His Birth and Our New Birth
His Birth and Our New Birth
His Birth in History (Luke i. 35)
The Highest. The Holiest. The Lowliest.
His Birth in Me (Galatians iv. 19)
The Lowliest. The Holiest. The Highest.
Do I come to Jesus because of what they say, or because of what I see? (John i. 12–13).
Do I seek for signs of the Kingdom of God, or do I see the Rule of God? (John iii. 3).
Do I seek to stop sinning, or have I stopped sinning? (1 John iii. 9).
The basis of Christian Psychology is in Jesus Christ, not in Adam. Therefore, if we are to study the characteristics of the Christian soul, we must not look to Adam or to our own experience, but to Jesus Christ, the Foundation. Christian Psychology is the study of a supernatural life made natural in our human life by the Redemption. We do not know Jesus Christ by knowing ourselves; to think we do is a modern fallacy. “No man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him” (Matthew xi. 27). If we are ever going to know the Father and the Son, we must have their nature, and we are not born with it. The meaning of New Birth is that we know God by a vital relationship, not only by our intellect. “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God ... which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John i. 12–13). The characteristics of the new-birth life are not the characteristics of our natural life, but the supernatural characteristics of our Lord’s life, which we have to see are manifested in our natural life. Jesus Christ sets the standard of God’s life in us. We have not to ask what good men have experienced, but to go direct to the Lord Jesus Christ and study His exhibition of the character of God’s normal man.
His Birth in History. “And the angel answered and said unto her, the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee : therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God ”(Luke i. 35). Jesus Christ was born into this world, not from it. He came into history from the outside of history; He did not evolve out of history. Our Lord’s birth was an advent; He did not come from the human race, He came into it from above. Jesus Christ is not the best human being, He is a Being Who cannot be accounted for by the human race at all. He is God Incarnate, not man becoming God, but God coming into human flesh, coming into it from the outside. His Life is the Highest and the Holiest entering in at the lowliest door. Our Lord entered history by the Virgin Mary.
His Birth in Me. “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you”(Galatians iv. 19). just as our Lord came into human history from the outside, so He must come into us from the outside. Have we allowed our personal human lives to become a ‘Bethlehem’ for the Son of God? The modern tendency is to talk of birth from beneath, not of birth from above, of something rising up out of our unconscious life into our conscious life, not of something coming into us from above. This preaching has so permeated people’s views today that many who name the Name of Christ and are supposed to be preaching His Gospel are at the same time undermining the very foundations of their own faith.
We cannot enter into the realm of the Kingdom of God unless we are born from above, by a birth totally unlike natural birth (John iii. 5). People have the idea that because there is good in human nature (and, thank God, there is a lot of good in human nature) that therefore the Spirit of God is in every man naturally, meaning that the Spirit of God in us will become the Christ in us if we let Him have His way. Take that view if you like, but never say it is the view of the New Testament. It certainly is not our Lord’s view. He said to Nicodemus, “Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again,” that is, something must come into you from the outside. Today people are dethroning Jesus Christ and belittling the need of salvation by making new birth to mean nothing more than a rising up from beneath. The conception of new birth in the New Testament is of something that enters into us, not of something that springs out of us.
We are dealing with New Birth as our Lord presents it. The Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus after He was glorified, is the One Who expounds the various stages in the experience of new birth. Our Lord never speaks in stages of experience, and the reason people divide into stages what our Lord said to Nicodemus is that they have taken their light from the Epistles. We are not dealing just now with the stages of experience, but with the fact of new birth—Christ formed in me. This does not correspond to what is evangelically known as being saved, but rather to the Methodist doctrine of entire sanctification, which is but the beginning of the purpose of the Christian life. If we are to understand how the new birth is to work, we must look at the Epistles. Paul alludes to the new birth life at work when he says, “I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.” It is the travailing of one who has himself been born from above. How many of us know anything about this travailing for those who have been really quickened by the Holy Spirit until Christ is formed in them? We are apt to rejoice in the number of souls who are evangelically described as being saved, but what becomes of them all? They have been introduced into the Kingdom of God, but as yet there is no evidence that Christ is formed in them. Jesus Christ sent His disciples to ‘disciple’ all nations. The regeneration of souls is God’s work; our work as saved souls is to work under His orders on the basis of Redemption, and Galatians iv. 19 is an indication of what that work is. “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth labourers into His harvest” (Matthew ix. 38). The labour is prayer. We labour on the ground of our Lord’s Redemption in simple confidence in Him.
Do I Come to Jesus Because of What They Say or Because of What I See? “But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God ... which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ”(John i. 12–13). The Life after new birth has very simple characteristics. In order to know whether we have been born from above, we must be guided by the revelation given by our Lord. One great characteristic of new birth is that we come to Jesus not only because of what we have heard about Him, but because of what we see He is to us now. Our Lord did not send forth His disciples on the ground of what He had done for them; He sent them because they had seen Him after His resurrection, and because they knew Who He was—‘Now go and tell My brethren.’ Mary Magdalene was His first apostle, she was the one out of whom our Lord had cast seven devils, but that was not to be the ground of her going. It was not until she had realised Who her Lord was after His resurrection, and the altered relationship in which she now stood to Him, that He said—‘Go.’ If Christ is formed in us, the great characteristic is that we know Him and perceive Him for ourselves. We do not need anyone to tell us about Him now, He is our Lord and Master.
