What this study is: a deep study of the new birth — what the Bible means by regeneration, what actually happens inside a man when he is born again by the Holy Spirit, and how that living change differs from the dead thing it is so often confused with: being religious. The study is built on one conversation — the Lord Jesus Christ talking through the night with the most religious man in Israel — and it widens from there through the whole New Testament witness: the washing of regeneration, the new heart of Ezekiel's promise, the new creature of Paul's gospel, the evidences of John's first epistle, and the assurance God wants His children to know. Every argument is built from the King James Bible, quoted exactly. Nothing here asks the reader to trust a denomination. It asks him to trust the text — and then to examine himself by it.

How to read it: slowly, with a Bible open, and honestly. This is not a study a man can read at arm's length, because its central question is personal: not do I have a religion? but have I been born again? The study will not flatter churchgoers, and it will not frighten true believers — it will do the opposite of both errors. It will show the religious man, from the Lord's own lips, why his religion cannot save him; and it will show the true child of God how he may know that he has eternal life. If you have never been born again, read to the end: the way in is plain, and the door is open. If you have, read to the end too: the evidences are written so that you may walk in the joy of a settled assurance.

PART ONE — NICODEMUS: THE RELIGIOUS MAN WHO WAS NOT BORN AGAIN

The Best That Religion Can Produce

Begin where the Lord began — not with a publican, not with a harlot, not with a man who had nothing, but with a man who had everything religion can give:

There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.

— John 3:1–2

Count what stands in those two verses. Nicodemus was a Pharisee — of the strictest, most Bible-serious party in Israel; the Pharisees were not the liberals of their day but the conservatives, the men who tithed, fasted, kept the Sabbath, and separated themselves from the careless world. He was a ruler of the Jews — a member of the Sanhedrin, the supreme council; religion had promoted him to its highest bench. He was, as the Lord Himself will call him in this very conversation, a master of Israel — a teacher of teachers, a man whose profession was explaining the Scriptures to other men. He was courteous, he was thoughtful, and he was sincere enough to seek Jesus out and honest enough to confess what the miracles proved: "we know that thou art a teacher come from God".

If churchgoing could save a man, Nicodemus was saved. If Bible knowledge could save a man, the master of Israel was saved. If sincerity, morality, position, education, reverence, and a lifetime inside the ordinances of God's own appointed religion could save a man, Nicodemus had them all, in a measure no ordinary churchgoer has ever matched. And it is to this man — precisely this man — that the Lord Jesus Christ addressed the most unsettling sentence ever spoken to a religious person:

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 3:3

Notice where the sentence falls. Jesus does not answer the compliment. He does not discuss the miracles. He goes straight through the man's religion to the man's birth, and declares that everything Nicodemus is — by nature, by training, by office — cannot so much as see the kingdom of God, let alone enter it. The defect is not in the man's conduct. It is in the man's nature. And a defect of nature cannot be repaired by effort, by ritual, or by time. It can only be answered by a new birth.

The Master's Question — and the Lord's Answer

Nicodemus heard the words with the ears of the flesh, and asked the only question the flesh can ask:

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?

— John 3:4

The question is honest, and it is the question every unregenerate religious man eventually asks in some form: how can I start over? I am what I am. My life is lived; my habits are set; my record is written. The Lord's answer explains the birth by naming its two great agents — the water and the Spirit:

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

— John 3:5

What is the water? Read the rest of the Bible's own language and the answer is consistent: the water is the washing of the Word of God. Ezekiel's promise, which this study will weigh in full shortly, joins the two halves of verse 5 in one breath — clean water sprinkled on the sinner, and a new spirit put within him. Paul writes that Christ cleanses His church "with the washing of water by the word" (Ephesians 5:26), and the Lord told His disciples, "Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you" (John 15:3). The new birth's water is the Word applied — the gospel heard, believed, and washing the sinner — and its life is the Holy Spirit Himself. It is not the water of a baptismal font: baptism, in this university's doctrine and in the plain order of the New Testament, is for a man after he has been born again, the believer's public confession of a birth that has already taken place — as Part Six of this study will show from the text. A font can wash a man's skin. Only the Spirit, through the Word, can wash his heart.

Then comes the principle that explains why the birth must be spiritual and cannot be natural:

That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.

— John 3:6

Flesh produces flesh — nothing more, nothing higher, ever. A religious upbringing produces a religious man; a moral resolve produces a moral effort; a reformation produces a reformed exterior. Like begets like, and the flesh, however educated, however churched, however sincere, begets only itself. But that which is born of the Spirit is spirit — a new life of a different kind, from a different source, with a different nature. This one verse is the whole study in seed: regeneration is not the flesh improved. It is a second birth, of a second nature, by a second Father.

And so the Lord, knowing the amazement on the old teacher's face, gathers it all into the sentence this study takes for its title text — spoken not to the rabble but to the ruler, not as a suggestion but as an absolute:

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

— John 3:7

Ye — plural. Not Nicodemus only, and not sinners of the grosser sort only. Ye — Pharisees, rulers, masters, churchgoers, and this study's every reader. Must — not advisable, not advanced, not optional for the especially devout. A man may marvel at it, as Nicodemus did. He may not evade it.

