One of my favorite hobbies, believe it or not, is visiting new churches. I love observing how different people in different cultures, whether across town or across the world, worship God and learn about him.
In all of my visits to different churches, and hundreds of sermons at my home churches, I’ve noticed that there’s one biblical concept that almost never gets talked about.
What is it? The teaching of regeneration. I’ve never heard a sermon on regeneration (or the new birth, its other name), and can’t think of the last time I’ve heard this foundational teaching of Christianity mentioned, much less explained, from the pulpit.
I find this shocking, since regeneration is at the core of what it means to become and be a Christian. As Jesus tells Nicodemus in their late-night rendezvous:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again (regenerated) he cannot see the kingdom of God.
So if Jesus believes that being born again is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian, why do we so rarely talk about it?
Why do we never talk about regeneration?
So why is one of the Bible's most important teachings so rarely talked about in our churches? As I've reflected on this, I've thought of five main reasons:
Regeneration is out of our control: Since the Holy Spirit regenerates us and we respond in faith, we assume that we no longer need to talk about it.
Regeneration is too basic: Too many churches assume their members are past the basics and that they should get onto the more complicated/important teachings.
Regeneration is too spiritual for our material minds: Regeneration is something that happens to us spiritually, which seems too strange for our materialistic (the belief that only physical matter exists) minds. We want to deal with what we can see and feel, and find the spiritual world too hard to understand.
The term “born again” got worn out: Billy Graham’s era of Christianity latched onto “born-again Christian” as a way to refer to someone who takes their faith seriously. As younger generations of Christians grew into leadership, they stayed away from terms that felt overused and stale.
Regeneration isn't practical enough: Too often, we want Christian growth on our terms, not God’s terms. So we rely on human methods and techniques like therapy, science, popular opinion, willpower, and self-help to enable us to grow, not God’s methods.
I don’t think this list is exhaustive, but it does help explain why our churches never talk about regeneration. Even in the places I’ve called my church home, you never hear any teaching or talking about how God regenerates our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Why is this important?
So why is it such a big deal that our churches aren’t regularly talking about regeneration? Because regeneration is what makes Christianity, Christian!
Lots of religions and social systems can give you moral teachings, lofty ideals, and a desire to make the world a better place. They use rules, moral pressure, and shame to try to turn you into a better person, which ultimately never really works.
In Christianity, though, God doesn’t just want to make us better; he wants to make us new. To be a Christian isn’t to go from morally neutral to a bit better, but from spiritually dead to alive.
This is what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 2 when he says:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
We become a Christian when God applies Jesus’ resurrected life to our spiritually dead hearts, making us alive in Christ and enabling us to grow to be more and more like him.
If we don’t talk about the new birth/regeneration and our continual need for Jesus’ new life in our lives, then we’re missing out on the power that makes Christian growth, holiness, and obedience possible.
An everyday illustration
Let me explain this using an illustration. Imagine that someone gives you a 1960s Mercedes convertible that’s been sitting in their garage for the last forty years.
When you receive the gift, you envision driving it down the highway at 70 mph with the wind blowing through your hair. But it’s in poor shape and doesn’t run anymore, so you immediately get to work fixing it up.
Over the next two years, you work on the old car every free moment, slowly replacing the seats, cleaning the interior, and fixing the rust spots. You then give it a brand new coat of fresh paint, which makes the car look as good as new.
After all of your hard work, you sit down in the driver’s seat and go to start the car. But when you turn the key, nothing happens; the engine doesn’t even turn over. You try pumping the accelerator, but the car still won’t go. You can’t understand what’s going wrong; you were going to be driving down the highway with the wind in your hair, not sitting stuck in your garage.
Not to be deterred, you decide to take matters into your own hands. You’re going to make this car go, after all. So you put it in neutral and muster up the strength to push it down your slightly-sloped driveway and into the street. Once the car hits 5 mph, you jump in and get ready to really get going. The car, though, soon runs out of momentum, leaving you sitting in a stationary car, wondering where you went wrong.
Frustrated, you get out of the car and decide you’re going to open up the hood. As you open it up, it dawns on you: you never did anything to fix the old dead engine. You spent so much time and money and energy on the car’s appearance that you neglected to address the most important part of the car…the engine!
How to apply this illustration
While no one who ever fixes up a car would be so foolish as to never check out the engine, I hope this illustration shows how so many churches treat regeneration and the Christian life. We get so wrapped up in the externals that we forget about the engine change we need to power our Christian.
We can do a lot of cosmetic work on our lives on our own, but until we receive an “engine transplant” from God, we’ll never have any power to go forward in faith. We need God to put a new heart in us to enable us to live for Christ and grow to become like him.
The good news is that God wants to do that. He says in Ezekiel 36:
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Too often, though, we try to live out the commands and teachings of the Christian life with either a dead or ailing engine. We focus on how we appear to others, and spiritually only limp along, unwilling to either get the new heart we need or tune up the one we’ve got. We try to use our own power to push ourselves forward, like in the analogy, yet eventually give up because the burden is just too heavy.
Because of this, we never truly experience the power of Christ’s new life in us to enable us to live like him. So instead of flying down the highway at 75 mph, we try to push ourselves along through moral striving and human ingenuity.
That’s not what Christianity is meant to be. That’s why Jesus was always challenging the Pharisees. His problem with them wasn’t that they weren’t respectable people, but that they weren’t regenerated people.
That’s why he challenged them so strongly in Matthew 23:
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.
If we don’t let people in our churches and culture know that Christianity is about being born again and living through Jesus’ resurrected power implanted into us, they will fall into the trap of the Pharisees. We will seek to live lives that look good on the outside, but are missing the inner vitality of a regenerated heart.
Unregenerate people can create an appearance of goodness, as they love those who love them and help those who help them. But they can’t do the crazy acts of obedience that require the resurrection power of Jesus, like loving their enemies, serving those who can’t help them, or forgiving those who have wronged them.
Too many of us, myself included, are interested in a Jesus that died on the cross to deliver us from our sins, but not in a Jesus who gives us new life and renews us so we can live lives full of salt and light. We try to push our lives towards greater Christian maturity through our own strength rather than letting God empower us from the inside-out.
This is why I believe that our refusal to talk about regeneration and the new birth is a major reason we see so few changed lives in our churches today. We reduce the gospel to justification and sin management, forgetting that God gives us a new heart so that we can live righteous and holy lives.
After all, it’s only when you let God power you’re life that you’ll be able to fly down the highway, spiritually speaking, and will bear a 30, 60, or 100-fold harvest of fruit.
There are two main ways that even good churches try to help us “power” our Christian lives without regeneration. This is a good stopping point, though, so I will tackle that next week.
Thanks for this important word, Luke! It’s wonderful to read your writing again.