NEW birth is an indispensable necessity for every soul of man ere he can see, or enter into the kingdom of God. Redemption by blood is also indispensable. I must be new born, and redeemed, in order to enter the glory of God.
You too, my reader, must also possess these blessings if you are to be saved. You will go to the lake of fire, unless you are born again “born of water, and of the Spirit,” as the Lord puts it in John 3. Baptism is not new birth. I value baptism greatly; it is an integral part of the faith of my soul; but it will not convey to you or to me a new and vital principle of existence before God, and that is what we need. You and I need a new life, and nature, to put us in a state in which we can know and enjoy God, and we need to be redeemed out of our old state.
It is the Word of God used by the Spirit of God that is the means of the new birth. I do not exclude faith; no doubt faith has its place. There is faith in the soul with regard to the Word; but you will find that souls are always born by the Word of God. The proof of this necessity lies in this fact— “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” Educate it, it is but educated flesh; make it religious, it is religious flesh; improve it, reform it, it is still flesh. Another has well said: “You may sublimate the flesh as you like, you will never distil spirit out of it.” Why? Because “that which is born of the flesh is flesh.” It partakes of the nature of its source.
“Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again,” are the Lord’s words. Let me press on you, with the greatest earnestness, that Christ says to you, and to me, as well as to Nicodemus, “Ye must be born again.” That is what I call an inexorable “must”―viz., the necessity of man’s nature as a ruined sinner before God, and the question raised by God for you is this―Have you been born again?
If you inquire the mode and manner of the new birth, Scripture supplies the answer, for there is no limit to God’s grace.
“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.” This brings in a new life and nature altogether. You and I have been born according to the laws of natural generation; we are children of Adam; but we have in us the flesh. Will it ever do for God? It will not. We have a nature with all the faculties and capabilities necessary for man’s existence here on earth, but that does not fit us for relationship with God, because it is corrupted by the flesh. Hence man must have a new nature altogether; he must be born of water, and of the Spirit.
“The wind bloweth where it listeth.” God is sovereign, but He always uses the Word, and He can use a very feeble instrument to bring His Word to a soul. He may even use a dumb creature as an instrument of His grace, as in a case of which I know. You may think it a strange thing if I say that a cow was the means of a man’s conversion. An infidel was out walking one Sunday evening―and you know Sunday is always rather a dismal day for a man who is not a Christian―and was wishing the day was over. He went into his park, on the other side of which grazed his cow. The cow came across the park when she saw her master, to whom she was attached, and licked his hand, which was on the railing. He suddenly recollected a scripture which he had learned when a child: “The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider” (Isa. 1:3). (Parents, teach your children the Scriptures.) As this scripture flashed upon his mind, the poor infidel exclaimed, “Upon my word, after all the Word of God is true; that beast knows me, and I do not know God.” And he was converted, thank God! Conversion is always by God’s Word, and He uses that Word as the means of blessing to souls, perhaps years and years after the Word has been heard.
More than a century ago there was a boy listening to a preacher in a church in the town of Dartmouth, about four miles distant from the spot where I was born in Devonshire. That boy became a man, and lived to a great age. He lived to be a hundred years old in the backwoods of America. One day, when he was still able to do a little work in the woods, he sat down, and began thinking. “This is my birthday,” he said to himself; “today I am a hundred years old;” and he turned back upon his past life. Back and back he went till he remembered when, as a boy of about seventeen, he sat in Dartmouth parish church and heard John Fletcher preach from this text: “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema-Maranatha”―cursed when He comes (1 Cor. 16:22). The preaching and the text came up in his mind after eighty-three years, and the old man said to himself, “I do not love the Lord Jesus Christ; I shall be lost.” He was a convicted sinner, and soon believed in the Lord, and was saved. That scripture, heard eighty-three years before, was the means of his conversion, Thank God!
Ah! my friend, God’s Word is quick and powerful, and He often sends strange parts of it to awaken a man, for “the wind bloweth where it listeth.” What do you suppose was the scripture used of God to my conversion? It was this: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe and tremble” (James 2:19). That scripture was quoted to me thirty-six years ago, and I saw the truth, that I had no more real faith than a damned devil in hell. I am not ashamed to say that I saw my company, and fled.