The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth

How does this birth happen? The Lord's illustration is the wind:

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

— John 3:8

The wind is sovereign in its movements — no man schedules it, channels it, or earns it — and it is known by its effects. You cannot see the wind; you hear its sound and watch the trees bend. So is everyone born of the Spirit. The new birth is God's act, in God's time, by God's power — no priest performs it, no ceremony contains it, no man manufactures it in himself or in another. But it is never invisible in its results: a birth produces a life, and a life makes a sound that can be heard and shows a motion that can be seen. Part Five of this study is given to those effects — the evidences — precisely because the Lord taught them here in parable: the Spirit's work cannot be watched in the doing, but it can always be known in the done.

Two cautions belong to this verse, and this study will keep them both. First, the wind's sovereignty is not man's excuse for passivity: the same chapter that says the wind blows where it listeth also commands the lifting up of the Son of Man and promises life to whosoever believeth — the sinner is told what to do, and Part Seven will lay it out. Second, the wind's invisibility is not a license to declare the birth unreal: a church that cannot point to changed lives has not understood the illustration. The trees bend, or the wind has not blown.

Nicodemus's reply is the confession of every religious expert who ever met a doctrine his system had no shelf for:

Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be? Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?

— John 3:9–10

The rebuke is surgical: a master of Israel — and knowest not these things? The new birth is not a New Testament novelty bolted onto an Old Testament religion; it stands in Israel's own Scriptures, in Ezekiel's new heart and David's prayer for a clean one, waiting for the teachers of Israel to teach it. A man can hold the highest religious office in the nation, handle the Scriptures daily, and yet be a stranger to the one transaction those Scriptures everywhere require. Office is not birth. Knowledge is not life. And the Lord presses the point home — testimony refused on earth will not be cured by revelation from heaven:

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?

— John 3:11–12

The Lifted-Up Serpent and the Whosoever

Then the conversation arrives at its summit — the part of John 3 that all the world knows, and that Nicodemus that night heard first. The way into the birth is the cross:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

— John 3:14–15

The dying Israelites in the wilderness were not healed by a ritual, a payment, a pilgrimage, or an improvement of their behavior. They were healed by looking — believing God's appointed remedy against every instinct of reason. So the Son of Man is lifted up, and the promise is not to the worthy, the reformed, or the religious, but to whosoever believeth in him. Then the verse that carries the whole gospel on its shoulders:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

— John 3:16

Mark the breadth of it, for this study's doctrine of the new birth stands or falls with it: God so loved the world. The Son was given for the world. The promise runs to whosoever believeth — no class excepted, no sinner pre-excluded, no hidden list behind the text. The new birth is not a door opened to a few by a decree the sinner cannot see; it is a gift given to the world and offered to whoever will believe. That is why the street preacher can stand before any crowd on earth and preach John 3:16 without a footnote. And the purpose of the giving was rescue, not ruin:

For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.

— John 3:17

The condemnation, where it falls, falls on refusal — and the Lord states it with a precision every churchgoer should sit under:

He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

— John 3:18

Not condemned because his sins were worse than other men's. Condemned because he hath not believed — the one sin that shuts every other remedy out. And the chapter closes by explaining why men refuse the light that would save them — an explanation that describes the religious man's resistance exactly, for no one fights the light like a man whose reputation is built on seeming to walk in it:

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

— John 3:19–21

The mark of the born-again man, given by the Lord in the very first telling: he cometh to the light. He stops managing his darkness. He lets his deeds be made manifest. The whole of Part Five hangs on that sentence.

And the chapter's doctrine is sealed at its end, where the alternative to the birth is stated without any softening: "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him" (John 3:36). Hath — or abideth. Life — or wrath. The Lord leaves no third column for the religious.

What Became of Nicodemus

One more thing about Nicodemus, because his story does not end in John 3, and its ending is a parable of this study's hope for every religious reader. Years later, when the council moved against Jesus and wanted Him condemned unheard, one voice in that chamber pleaded for fairness — and it belonged to the man who had come by night: "Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,) Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?" (John 7:50–51). The seed was working in the dark, as seeds do. And at the end — when the cross had done its work and the disciples had scattered — Nicodemus stepped into the open at last, carrying his fortune in burial spices to the tomb of a crucified man, in daylight, before all Jerusalem:

And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.

— John 19:39

The Gospel does not give us the hour of Nicodemus's new birth, and this study will not invent one. But it shows us the trajectory the Lord's own parable predicts: the man who came by night ended at the cross in the open; the sound of the wind became audible; the trees began to bend. Let every religious reader take the hope that is actually in the text: the same Lord who told the master of Israel "Ye must be born again" did not slam the door on him — He preached him the gospel, in full, in the night, and waited for His own word to do its work. That is how men are born again. Which raises the question the next part answers: when that birth happens — what is it?