Another characteristic of new birth is that Jesus Christ is easily first. Where do we go in a crisis? If we are born from above and Jesus Christ is Lord and Master, we will go direct as a homing pigeon to Him. The reason the majority of us know so little about the Lordship of Jesus Christ is that we only know the quickening of His Spirit, we have not gone on to the experience of Christ being formed in us. We know a great deal about the evangelical doctrine of being saved from hell, but very little about Galatians i. 15–16. In Acts i. 8 our Lord said this striking thing—“Ye shall be witnesses unto Me. ” When Christ is formed in us, we are a satisfaction to our Lord and Master wherever He places us. The point of importance is to know that we are just exactly where He has engineered our circumstances. There is no ‘foreign field’ to our Lord. The reason we feel called to foreign mission work is because God introduces His own nature into us when we are identified with Jesus Christ (John iii. 16). We know what the nature of God is like, because we see it manifested in Jesus Christ. Immediately Christ is formed in us, His nature begins to work through our hearts and to alter our conceptions.
Do I Seek for Signs of the Kingdom of God, or Do I See the Rule of God? “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 iii. 3). Another evidence of new birth is that we see the rule of God. We no longer see the haphazard of chance or fate, but by the experience of new birth we are enabled to see the rule of God everywhere. “Who hath believed that which we have heard? And to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (Isaiah liii. 1, R.V. marg.). Literally, ‘Who has the power to discern the arm of the Lord?’ We all see the common occurrences of our daily life, but who amongst us can perceive the arm of the Lord behind them? The saint recognises in all the ordinary circumstances of his life the hand of God and the rule of God, and Jesus says we cannot do that unless we are born from above. In the beginning we only discern the rule of God in exceptional things, in crises like a friendship, or marriage, or death, but that is an elementary stage. As we go on we learn to see God’s rule in all the ordinary haphazard circumstances of a common-sense life, and to say, ‘I shall never think of anything my Heavenly Father will forget, then why should I worry?’ Are we irritable and worried? Then do not let us say we are born from above, because if what Jesus says is true, how can we worry? Worry means one of two things-private sin, or the absence of new birth. Nothing happens by chance to a saint, no matter how haphazard it seems. It is the order of God, and the experience of new birth means that we are able to discern the order of God.
The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of principles to be obeyed apart from identification with Jesus Christ. The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting His way with us. The Holy Spirit applies the principles of Jesus to our circumstances as God engineers them, and we have to see that we exhibit the new birth life at work. Tolstoi made the blunder of applying the principles of Jesus straight away to practical circumstances while he ignored the need for the new birth. Jesus Christ does not lay down the statements in the Sermon on the Mount as principles and say, ‘Now work them out’, He is describing what the new life is in its working from His standpoint. When circumstances arise by God’s providential engineering, and the Holy Spirit brings back some word to our remembrance, are we going to obey our Lord in that particular? Never debate when the Holy Spirit brings back a word of Jesus Christ. A fanatic is one who takes the statements of Jesus and tries to live up to the standard of them while he ignores the necessity of a personal relationship with God through new birth. We have not to live according to maxim, but according to the new life in us in which Jesus Christ is manifested.
Do I Seek to Stop Sinning, or Have I Stopped Sinning? “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God”(1 John iii. 9). Do we seek to stop sinning, or have we stopped sinning? We are always inclined to make theoretical what God makes practical. Learned divines and others talk about the sin question, and make it a doctrinal matter of dispute. In the Bible it is never, Should a Christian sin? The Bible puts it emphatically: A Christian must not sin. The confusion arises when the practical experimental doctrine is made a philosophical doctrine to do with God’s election. Deliverance from sin is not a question of God’s election, but of an experience in human life which God demands. The effective working of the new birth life in us is that we do not commit sin, not merely that we have the power not to sin, but that we have stopped sinning—a much more practical thing.
The one thing that will enable us to stop sinning is the experience of new birth, i.e., entire sanctification. When we are born into the new realm the life of God is born in us, and the life of God in us cannot sin (1 John iii. 9). That does not mean that we cannot sin; it means that if we obey the life of God in us, we need not sin. God never takes away our power to disobey; if He did, our obedience would be of no value, for we should cease to be morally responsible. By regeneration God puts in us the power not to sin. Our human nature is just the same after new birth as before, but the mainspring is different. Before new birth we sin because we cannot help it; after new birth we need not sin. There is a difference between sin and sins; sin is a disposition, and is never spoken of as being forgiven, a disposition must be cleansed. Sins are acts for which we are responsible. Sin is a thing we are born with, and we cannot touch it; God touches sin in redemption. If we have been trying to be holy, it is a sure sign we are not. Christians are born, not made. They are not produced by imitation, nor by praying and vowing; they are produced by new birth (John iii. 7). “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
The characteristic of new birth is that we deliberately obey all that God reveals through His Spirit. We yield ourselves so completely to God that Christ is formed in us. When He is formed in us, the characteristics of His life in our mortal flesh are that we see Jesus for ourselves; we see the rule of God; and we quit sinning—all by the wonder of His supernatural new birth in us, and that is how it works all through.