You Must Be Born Again!
Just what does it mean to
be “born again?” There is probably no subject misunderstood more than that of
genuine conversion and entrance into the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, people
have come to believe that one is “born again” on demand. Most conceive
that after reciting a sinner’s prayer and acknowledging a few fundamentals of
the Christian faith, they are good to go. Sadly, nothing could be further from
the truth. The issue between man and God is not facts, but rather faith, and genuine faith at that. God is looking
for our reaction to the facts, not our understanding of them. Repentance is the
irreversible transforming of the heart as a result of experiencing the full weight
of those facts. This means that God’s focus is always on the heart, and not the
head. That moment when the weight of our sin and sorrow, meet grace and mercy in
earnest, and we are left wholly undone in the presence of Christ, crippled
spiritually, broken emotionally, and now dependent upon Him eternally, as we
now reach out to Him as our only source of hope, then and only then, have we
experienced saving faith!
Although being “born
again” begins in this moment, experientially, it doesn’t end there. Scripture
teaches that our being, now fashioned as the dwelling place of God after the shadow
of the Tabernacle and Temple of the Old Testament, now cleansed by applying the
blood of Christ, is properly suited for the Spirit of God to dwell. Now, like
the Spirit would overwhelm and fill the Temple at special moments in days of
old, we are now filled with that same presence forever. In that moment, the
veil now lifted, in the inner man, we behold the Glory of the Lord, the very
Glory Moses cried out to see at Sinai.
Now, a heart once crushed
by the weight of sin and death, is flooded with rivers of mercy, while beholding
unveiled the Glory of God, now, like Jesus told Nicodemus, we are left with an
unexplainable, but unmistakable event, changing us forever, and thus is what it
means to be “born again!”
Rev. Joel M McDuffie Jr.
2/6/2017
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