Recent Thoughts on Spiritual Rebirth

The New Birth
I sat with a man and his wife as they described the spiritual journey of their lives. She had been born again years earlier and had a desire to continue with her development in the things of God. She had hit a plateau and knew that her growth toward Jesus’ character had stalled. I was there to talk to her about being baptized. Her husband joined us in the living room.

He never had much to do with religion or God. Growing up rough and tough, his thoughts toward religious activity usually just brought on anger toward a God whose ways he didn’t understand. Recently both this man and his wife had begun to sense something (or someone) propelling them in a certain direction. Health problems, financial problems, and changed plans had landed them here. They both marveled that their adversity had brought them such positive circumstances and they felt there must be a reason.

To me, this was a classic example of the grace of God at work in the life of people all around us. God had awakened in this man a desire to understand, or know, God. Years of unexpected setbacks caused him to feel his own life had brought on these adversities. He accepted his own inadequacies as the reason he wasn’t achieving a right standing with God.  God had brought him out of his deadness and had begun to draw him. This was the perfect example of Ephesians 2:1-5.

The moment of new birth is always hard to define, but this day, while I talked to him in the living room, I felt like a midwife assisting God in the miracle of one being born again. There were no tears of joy, but a settled certainty about a new life. Like many men before him, I saw in his response a practical, thoughtful beginning. This was a new life. The search for spiritual food and physical development began at once.

So now the family (that’s us, Christians) must take some responsibility for this new life. He and his wife will need family members to assist them in their development. They themselves will need to find the means to shift from one kingdom lifestyle to another. Yet in all this I realize it is God who inexorably, over the years brought all this about, in the living room in a small town in Northern Michigan.
As it says in Ephesians 2:13, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.”