To Enter The Kingdom Of God You Must Be Born Again
Jesus declared, “Most assuredly, I
say to you, unless one is born
again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God.” “How can a man be
born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Can he
enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be
born?”
Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I
say to you, unless one is born of
water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the
kingdom of God. That which is born
of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is
spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 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” (John 3:3-8).
The phrase “born again” has
been used to refer to everything from refurbished cars to a
byword of evangelical Christendom. Yet because of its
familiarity, it seems that few have pursued what Jesus meant in His
call to be “born again” or “born from
above” or “born of the Spirit”.
Most Christians would assert that Jesus
inaugurated the concept of rebirth in His discourse with
Nicodemus in John 3. However, consider this: If experiencing a
spiritual rebirth were a new teaching, why would Jesus ask
Nicodemus, “You are
Israel’s teacher and you
don’t know this?” (v.10).
The issue of being born again must have
been well-known for Jesus to have addressed this august Council
member in such a manner. Spiritual birth was, and is, a mandate
for people to both see the Kingdom and to enter it: “You
should not be surprised at My saying, ‘You must be born again’” (v.7). Thus, our ability to both recognize
and comprehend the Kingdom which Jesus is establishing depends
on our spiritual rebirth.
Did you know that for over two hundred
years before the coming of Jesus the Hebraic Stream of rabbis taught that a
person must experience spiritual
rebirth in their relationship
with God? In Hebraic terms, “conversion” involved
the total person responding to God’s call on his life.
It’s as if His Spirit was calling out
to your spirit. When you respond to that bidding, you are “born from above” or “born
again”. To recap: To be born from above was
understood as a positive response to our Father’s appeal
to a person’s spirit.
Being born from
above is a whole different mechanism
than relying on your sin nature-controlled soul! When your
spirit is aligned in union with the Spirit of Christ,
you’re changed from knowing about God through your mind to knowing Him intimately through
your spirit.
To be born again in spirit as a Kingdom person is a
shift from institutionalized religion and its obligatory
practices to a life journey of
personal intimacy with our Father
in the Lordship of King Jesus.
The temptation to try to blend religious
form and practice with your new life in the Spirit appears
reasonable at first glance. But while that may seem good to
your mind, the danger to your
spirit is as real as an exploding
wineskin:
No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on
an old garment, for the patch will
pull away from the garment,
making the tear worse.
Neither do men pour new wine into old
wineskins. If they do, the skins
will burst, the wine will run out
and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved (Matthew 9:16,17).
In essence, the King of kings is telling us
that you can’t live in His
Kingdom and practice religion at the same time. If you try, you’ll only tear yourself
apart. Perhaps you’ll revert back to the familiarity of
your old religious practices rather than press on in your
relationship with Him.
Why is this? Because from the day you were
physically born, your sin
nature-controlled soul (your mind,
will, and emotions) guided you. In contrast, when you are born again, the
Spirit of Jesus in you wants to rule through your spirit. This
transformation process is called
“sanctification”—a total departure from
life-long reliance on your soul to total dependence on the
Spirit of Christ in you.
Because of the powerful influence of your
sin nature from the moment you were born, the transition from
“soulish reliance” to Spirit-dependence is
formidable. The battle is ongoing and in-tense:
For the sinful
nature [within your soul] longs after what is
contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the
sinful nature. They are in conflict
with each other, so that you do not
do the things that you wish (Galatians 5:17).
Much of contemporary western Christendom
has abused the truth of biblical grace, tending instead to
appease man’s sin nature by tolerating
and excusing sinful attitudes
and actions. Many who have swallowed this false gospel find
satisfaction in believing that they can allow their sin nature
to rule and yet be acceptable in God’s sight.
Unconfronted by the reality of their sin
and willful disobedience, they receive soulish comfort in their
traditions and religious practices, most of which emanate from
pagan Hellenism and Romanism. [We’ll discuss this topic
more thoroughly in a later Lifebyte.]
Both the standard and the means of
experiencing spiritual rebirth is Jesus Himself. That implies
we must trust completely in Him “as
the Scripture [Older Testament] has said” (see John 7:38,39) — with the same
devoted, obedient intensity as Abraham trusted and was thus
declared righteous. As we discussed in Lifebyte 51, the
biblical foundations of understanding the Kingdom which Jesus
came to establish are found in the Older
Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures.
