualism, religious practice, or self-directed morality.
• The new birth signals more than a profession of faith; it signals transforming power.
• The new birth transforms, because it is God’s work not ours.

Jesus’ Authority to Speak

• “We speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen...No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man.”
• Jesus can speak of the new birth, because it originates in heaven—where he is from.

How Jesus Brings New Birth

• We provide the sin, death and destruction; God provides forgiveness and life.
• We receive life not by ritual or effort, but by looking to God’s salvation in faith.
• On his cross Jesus provided the means by which we have new birth.
• In John 3, eternal life is the product of new birth.
• If you have new birth, you have life, and this life is eternal.
• New birth causes us to see—looking to the crucified and risen Christ for eternal life.
• By his death we have life.