I was awakened, and said to myself, “I had better turn to God at once”; and I did, praised be His name. My friend, give heed to the Word of God, and if you have never yet turned to God, will you not turn to Him just now?
Remember that the very fact of God having sent His Son as Saviour is a proof that you and I are lost. But people will not have this; they do not like to hear it. If a preacher talks of judgment to come, or of sinners going to hell, they will not listen to it. “Surely we are all facing for heaven,” people say. No, no. Do not deceive yourself. If you are not redeemed, if you are not under the shelter of the blood of Christ, God’s Lamb, your face is not heavenward, but toward the lake of fire. You will have to meet the judgment of God yourself, unless you get under the shelter of the blood of Him who bore that judgment as your substitute.
There is one great foundation truth, running all through Scripture, viz., that the only basis of relationship between man and God, since man has fallen, is founded on death; relationship with Him must be established by blood. I know that nowadays people do not like to hear of the blood; I know that the blood of Christ is trampled underfoot; but be assured there is only one way in which you and I, as sinners, can meet God, in righteousness, and that is the blood-stained pathway of the cross. The new and living way to God is through the death of Christ, not His birth.
His birth was necessary, of course, for, if He had not been born, He could not have died; He became a man in order to die.
The difference between the death of Christ and the death of one of us is vital. You and I die because we are sinful men, whereas Christ became a man in order that He might die. You and I had to die; He had not. On Him death had no claim whatever. He could say, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me” (John 14:30). There was no seed of death in Christ. He was holy, harmless, undefiled, and separated from sinners. It was not only that the Father could say, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”; but His very foes had to confess His excellence and spotlessness.
My friend, get hold of this; that you and I were sinners under sentence of death, but, in grace, the Lord Jesus Christ has stepped in, and died in the room and stead of those who were guilty and lost.
The sentence of God upon man for sin is death; that is sin’s wages; but, if a man die for himself, how can he redeem himself? That is the difficulty.
Psalms 49 declares that “none can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him.” Therefore we are shut up to the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, redemption through the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, who has died and “once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).
Redemption has two sides. Redemption by blood meets the claims of God’s nature, whereas redemption by power meets the necessity of our condition, as under Satan’s yoke. Observe, too, that God marks out redemption as the commencement of an entirely new history for His people: “This month shall be to you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Ex. 12:2).
May I now ask you, Are you saved yet? Have you begun to live unto God? You have not, unless you have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. I saw an old man the other day, every hair of whose head was snow white, and his face wrinkled and furrowed with age, and I asked him, “How old are you?” The old man answered with a smile, “Just four years old.” I knew what he meant. For eighty years he had been in the service of the devil, and on the road to hell, but four years before God had opened his eyes, and his ears, to the beauty and sweetness of the gospel; he had fled to Jesus, and Jesus had saved him. It was the commencement of a new history for him, and he could therefore say truly that his age was just four years.
How old are you, my friend? Well, I daresay many could tell the year, the month, the day, perhaps the very hour of their conversion. I could give you, I might almost say, the very tick of the clock when I was converted, on the 16th December 1860. But the point is, Have you got under the shelter of the blood of the Lamb? Have you begun this new history? Can you from the bottom of your soul, with an honest and true heart, say, “Lord, I have got under the shelter of the blood of the atoning Lamb; I have begun to live to God”? If you have never yet done so, let me urge you to begin now.
Trust simply in the Lord Jesus Christ and then you will understand and rejoice in the words: “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph. 1:7). Having thus received Christ as your Saviour, you will be prepared also to apprehend the following precious instruction: “And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man’s work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear; forasmuch as ye know that ye were not REDEEMED with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.... Being BORN AGAIN, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever” (1 Peter 1:17-23).
Friend, if you have never yet known the Lord, may the opening hours of 1897 find you bowing to, and believing in trim. Could you have a better moment? Never! The past is gone. To delay may be fatal. Now is your moment. Let it be “the first month of the year” unto thee.
W. T. P. W.