You can’t trust wholly in Jesus while
still relying on religious tradition to appease your soul! Your
“trust” will wither to half-hearted belief while
your soulish adherence to form will lull you into
self-righteousness. Consider the parallel between clinging to
worldly values while claiming God is your Master, and holding
tightly to religious form and practice while proclaiming Jesus
as Lord of your life:
No one can serve two masters. Either he will
hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the
one and despise the other. You cannot
serve both God and [religion] (Matthew 6:24).
While Christendom identifies with the name of Jesus the
Christ, little of the agape love He both personified and called for is
manifested in its midst.
In essence:
Religion not only comes between
you and King Jesus,
it’s also the greatest impediment
for you to become like Him
in fulfilling your purpose
in His Kingdom.
ALL religion is man-made, attempting to
satiate the demands of some god “out there” as well
as appease man’s sin nature-controlled soul. But
“new wine” calls for an entirely new kind of
wineskin, relating through the spirit to our heavenly Father in
Spirit:
But the hour is coming, and now is, when
the true worshippers will worship
the Father in spirit and truth; for
the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who
worship Him must worship in spirit
and truth (John 4:23,24).
Why does our Father demand that you worship
Him in spirit? Because when you embrace the Covenant He offers
through Jesus, He consummates the Covenant by sealing you with
the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 4:30).
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ who takes
up His rule through your yielded spirit (Romans 8:9; 2 Corinthi-ans 13:5;
Galatians 2:20; Ephesians 3:16,17; Colossians 1:27; Philippians
1:19). The Kingdom of God begins when the Spirit of King Jesus
takes up residence in you.
[For more on this new Covenant, see our
Hebraic Article: The Gospel of the
Covenant is the Pilgrimage to Salvation.]
Agape Love: A Sign That You’re
Born From Above, and The Hallmark
Of His Kingdom’s Servants
Signs appear frequently throughout both
testaments of God’s Word as indicators that prove a
truth. The compassionate love that grows in a heart that’s yielded to
the Holy Spirit is an evidential sign of His Presence at work
in you. Lifebyte 51 deals significantly with our Father’s
desire for relational intimacy with His children, a compassionate
relationship of love that’s as intimately personal as a
Father with His sons and daughters.
Jesus both emphasized and reflected devoted
and intense love for His Father. This love relationship
emanated from His obedient trust in His Father. His call to all
who would follow Him as Lord is the same as the command to the
people of Israel: to love God.
The Hebrew word for the love He commands is ahav, a
passionate devotion for Him which both yearns to be in His presence and is dedicated to
pleasing Him in obedient trust.
The Hebrew letters in ahav mean “a window into the Father’s
heart.” When you are born
again, you’re choosing to lovingly relate to Him as the
Spirit of Jesus in you enables you. Our Father reveals Himself
to a born-again son or daughter in a dynamic and intensely
intimate manner through the Spirit of Jesus in them. It’s
vital that you grasp this truth!
One of the five criteria for embracing the
Covenant our Father offers you in Jesus is to love Him. You enter
into Covenant with Him with a heart of grateful love for Who Jesus
is and what He has done on your behalf to bring about
forgiveness and the intimacy of covenant union. This ongoing
love is also an element of your trust-filled determination to continue to live in
Covenant with Him by His wonderful sustaining grace.
The apostle Paul, who zealously persecuted
the early followers of Jesus, had in mind the critical
importance of love when he penned 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. Without
love you “are nothing” in the Kingdom and “gain nothing” in the King-dom.
So many false gospels that are being
peddled today call for no change in your life —
“just believe a few select verses, and you can continue
on in your life as before and still be
‘saved’.”
The true Gospel of the Bible, however,
calls for you to be sanctified by the Spirit as part of your
pilgrimage to your salvation. Sanctification is the lifelong purifying process of the Spirit
of Jesus in you that enables you to be conformed into His
likeness. He works in you so that you’ll both experience
and share His love with others, and be fruitful as you fulfill His purposes for
you in His Kingdom.
One of the signs that you’re truly
born again in a Covenant relationship with our Father is that
you are conforming more and more to the love-based motivation of
Jesus. By His loving grace He enables you to do
this—again by His Spirit at work in you! In fact, because of the Spirit
of Jesus in you, your desire to be like your Lord is so
powerful that you’re never satisfied; you want more of His gracious
transformation into His likeness.
The Spirit of Christ in you both draws and
empowers your spirit to be progressively transformed in
character and love like that of Jesus. As a result, you increasingly live as if our Lord Jesus is living through you.
This inner longing to be more like Jesus is a good indicator
that you’re truly born from above.