PART TWO — WHAT REGENERATION IS

The Washing of Regeneration

The New Testament has one word that carries the whole doctrine as its proper name: regeneration. It stands as a noun only twice in the King James Bible — once for the renewal of all things at the kingdom's coming ("in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory", Matthew 19:28), and once for what happens in a sinner when he is saved:

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;

— Titus 3:5

The Greek word, paliggenesia, means exactly what the English says: a birth again — Strong's defines it as "(spiritual) rebirth (the state or the act)" and "spiritual renovation". Now weigh every clause of the verse, because Paul built it to exclude every rival explanation of salvation:

• "Not by works of righteousness which we have done" — the ground of the saving is not the sinner's goodness. Whatever regeneration is, it is not a reward.
• "but according to his mercy he saved us" — the ground is God's mercy. Regeneration is an act of pity toward the undeserving.
• "by the washing of regeneration" — the means is a washing that is a rebirth: the sinner is not scrubbed on the surface and left the same man inside; he is washed in a way that makes him a new man. (What this washing is — and why it is not baptism — Part Six takes up head-on.)
• "and renewing of the Holy Ghost" — the agent is the Holy Ghost, and His work is a renewing: not a repairing of the old, but a making-new of the man.

Verse 7 adds the fruit of it: "That being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life" (Titus 3:7) — the regenerated man is an heir, because he is a son. A birth makes an heir. Religion can make a member; only regeneration makes a child.

Ezekiel's New Heart — the Old Testament's Own Doctrine

The Lord's rebuke to Nicodemus — "Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?" — only has force if the new birth stood written in Israel's Scriptures. It did. Six centuries before the night conversation, Ezekiel prophesied the whole transaction in God's own first person:

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

— Ezekiel 36:26–27

Notice everything. The verbs are God's: I will give, I will put, I will take away. The operation is inward: a heart of stone — dead, cold, unfeeling, unresponsive to God — is removed, and a heart of flesh — living, warm, tender, responsive — is given in its place. And the crowning gift is God Himself taking up residence: "I will put my spirit within you" — with a guaranteed fruit: the man so indwelt is caused to walk in God's statutes. Obedience is not the price of this gift; it is the product of it. Ezekiel repeats the promise in the same terms a chapter's length earlier: "And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 11:19) — and the purpose clause lands on relationship: "and they shall be my people, and I will be their God" (Ezekiel 11:20).

The same prophet watched the promise pictured in a valley of dry bones, and heard the same means named: "And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live" (Ezekiel 37:14). Dead bones do not cooperate with their resurrection. Dead men do not cooperate with their regeneration. In both, God speaks, God breathes, and the dead live. That is not a metaphor chosen loosely; it is the Bible's consistent picture of what a sinner is before the new birth — and Paul picks up Ezekiel's exact frame when he describes the Christian's past:

And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;

— Ephesians 2:1

Quickened — made alive. Not improved, not encouraged, not reformed: quickened. And lest any man think God waited for some spark of life in us before He acted:

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)

— Ephesians 2:4–5

"Even when we were dead in sins" — the quickening reached us in the death, not after we climbed out of it. Paul says it identically to the Colossians: "And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses" (Colossians 2:13). Dead → quickened. Stone → flesh. Old → new. This is the constant anatomy of the change, and it excludes, by definition, every theory that makes the new birth a gradual self-improvement. A corpse does not gradually improve. He is raised, or he rots.

A New Creature

Then Paul states the result in the most sweeping sentence ever written about a converted man:

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

— 2 Corinthians 5:17

Not a repaired creature, not a re-educated creature — a new creature. A creature is something God makes; the word throws the whole transaction back onto the Creator. And mark the double totality: old things are passed away — the old standing, the old loves, the old lord; all things are become new — new heart, new desires, new family, new walk, new destiny. The verb tenses preach by themselves: the passing-away is settled fact, the becoming-new is the believer's unfolding life. When a preacher says, of a truly converted man, everything changes, he is not exaggerating for effect. He is translating 2 Corinthians 5:17.

The Seed and the Word

By what instrument does God beget this new life? Peter and James answer with one voice — by the Word of God:

Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.

— 1 Peter 1:23

Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

— James 1:18

A birth requires a seed; the seed of the new birth is the incorruptible Word. This is why preaching is not decoration on the Christian enterprise — it is the very mechanism of regeneration God has appointed. The gospel is heard; the Spirit takes the heard Word and does what no preacher can do: He begets life. Peter, who gave us the seed, also gave us the begetting's doxology: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3) — begotten us again, by abundant mercy, unto a lively (living) hope. And John gathers the whole doctrine into his definition of who the born-again are:

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

— John 1:12–13

Three negatives, each killing a counterfeit. Not of blood — the new birth is not inherited; a Christian parentage, a godly ancestry, a family name in a church book transmit no grace. Nor of the will of the flesh — a man cannot birth himself by resolve, any more than an infant begets itself. Nor of the will of man — no other man can birth him either: no priest, no parent, no preacher can vote him, sign him, or sprinkle him into the family of God. But of God. The birth is God's work — received, John says in the same breath, by receiving Christ, by believing on His name. There is the balance this study will hold from first to last: God alone regenerates; man truly receives and believes. Both are in the text. Part Seven will set the order out in full.

