I’ve done lots of things today, but the gospel has been on my mind. In particular, the doctrine of regeneration. Regeneration is kind of a lost doctrine, and in some ways, evangelicalism has led to its weakening. Sometimes the gospel has been preached just to collect ‘decisions’ for Christ. The truth is that you can make decisions all day, but if the Holy Spirit has not regenerated you, making you into a new creature in Christ through the applied blood of Christ, having come to the point of repentance and faith (also gifts of God), then no salvation occurs.
Again, I reflect on my own conversion. I can see a clear hand of God in and through the circumstances of my life that moved me to the point where the only logical and necessary thing was to surrender, repent and believe. The fruit of that repentance began to show itself in a changed heart, changed orientation towards God, love of God, love of Christ, encounter and love of the Holy Spirit, love for his church and its mission, and for lost people. More than this, characteristics known as the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ began to display themselves in increasing measure that were not fruit of my own attempts. These are not the things that saved me, but were the overflow of the things that come out of a regenerated life. By their fruit you shall know them, said Jesus!
You see, I know I’m saved. I was saved, I am being saved, and I will be saved – not because of anything at all I have done, but because of Christ, and Christ alone. It is not right to speak now of the things that I would have believed, enacted or persisted in before I knew Christ, but I know that when I got saved, I developed a clear and deep inner understanding of what was right and holy and what was not. The Spirit was leading me, and is leading me, in a more holy way.
Before Christ, I’d put my head in any trough of slop and have a bite. After Christ, the stuff in the trough became absolutely repulsive and my desires and appetites changed. There is no amount of ‘deciding’ that could have changed all of those orientations of the heart – only a complete renovation of the heart in the work of regeneration!
This is not to say that I am consistently in a state of holiness, but it does mean that I am quicker to repent of sin when it turns up at my door, and the growth in grace makes me a shade less likely to persist in what I know to be sinful.
What this all comes down to is that our contemporary church can create false converts because we lose sight of both the signs of a regenerate heart and process by which it takes place. Oh boy, I got into real trouble for preaching that in some places. I preached it because I saw it in scripture, and I saw it in reality. People who were Christians by name or by tradition, but displayed no change of appetite, desire, love for Christ…who were not in the battle striving for holiness in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.
This is even more offensive than preaching the gospel itself, just as Jesus found as he called out the religious authorities for their hypocrisy. Jesus also explicitly tells us that there are many who say ‘Lord, Lord – we did all this for you’, to whom he will reply, ‘depart from me, you workers of iniquity, I never knew you.’ That is terrifying (for them when they stand before him, and for us who realise a new responsibility to teach the gospel thoroughly).
So, I have a regular practice, which Paul recommends: ‘test yourself and see if you are in the faith’ (2 Cor 15: 5). Paul had been dealing with sin in the Corinthian church for a good while. He wanted to see genuine repentance. He didn’t want to come down hard on them and deliver the awful news to their face – he knew that if the Spirit of God was in them, he could trust them to be led to repentance. Moreover, rather than cross-examining each other, Paul is saying that the person possessing the Spirit has all the resource then need for holiness, and that if we did need another brother or sister to point our sin out to us, then we’d probably gone quite far down a road of disobedience.
How do we do this? Oh…whilst I could give a very practical instruction in detail, the reality is that the Holy Spirit will show us the condition of our heart if he isn’t already. David, only after he was caught in his sin, came before God and admitted that he knew his sin because it was always before him, that he was sinful from his conception and birth, and that it is a grievous thing before God (Psalm 51). David’s heart here is a good example to us all – and you don’t need to go much further into praying Psalm 51 before you’ll be in touch with the shape of your soul.
If anyone reads these words at an all, my plea to you would be to examine yourself openly before God. He’ll lead you on deeper into Christ. Know that he who begun a good work in you, if it has genuinely begun, will carry it on to completion. That’s a promise.