Each step of your spiritual transformation
is earnestly aimed at producing a love in you that points to
the Spirit in you bringing praise to your Lord:
For this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith
virtue; and to virtue, knowledge**; and to knowledge, self-control; and to
self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and
to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love (2 Peter 1:5-7).
**Contemporary
Christendom has been plagued by an overriding pursuit of knowledge. Many men
in particular hold themselves in esteem because they know about the
Father, but have never allowed or even asked Him to reveal His
loving heart to them. Their spiritual progression has stopped
with “knowledge”.
To Be Born From Above
Is To Experience Your Father’s Heart
The Pharisees, like so many people of
Jesus’ day, yearned to see the hated Romans overthrown
and the government of God on earth restored. So they asked
Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. Jesus replied, “The Kingdom of God does not come with
your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it
is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:
20,21).
Through the apostle John, the Lord voiced
concern that His Jewish audience was missing what the Older
Testament aimed for—Jesus as King over a kingdom: “You
diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them
you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about Me, yet you refuse to come to
Me [as the Scriptures have said] to
have life” (John 5:
39,40).
Because the religious leaders were not born
again, they were seeking the prophesied king through their souls. They expected
their Messiah to establish an earthly kingdom like all those
around them—the same grievous error their Israelite
ancestors had made!
Sadly, many who call themselves
“Christian” today are not born again according to
God’s parameters. Man’s religious traditions take
precedence and lift verses out of context, ignoring the
foundations of the Hebrew Scripture from which Jesus drew. As a
result, these man-made, man-pleasing gospels appeal to the
mind, will and emotions but have no root in biblical truth.
The Spirit of Jesus does not abide in those
who accept an unscriptural formulaic gospel, so those who give
way to this framework seek a form
of religion as an expression of
their belief. Paul warned his spiritual son, Timothy, about
such religious systems that lead people astray: They practice
outward rites of religion but deny the power (the indwelling
Jesus) by missing the truth. He warns us all to stay away from
these people (see 2 Timothy 3:5)!
If you’re going to have a
relationship with anyone, especially a loving relationship, you
must experience it with them. Only a born-again person, indwelt
by the Spirit of Jesus, can experience
the Father. Experiencing Him should
be as much a life reality for you as experiencing the people
with whom you have any intimate relationship.
Relational connectedness was critical to
the Hebraic Stream, as it is for all who would be born again in
spirit. When you read about the life of Abraham, would you
agree that he experienced God in his relationship with Him? How about Moses
and Joshua? Was their dependent trust in Him an ongoing
expression of His reality in their lives? And David, the man
after God’s heart who readily sought His guidance in all
matters? Each of these men experienced divine interaction.
Our Father’s loving nature and
faithfulness to His people permeate the Bible. His
Father’s heart yearns for born-again followers of His Son
to experience Him through the Spirit of Christ in them. Our
compassionate Father indeed seeks for you to experience His
heart through the presence of Jesus in you. This is a
relationship of intimacy that only gets deeper the longer you
cling to Him in loving and obedient trust!
That all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in Me and I am in You. May they also be in
Us so that the world may believe
that You have sent Me (John 17:
21).
Can you comprehend the joy and beauty of
this internal interconnection? Is it something you are
experiencing by faith? If not, would you like to?
Born Again: Not A “Believer”
But An Absolute Truster
Have you always thought of yourself as a
“believer”? You might want to reconsider. Belief basically
means that you acknowledge that someone or something exists.
And even the demons are believers (see James 2:19). Belief reflects thoughts,
ideas and opinions but doesn’t necessarily change your
life.
However, along with loving Him, our Father
demands intensely deep dependence on Him. He calls for faith that’s
demonstrated in absolute trust in Him, since His Spirit is
fully capable to bring this about.
Our Father knows Who He is. The real issue
is: Do you know your Father and absolutely trust Him?
The Hebrew word for “faith” is emunah. It means far
more than belief; it is absolute trust in and dependence on
your Father. Emunah is an emotional and responsive term that
emanates from your heart (spirit). To
truly trust in our Father requires that you wholeheartedly
yield yourself to Him unconditionally.
Faith, an
authentic trusting faith, is a sign of true spiritual rebirth
in those who follow Jesus as their Lord and King. The faith
Jesus calls for if you would be “born again” is
reflected in the total confidence you have in the reliability
of our Father. This confident trust penetrates the very core of
your being.
Your trust in our Father is similar to
hanging off a cliff—but HE’s holding the other end
of the rope! Your en-tire life journey of living in Covenant
with your Father en-tails this type of trust—because He
is worthy of it.