What the Birth Changes — in One Sentence

Gather Part Two into one definition, and it is this: Regeneration is the act of God the Holy Spirit, through the Word of God, by which a sinner dead in trespasses and sins is made alive, given a new heart and a new nature, adopted into the family of God, and made a new creature in Christ — wholly of grace, wholly God's work, and wholly real in its effects. Everything else in this study is commentary on that sentence: the Spirit's manner of working (Part Three), the counterfeit it exposes (Part Four), the changes it produces (Part Five), the substitutes it refutes (Part Six), the way a man comes to it (Part Seven), and the certainty he may have of it (Part Eight).

PART THREE — THE SPIRIT'S WORK: CONVICTION, THE WORD, AND THE SEAL

He Will Reprove the World

Before a sinner is born again, he is worked upon. The Lord named the Holy Spirit's preliminary ministry on the night before the cross:

And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: Of sin, because they believe not on me; Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.

— John 16:8–11

Reprove — convince, convict, expose. The Spirit does not begin His work in a sinner by comforting him; He begins by convicting him. Of sin — and note the concentration of it: "because they believe not on me". The damning sin, the sin that contains all others, is unbelief toward Christ. Of righteousness — the sinner is measured against the risen, ascended Christ, the righteousness that is now at the Father's right hand, and finds that his own righteousness is no righteousness at all. Of judgment — because the prince of this world already stands judged, and every man still in his kingdom stands under the same sentence.

This is why true preaching aims at conviction and false preaching avoids it. A religious service can run for years, full of music, morality, and good feeling, and never once reprove a man of sin — and in those years, however crowded the room, no one is born again, because the Spirit's appointed first work has been skipped by the preacher and resisted by the hearers. The uneasiness a sinner feels under the plain preaching of the gospel — the sense that the sermon has found him out, that his excuses are thin, that he is not right with God — is not an embarrassment to the ministry. It is the wind beginning to blow.

The Spirit Strives — and Can Be Resisted

Here one of this university's settled doctrines must be stated plainly, because the whole shape of gospel preaching depends on it: the Holy Spirit strives with men, and men can resist Him. It is so from the beginning: "And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man" (Genesis 6:3) — striving is His settled posture toward the sinner, and the warning is that it will not last forever. And it is so at the end of the Acts, in Stephen's dying sermon to the religious council of Israel:

Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.

— Acts 7:51

Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost. The words are addressed to churchmen — to the Sanhedrin, the Bible scholars, the keepers of the ordinances — and they settle the matter: the Spirit's striving is real, powerful, and resistible. A theology that makes the Spirit's convicting work an irresistible mechanism, performed upon a passive sinner who neither hears nor refuses nor believes, cannot survive Acts 7:51 or the whole pattern of Scripture, in which God pleads with men, reasons with men, stretches out His hand to men all day long — and men refuse. The new birth is God's work. The refusal of it is man's sin. Both statements are Bible, and a street preacher needs them both: the first keeps him humble, the second keeps him urgent. The Spirit strives now; He will not strive always.

The Order of Ephesians 1:13

Paul states the order in which these things happen in a converted man, and the order is a doctrine in itself:

In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise,

— Ephesians 1:13

Read it as a sequence, for that is how Paul wrote it. First, ye heard — the word of truth, the gospel, got to the sinner's ears: preaching first. Then ye trusted / believed — the heard gospel was believed; faith is the sinner's real act, and it comes after the hearing. Then ye were sealed — the Holy Spirit, the seal of God's ownership and the guarantee of the inheritance, given to the man who has heard and believed. The apostle states the same order from God's side in the second epistle to the Thessalonians: "God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth" (2 Thessalonians 2:13). Election is real — and Peter names its ground: men are "Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:2). God's choosing works through the Spirit's sanctifying and through the sinner's belief of the truth — never around them, never instead of them. Any doctrine of the new birth that erases the hearing, or the believing, or the striving that precedes them, has amended Paul's order, and with it Paul's gospel.

So the Spirit's work has a shape a preacher can cooperate with and a sinner can respond to: the Word is preached; the Spirit convicts by it; the sinner hears, and under conviction turns and believes; God regenerates and seals. The wind blows where it listeth — but it blows, in the ordinary course of this age, where the Word is preached. That is why the Lord could say of His own words what no preacher dares say of his: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life" (John 6:63). The Word is the Spirit's instrument because the Word is alive — "quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword" (Hebrews 4:12) — and a God who has promised that His word "shall not return unto me void" (Isaiah 55:11) has tied His regenerating power to its proclamation. Preach the Word, then, and expect births. Neglect it, and expect — whatever else grows — religion.

