The instrument is the word of the Gospel.
The agent is the Holy Spirit.
The Word is preached—it falls into the heart of the believer as seed into the ground.
The Spirit quickens it—the new life is germinated.
That new life is the life and nature of the risen one, our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, the man in the glory; it is the mind of him who is called Christ, and it is, therefore, in final term—“the mind of Christ.”
It is wrought, not in the soul, but in the spirit of the believer.
By no slow process does it enter—this life of the risen Lord—but by absolute fiat—the fiat of him who said—“Lazarus, come forth.”
It is fiat life.
Its entrance into a human being is as light flashes into darkness.
It is as instantaneous as when God of old said, “Let there be light,” and light burst over a world cataclysmically fallen into chaos.