never sure whether they themselves have been born again or not.
As plain and clear a definition of the New Birth as we can find in the Word of God is given in 2 Pet. 1:4, "Whereby he hath granted unto us his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust." From these words of Peter it is evident that the New Birth is the impartation to the one who is born again, of a new nature, God's own nature. By being born again we become actual partakers of the Divine nature. We are all born into this world with a corrupted intellectual and moral nature. The natural man, or unregenerate man, is intellectually blind, blind to the truth of God, "the things of the Spirit" he cannot see or receive. "They are foolishness unto him, and he cannot know them" (1 Cor. 2:14). His affections are corrupt, he loves the things he ought to hate and hates the things he ought to love. A definite description of the affections and tastes and desires of the unregenerate man is found in Gal. 5:19, 20, 21. He is also perverse in his will, as Paul puts it in Rom. 8:7, "The mind of the flesh is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." This state of intellectual spiritual blindness and moral corruption is the condition of every unregenerate man. No matter how cultured or refined or moral he may be outwardly, his inner
life is radically wrong. In the New Birth God imparts to the one who is born again His own wise and holy nature, a nature that thinks as God thinks ("He is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him"—Col. 3:10); he feels as God feels, loves the things that God loves, hates the things that God hates, wills as God wills (1 John 3:14; 4:7, 8). It is evident then that regeneration is a deep thorough-going change in the deepest springs of thought, feeling and action. A change so thorough-going that Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:17, "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature (more exactly, Creation): the old things are passed away; behold they are become new." To use the inspired language of the Apostle John, regeneration is a passing "out of death into life." John says in 1 John 3:14, "We know that we have passed out of death into life." Until we are thus born again we are in a condition of moral and spiritual death. When we are born again we are "quickened" (or made alive), we who "were dead through our trespasses and sins." (Eph. 2:1). There is a profound contrast between regeneration and mere conversion. Conversion is an outward thing, a turning around. One is faced the wrong way, faced away from God; he turns around and faces toward God. That is conversion. But regeneration is not a mere outward change, but a thorough-going change in the deepest depths of one's being, that leads to a genuine conversion or genuine outward change. Many an apparently
thorough conversion is a temporary thing because it did not go deep enough, but regeneration is a permanent thing. When God imparts His nature to a man, that nature abides in the man. When he is born again he cannot be unborn, or as John puts it in 1 John 3:9, "Whosoever is begotten of God doth no sin, because his (God's) seed abideth in him." A man may be converted a thousand times, he can be regenerated but once.
II. RESULTS OF THE NEW BIRTH
We now come to the second question, closely related to the first, and it will help us to understand even more clearly what the New Birth is. What are the results that follow when one is born again? They are numerous.
1. The first of these results is found in 1 Cor. 6:19, where we read: "Know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have from God?" These words were spoken to believers, to regenerated men, and they plainly tell us that when one is born again, the Holy Spirit comes to take up His permanent dwelling in the man and that the man who is born again thus becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit. It is true that we may not always be conscious of this indwelling of the Holy Spirit, nevertheless He dwells in us.
2. The second result of the New Birth is found in Rom. 8:2-4, where we read: "For the law of
the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." In the 7th chapter of Romans, we have a picture of the man who is awakened by the law of God which he approves after the inward man, which he sees "is holy and just and good," which he tries to keep in his own strength, but utterly fails to keep, until at last he comes to an end of himself and is filled with despair of ever being able to keep the law of God outside of him, because of the law of sin and death inside him, which law of sin and death says, "the good which you would do you cannot do, and the evil which you hate and would not do, you must keep on doing." When a man is thus brought to a consciousness of his own utter helplessness and turns to God and accepts Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus Christ gives to him who dwells in him, sets him free from this law of sin and death so that by the power of the indwelling Spirit he is enabled to obey the law of God and to get the victory over the evil things that he would not do and to do the things which he would do. Whereas in a man merely awakened by the law of God, "the law of sin and death" gets a perpetual victory, in a regenerate man, the "law of the Spirit of life
in Christ Jesus" gets the perpetual victory. Doubtless many of you here to-day are still struggling to keep the law of God and utterly failing in your attempt to do so. What you need is to be born again, and thus have the Holy Spirit come to dwell in you, and then to walk by the Spirit, and by the power of this indwelling Spirit to get victory every day and hour over the law of sin and death that wars in your members against the law of God.