PART FOUR — THE RELIGIOUS CHURCHGOER: THE COUNTERFEIT EXPOSED

"Lord, Lord" — the Most Terrifying Words in the Bible

If the new birth is as necessary as Part One says, then the Bible should be expected to describe the man who has religion without it — and it does, in words that ought to be read on one's knees. The description is not of pagans. It is of preachers:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

— Matthew 7:21–23

Weigh the résumé these people present at the judgment. They called Him Lord — twice, with feeling. They prophesied in His name — they preached. They cast out devils in His name — they had a deliverance ministry. They did many wonderful works in His name — a record of religious achievement any church would celebrate. And the verdict is not you did too little. It is "I never knew you". Not I knew you once and lost you — never. The defect was never in their activity. It was in their birth. They had Christianity as a profession, a vocabulary, a ministry — and they had never been born. This is the Lord's own portrait of the unregenerate churchgoer at his most accomplished, and it is the reason this study exists: because the distance between saying "Lord, Lord" and being known by the Lord is the distance between religion and regeneration, and a man can cross his whole life without discovering he never made the journey.

Whited Sepulchres

The Lord gave the same people their enduring picture in the woes of Matthew 23:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

— Matthew 23:27–28

A whited sepulchre is a tomb painted for a festival — scrubbed, decorated, impressive, and full of death inside. That is the anatomy of religion without regeneration: the outside is genuinely maintained (the appearance is not always a lie — the sepulchre really is white), but there is no life within, because the one thing needful has never been done within. And the Lord lays His finger on the worship itself:

This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

— Matthew 15:8–9

In vain they do worship me — worship, offered by the unregenerate, is in vain: not because the forms are wrong, but because the heart is far while the lips are near. The distance between lip and heart is the measure of the counterfeit. Paul compresses the same man into nine words: "Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof" (2 Timothy 3:5) — the form is real: services, creeds, ordinances, respectability; the power — the regenerating, life-giving power of the Holy Ghost — is denied, absent, unexperienced. And Titus states the contradiction in its sharpest form: "They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate" (Titus 1:16). They profess that they know God — the profession is orthodox. But in works they deny him — the life contradicts the lips. The whole man is the test, and Part Five will make the test positive.

The Pharisee and the Publican

The Lord told the standing parable of this contrast — told it, Luke is careful to say, to men "which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others":

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

— Luke 18:10–14

Both men were churchgoers — both "went up into the temple to pray". The Pharisee's prayer is a catalogue of genuine religious attainments: he is not an extortioner, not unjust, not an adulterer; he fasts twice a week; he tithes everything. None of it is fabricated, and all of it is worthless to his justification, because he brings it to God as his standing — and a man cannot be born again by reciting his qualities. The publican brings nothing but his sin and a seven-word prayer for mercy — and goes home justified. The difference between the two men at the temple door that day is the whole subject of this study. The Pharisee had religion that congratulated him. The publican met a God who could regenerate him. One went down to his house with his form intact. The other went down a new man.

Laodicea — Christ Outside the Door

The New Testament's last portrait of the religious counterfeit is the saddest, because it is a portrait of a church — and of its absent Lord:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:

— Revelation 3:15–17

The Laodicean church's self-assessment is glowing — rich, increased, needing nothing — and Christ's assessment is its exact opposite in five words: wretched, miserable, poor, blind, naked. The tragedy is not hostility to Christ; Laodicea is not persecuting the faith, it is hosting it — comfortably, lukewarmly, without Him. For the verse everyone knows comes next, and its setting is this: the risen Christ, addressing His own church, stands outside it:

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

— Revelation 3:20

A church can have the building, the services, the history, and the self-satisfaction — and Christ on the doorstep, knocking to be let in to individual hearts that have had the form for years and the life never. Notice, too, the grace in the picture: He knocks. He does not batter the door down. Even for the lukewarm churchgoer, the way in is the same as for the publican — hearing His voice, and opening. The last word on the religious man in this study is not contempt but invitation. It is the offer Part Seven will make in full.

PART FIVE — EVERYTHING CHANGES: THE EVIDENCES OF THE NEW BIRTH

Why There Must Be Evidences

Return to the wind. The birth itself is God's secret act — no man watched his own regeneration happen, and no preacher watches it happen in another. But the Lord's own illustration forbids us to stop there: "thou hearest the sound thereof". A birth that leaves no trace is a doctrine the Bible does not teach. The apostle John, who recorded the night conversation, spent his first epistle on exactly this: the marks by which a man may know he has been born of God. They are not tests invented by strict churches to trouble tender consciences; they are the Spirit's own evidences, written, John says at the end, "that ye may know that ye have eternal life" (1 John 5:13). Take them in order.