Let’s recap: Salvation among the early Hebraic followers of Jesus was
understood to be a process that culminated before His Throne in
heaven. Entry into this process—being “born
again”—meant to trust that the shed blood of Jesus
fully paid the penalty for your sin.
Picture if you can what this
substitutionary sacrifice on their behalf meant for them. On
the Day of Atonement each year each Jewish household offered an
unblemished lamb to cover over their sins. They trusted that God, through His
abundant grace and mercy, would forgive them the guilt of all
their sin—the same trust that we in Jesus have that
we’re forgiven by His death and have resurrection life:
In Him we have redemption through His blood,
the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace (Ephesians 1:7).
It’s sometimes difficult for us
Gentiles to grasp the significance of the Jewish community as a
people who understood the severity of sin and their need for
forgiveness, yet trusted that the shed blood of a lamb could
bring the forgiveness they so earnestly desired.
Suddenly, after centuries of penitent Days
of Atonement, the contemporaries of our Lord were being asked
to trust that through the sacrifice of Jesus, God would forgive
all their sins. Surely there were only two responses:
wholehearted joyful acceptance, or dumfounded angry disbelief.
As recorded in Scripture, most refused to
trust in Jesus as the acceptable Lamb of God. Religious forms
and practices had become an end in themselves. They could not
patch their religion and its traditions onto a trust in Jesus
as the prophesied Atonement sacrifice (Isaiah 53). Only one who
had been born again in spirit could accept this.
Those who heeded the Spirit’s call to
trust joyfully responded, initiating a strand that’s
extended for two millennia:
Repent, and let
every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for
the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all who
are afar off, as many as the Lord
our God will call (Acts 2:38,39).
With repentant hearts they were born again, placing
their trust in the sacrifice of Jesus, who bore the punishment
their sins deserved. In that new birth they were sealed with
the Holy Spirit, initiating a new relationship with their
heavenly Father.
From a Hebraic viewpoint, trust is ongoing
and life-motivating—not a belief system but a way of life that
evidences His work in and through those He makes righteous:
For I am not ashamed of the Good News,
since it is God’s powerful means of bringing salvation to
everyone who keeps on trusting...For in it is revealed how God makes people
righteous in His sight; and from beginning to end it is through trust—as
the scriptures put it, ‘But the person who is righteous
will live his life by trust (Romans 1:16,17, Jewish New Testament).
And it is a righteousness that comes from
God, through the faithfulness of Jesus the Messiah, to all who continue trusting...Therefore,
we hold the view that a person comes to be considered righteous
by God on the ground of trusting (Romans 3:22,28, Jewish New Testament).
How would you know if you have the
love-grounded, born-again faith of one who is acceptable to our
Father in Jesus?
• You find complete purpose and
fulfillment in your relationship with Him and express this life
of trust by deeds of gratefulness which are empowered by the
Spirit’s indwelling presence.
• Your Father eagerly shares His
boundless grace with you, His beloved child.
• You realize that you’re
helpless apart from His sustaining power and love. As our
Father initiates each life circumstance and situation, you
respond in such a way that you recognize He is both real and
trustworthy.
“Examine yourselves as to whether
you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do
you not know yourselves
that Jesus Christ is in you?—
unless indeed you are counterfeit”
(2 Corinthians 13:5).
• Describe what you’ve
previously believed being “born again” meant.
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• Having read this Lifebyte, has any
of your definition changed? If yes, how? Are you truly born from
above?
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• The Hebrew letters for love, ahav, mean “a window into the Father’s
heart.” How has your Father
revealed His heart to you?
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• Has your faith walk flowed with
experiencing God? If so, list three recent testimonies.
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• We wrote, “Religion not only comes between you and Jesus, it’s also the greatest impediment for you
to become like Him in fulfilling your purpose in His Kingdom.”
Write why you agree or disagree with this statement.
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• On the scale of belief and trust below,
indicate where you would place yourself.
Belief
Trust
0 10 20 30 40
50 60 70 80 90 100
Describe why you answered as you did.
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• Based on the question above, do you
believe God is pleased with your level of trust? If not, why?
How can you change?
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• In Lifebyte 40, Do You Confront For Jesus? Or, Placate For Satan?, we discussed the trap of cold love. On the
scale below, indicate where you would place yourself.
Cold love Christ-like Love
0 10 20 30 40
50 60 70 80 90 100
Describe why you answered as you did.
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• Based on the question above, do you
believe God is pleased with your level of love? If not, why?
How can you change?
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