Articles

Have you ever had a moment of bewilderment where you wonder, “how can people not see the truth of Christianity?” You look up at the night sky, in awe at the glory of it, and marvel at how clearly it points to a Creator. You read of Christ’s death and resurrection in God’s word, and you’re amazed at the beauty of God’s saving plan. How can people not see the truth of this? Why can’t my friend or family member see it?

It's easy for us to be confused by this, until we realise that there’s more to seeing these glorious realities than simply being led to think logically about them. At one level, it is the most reasonable thing in the world to believe in God and to see the glory of Jesus in the pages of Scripture. And yet the Bible says that we have a problem deep down with our reasoning. In our sin, our hearts are bent away from God, which means we naturally suppress what is obviously true about him (Rom 1:18–25). We don’t want to see the obvious truth about God. Instead, we want to run away from it.

It's like going to a party knowing someone’s going to be there who you’ve been trying to avoid. How might you keep avoiding them? You might try not to make eye contact, maybe move to a corner of the party where the other person is not, maybe hang out with people that you think the other person won’t. And maybe you get to the end of the party, and you’ve done so well at avoiding the other person that you forget they were even there. That’s what we’re naturally good at when it comes to God. We are skilled God avoiders.

So what do we need in order to be convinced of the truth about God? What do we need if we’re going to truly see Jesus for who he is and want to trust in him? Well, we need something radical to happen to our wayward hearts. Jesus says this to Nicodemus in John 3: “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3). Something so radical needs to happen to us if we’re going to enter God’s kingdom, Jesus says it’s like being born a second time!

This is clearly not something we can do ourselves. We can’t give ourselves new birth! It is something God must do. And, incredibly, he does. In conversion, God gives us “an explosion of new life,” by the power of his Spirit.^[1] Paul says God “makes his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). As we hear the good news about Jesus, God, by his Spirit, makes the lights come on for us: we see God for who he is, we see what Jesus has done for us, and we respond, not by running away, but by running toward him with joy.

Another word for new birth is regeneration. Faith is only possible if God first does this radical work of regeneration in our hearts. His normal pattern is to do this through his gospel word, confronting us with the good news and shining in our hearts to enable us to respond to it. But he can do this when we’re very young, so that we may not know a time when we didn’t call Jesus Lord. We don’t need to be able to pinpoint a particular time this happened – if our hearts are ignited in love and trust towards the Lord Jesus, then we know he has done it!

What fuel for joy this is if you’re a Christian.  It  shows the wonderful depth of God’s grace to us, that it’s deeper than we might have imagined. If you’re a Christian, not only did Jesus die on the cross for you, but by his Spirit he awakened your dead heart to his glory. He breathed new life into you by his Spirit so that you could see him for who he is and put your trust in him! This is wonderful, deep down grace.

And you can see how this can give us hope as we think of our friends and family, and our community here in Bowral. That friend that you have who is so anti-Christian you think they’d never come to Jesus…. That son or daughter who has rejected the Christianity they grew up with… God is powerful to save, and he can transform the hardest heart to begin to beat with affection for him. So let’s be praying that he will, that he might give an explosion of new life to those in our lives who don’t know Jesus. And let’s be brave, looking for ways to share the good news of the gospel with them, trusting that God can do immeasurably more than we could ever imagine.

^{[1] Dane Ortlund, Edwards on the Christian Life, 39.}

God is powerful to save, and he can transform the hardest heart to begin to beat with affection for him. So let’s be praying that he will, that he might give an explosion of new life to those in our lives who don’t know Jesus.

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