1. A New Heart — New Desires

The first evidence is the Ezekiel transplant itself, felt from the inside. The stony heart did not care for God: His day was an interruption, His book a duty, His people a bore, His law a fence around forbidden pleasures. The heart of flesh cares: the things of God attract instead of repel; the worship that was endured is now desired; sin that was loved is now grieved over — not always conquered on the first day, but hated as it never was before, and fought as a foreign occupier rather than indulged as a friend. The new man finds, to his own astonishment, that his wants have changed. David prayed for this change as the deepest need of a fallen saint: "Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10). In regeneration, God answers that prayer once and for all at the root: the believer does not merely receive forgiveness for the old heart's sins; he receives a new heart.

2. Love of the Brethren

John makes this the headline evidence — the one he states as a knowledge a man can hold:

We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.

— 1 John 3:14

We know. Not hope, not guess: know — and the evidence named is love of the brethren. The born-again man recognizes his new family before he can explain it: the people of God, whom he formerly found dull, strange, or threatening, become his people; their company becomes a home; their joys and sorrows register in him as his own. The Lord had said the same of the passage itself: the believer "is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). John simply hands the believer the receipt — you can tell the passage happened because the love is there. A man may have sat beside the brethren for forty years as a stranger among them; regeneration makes him a brother among brothers, and he knows the difference without being taught it.

3. The Practice of Righteousness — and a New Relation to Sin

If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him.

— 1 John 2:29

Doeth righteousness — practices it, as the pattern and direction of his life, because he is born of him. The fruit follows the birth; the birth explains the fruit. Then come the two great statements of 1 John about the born-again man and sin, which must be taught whole or they will be taught falsely:

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 3:9

We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.

— 1 John 5:18

These verses do not teach that a Christian cannot fall into an act of sin — the same epistle, in the same breath, forbids that very claim and calls it self-deception. They teach what the words say: the one born of God does not commit sin as his practice, his trade, his settled course — his seed remaineth in him. The new nature, the very life of God planted in the believer, cannot sin: it does not want to, cannot settle into it, cannot make peace with it. The born-again man who falls rises miserable and runs to confess; the unregenerate man who falls adjusts. One has a nature at war with his sin; the other has a nature at home in it. And John himself supplies the balance that keeps the doctrine honest and tender:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

— 1 John 1:8–10

So the evidence is not sinlessness — any man claiming that disproves himself by the claim. The evidence is a new relation to sin: it is confessed, not concealed; grieved, not defended; fought, not fed. The religious man manages his sin for his reputation. The regenerated man drags his into the light for his cleansing — which is, the reader will remember, exactly where Part One left the mark: "he that doeth truth cometh to the light".

4. Overcoming the World

For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?

— 1 John 5:4–5

The world — its fashions, its fears, its price-tags on a man's soul — that once carried the believer along like a current, meets in the new birth something that swims the other way. Not by the man's strength: "even our faith" is the victory, faith in the Son of God, whose own life in the believer is stronger than the tide. The unregenerate churchgoer adapts to every age; the born-again man, gently and stubbornly, does not — because a life from above cannot finally be at home down here.

5. Hunger for the Word, Prayer as Breathing

The newborn of 1 Peter 1:23 becomes the newborn of 1 Peter 2:2: "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby" (1 Peter 2:2). An appetite for the Word is the appetite of the new nature — as natural, and as diagnostic, as a healthy infant's hunger. A man may be made to read the Bible by duty, habit, or office (Nicodemus had read it professionally for decades); the regenerated man desires it, finds himself fed by it, and grows by it — and when the appetite sickens he knows something is wrong with him, not with the Book. Prayer changes in the same direction: from a formal exercise performed at set times (the Pharisee in the temple, listing his virtues) to the breathing of the new life — constant, unselfconscious, childlike, addressed to a Father who is actually there. The man who has been born again does not merely say his prayers. He prays — and when he neglects it he suffocates, which is how he knows he lives.

6. The Old Man Put Off, the New Man Put On

Paul dresses the whole change in the language of clothing, and the metaphor insists on a daily, deliberate cooperation with the birth:

That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

— Ephesians 4:22–24

Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:

— Colossians 3:9–10

The old man — the man the believer was in Adam — is corrupt, and his deeds belong to the wardrobe of a dead life. The new man is created: "after God… in righteousness and true holiness", "renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him". Regeneration is, in the strictest sense, a new creation — the same God who commanded "Let there be light", speaking life into a dead soul. And because the believer was "buried with him by baptism into death", his walk is resurrection walking: "even so we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:4). Under it all, growing as fruit grows — quietly, seasonally, unmistakably — the character of the indwelling Spirit Himself: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law" (Galatians 5:22–23). Fruit is not manufactured by the branch. It is produced by the life in the branch. Everything changes — because Someone new has come to live where only the old man lived before.

