God Changes Hearts
One of the things that most people know about when they hear anything about Christians or Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, is that we think you need to be born again. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about that, and that understanding isn’t new. That’s an old understanding. The language comes from Jesus himself.
Jesus is having a conversation with Nicodemus in John 3, and Nicodemus wants to know how he can enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus says he can’t enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is born again. Nicodemus’s response is to say, Jesus, you’re crazy. I can’t do that. How could God ask me to do something that I can’t do and make that the requirement for getting into the kingdom of God, for getting into heaven?
Conversion
Michael Lawrence
This book explains the relationship between what we believe about how people are saved and our approach to sharing the gospel in the context of the local church.
What Jesus goes on to explain is that to be born again is for God, through the Spirit, to take the initiative and to actually change you. Being born again is not a decision that I make. It’s not the result of something that I did. Being born again is the result of what God does when he causes a person’s heart to be changed from hard and opposed to God to soft and open to God.
The Scriptures use different images to talk about this. They talk about recreation—being made new. They’ll talk about being born again. They talk about transformation—being given a new nature. One word that the Scriptures never use to describe being born again is the idea of reformation. Being born again is not us fixing ourselves up. Being born again is the result of God changing a person’s heart.
Micheal Lawrence is the author of Conversion: How God Creates a People.
Michael Lawrence (PhD, Cambridge University; MDiv, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) serves as the lead pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church.
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