PART SIX — REGENERATION VERSUS REFORMATION: THE SUBSTITUTES ANSWERED

The Difference, in the Lord's Own Image

A man can reform without being regenerated. He can quit a sin, clean a habit, join a church, adopt a morality, and rebuild his reputation — and thousands have, to their credit and their neighbors' relief. Reformation is real work, and this study does not mock it. It simply names its limit: reformation works on the outside of a man's life; regeneration works on the inside of the man. The Lord's image for the difference is a cup:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess. Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

— Matthew 23:25–26

"cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter" — and then, He promises, the outside will be clean also, genuinely clean, clean the whole way through. Religion begins with the outside and hopes the inside will follow. It never does: a whitewashed exterior over an unchanged heart is the definition of the Pharisee, and the labour only makes the sepulchre handsomer. Regeneration begins where God begins, within — and the outside follows as fruit follows root. Every substitute for the new birth is, at bottom, an attempt to clean the outside of the cup and call it the new birth. Two of them deserve a full answer, because they meet every street preacher and sit in every congregation.

Cornelius — the Devout Man Who Still Needed to Be Saved

The book of Acts contains the perfect controlled experiment, and its subject is a Roman officer:

There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion of the band called the Italian band, A devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway.

— Acts 10:1–2

Devout. God-fearing — with his whole household. Generous to the poor. Praying alway. If religion could regenerate, Cornelius was regenerated before Peter ever reached Caesarea. And yet God sent an angel to this praying, giving, fearing man with a message that makes no sense unless he was still unsaved: fetch Peter, said the angel, "Who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved" (Acts 11:14). Shall be saved — future tense, spoken of the most religious man in the city. Cornelius did not need Peter to congratulate his devotion. He needed Peter to preach him the gospel, because devotion is not birth, morality is not life, and prayer — even constant prayer — is not a substitute for the new birth; it is, in Cornelius's blessed case, the hunger God was about to answer with it. He heard the word of truth, he believed, and the Holy Ghost fell on the whole house in front of Jewish witnesses — Ephesians 1:13's order, enacted in history. Let every devout reader mark it: if Cornelius needed to be saved by the preached Word, no churchgoer's devotion overrules his need of the same.

Baptism Does Not Regenerate — Simon the Baptized

The second substitute is baptism itself, and Acts answers it with a man who had been baptized. Simon of Samaria believed Philip's preaching — outwardly — and was baptized, and followed the evangelist, and then offered the apostles money for the power of the Spirit. Peter's verdict on this baptized man is the most important anti-substitute text in the Bible:

But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee. For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity.

— Acts 8:20–23

A baptized man — in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity, his heart not right in the sight of God. The water had touched him; the birth had not. The doctrine called baptismal regeneration — that the ordinance itself conveys the new life — dies on this passage, and on Titus 3:5's own fence: the washing that saves is "the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost", and it comes "Not by works of righteousness which we have done". Baptism is a work a man does and receives; regeneration is a work God does. This university's settled doctrine stands exactly here: baptism is for the believer, after he is born again — the public confession and burial-picture of a birth already wrought by the Spirit through the Word — immersion of a believer, never a mechanism that manufactures one. That is why the Lord's "born of water" in John 3:5 cannot mean the font: the same Scripture interprets the phrase for us — Christ sanctifies His church "with the washing of water by the word" (Ephesians 5:26), the disciples are "clean through the word which I have spoken unto you" (John 15:3), the seed of the birth is "the word of God" (1 Peter 1:23), and the begetting is "with the word of truth" (James 1:18). The water of the new birth is the Word washing; the life of the new birth is the Spirit quickening. Keep the two together, as John 3:5 keeps them, and every counterfeit falls into place beneath them: reformation polishes the cup's outside; baptism wets the skin; only the Spirit, by the Word, makes a man new.

PART SEVEN — HOW A MAN IS BORN AGAIN

Repentance and Faith — the Sinner's Side of the Door

The birth is God's work; but God has appointed a way for a sinner to come to it, and Paul summarized his whole ministry by that way:

Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

— Acts 20:21

Repentance toward God — the sinner turns: from his sin, his self-righteousness, and his rebellion, toward the God he has wronged. It is not penance performed to purchase pardon; it is the publican's smitten breast — "God be merciful to me a sinner" — the whole man changing direction because the whole man has changed his mind about God, about sin, and about himself. Faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ — the sinner trusts: not in his repentance, not in his feelings, not in his religion, but in the person and finished work of Christ. And the promise attached is famously plain:

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

— Romans 10:9–10

For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

— Romans 10:13

Whosoever. The jailer at Philippi asked the question every convicted sinner asks — "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" — and the answer he got contains no ceremony, no probation, no waiting period, and no exception clause: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house" (Acts 16:30–31). The strait gate is real — "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matthew 7:14) — but it is narrow the way a door is narrow, not the way a lottery is narrow: it stands open to every man who will come through it on God's terms, and shut only to those who will not come. And heaven's own last invitation keeps the door's breadth on the final page of the Bible: "And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely" (Revelation 22:17).

The Whole Transaction, in Order

Set the parts in their scriptural order and the doctrine of the new birth stands complete — God's side and man's side, each in its place, neither swallowing the other:

1. The Word is preached and heard. "after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation" (Ephesians 1:13). Faith cometh by hearing; the seed must reach the ground.
2. The Spirit convicts. By that Word the Holy Ghost reproves the sinner of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment (John 16:8–11) — striving with him, as He has striven with men since Genesis. The sinner may resist (Acts 7:51), and grieve away his day; the striving is grace, not machinery.
3. The sinner repents and believes. He turns toward God and trusts in the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 20:21); he receives Christ — "as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name" (John 1:12).
4. God regenerates. At that believing, God does what only God can do: He quickens the dead (Ephesians 2:5), transplants the heart (Ezekiel 36:26), makes the man a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), washes him in the washing of regeneration (Titus 3:5) — births him "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13).
5. The Spirit seals and indwells. "after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise" (Ephesians 1:13); God puts His Spirit within the man (Ezekiel 36:27), who from that moment carries the evidence-producing life of Part Five.

By grace, through faith, every step of it gift: "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). No step in the order is a work of righteousness which we have done. And no step may be deleted: delete the hearing, and you have a birth without the seed; delete the believing, and you have a mechanism without a sinner; delete the regenerating, and you have a decision without a birth — a man reformed, enrolled, and baptized, and exactly as dead as he was. The Bible keeps all five. So must we.

PART EIGHT — EXAMINE YOURSELVES: SOBER EXAMINATION, CERTAIN ASSURANCE

The Command to Examine

This study ends where the apostle ends — with the reader, and a command:

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates?

— 2 Corinthians 13:5

The examination Paul commands is not morbidity; it is honesty, and for the churchgoer who has read this far it can be put in the form of plain questions, drawn from the study's own chapters. Have you ever been convicted — not merely informed — of your sin, until you saw that unbelief toward Christ was your ruin? Have you come to the light, or do you still manage a darkness you would not want made manifest? Is your Christianity a form you keep up — services attended, words said, standards observed — or a life you live, with a heart that has demonstrably changed its loves? Do you love the brethren — not tolerate, not use, love — as your own people? Does the Word feed you, and does prayer breathe in you? When you sin, do you confess it as an enemy, or excuse it as a custom? Do you have "Lord, Lord" — or do you have Him?

Ask them without flinching. The questions are not a trap; they are a door. For the man who discovers by them that he has had religion and never the birth, the discovery is not the end of hope but the beginning of it — he stands exactly where Cornelius stood, devout and unsaved and very close to the kingdom, with the same remedy one sermon away: repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, today. And what awaits the man who will not take it — who dies with a form and without the life — this study has not needed to argue, for the companion study in these Study Materials, Hell and Eternal Punishment, lays out the Lord's and the apostles' whole teaching on that end, text by text. The two studies belong together: the one shows the door of life; the other shows what stands outside it.

Assurance — That Ye May Know

But let the last doctrinal word belong to the believer, because God wrote a whole epistle to give it. The God who commands examination commands knowledge too:

These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.

— 1 John 5:13

That ye may know — not hope, not fear, not wait and see. The assurance of the born-again man rests on three legs, all of them in this study. It rests on the promise of God, which cannot lie: the believer hath everlasting life, present tense, and "shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (John 5:24). It rests on the witness of the Spirit: "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God" (Romans 8:16). And it rests on the evidences of the birth itself — the new heart, the loved brethren, the practiced righteousness, the confessed sin, the overcome world — the sound of the wind, heard by the man in whom it blows. A believer who doubts should not be scolded out of his doubt; he should be walked through the evidences and the promises until the doubt gives way to the knowledge God intends him to have — and spurred, in Peter's words, to "give diligence to make your calling and election sure" (2 Peter 1:10).

A Birth Cannot Be Undone

One security remains, and with it this study closes. A birth, in the nature of things, is irreversible. A son may disgrace his father, grieve his father, wander from his father — he cannot unbecome his father's son; the birth stands behind every subsequent fact of his life. So it is with the birth from above. The Lord states the security in words that have no exception clause:

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.

— John 10:28–29

I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish. A life that can be lost was never eternal; a son who can be unborn was never born. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God" (1 John 3:2) — now, in the present, sons — and the Father who foreknew His own (Romans 8:29) holds them in a hand no power in the universe can pry open. The believer's security is not his grip on God. It is God's grip on him — the grip of the Father who gave him life, of the Son who bought him with blood, and of the Spirit who sealed him at his believing and indwells him still.

So the study returns to its first door, and leaves the reader standing where Nicodemus stood — with the sentence still sounding, and the promise still open:

Ye must be born again. Not reformed, not enrolled, not whitewashed — born, of water and of the Spirit, by the mercy of God, through the Word of God, unto a life that changes everything. It happened to a thief on a cross and a jailer at midnight and a devout centurion in Caesarea, and it is happening on streets and in seats this week, everywhere the Word is preached and a sinner believes. If it has not happened to you, the way in is one verse long, and it has your name's place already written in it: whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Come to the light. Be born again.