A Statement About the Necessity of Rebirth

The Christian life should seem an outright oddity to any bystander examining it.  The oddity of the Christian life, the source of the indescribable to an outsider is that the Christian life is an internal ordeal that expresses itself, as all internal things do, externally.  The rub here is to misconstrue the good and necessary externals as the thing of Christianity itself and not merely the perceivable effects of the internal processes that are being undertaken.

For the most part, Christians seem to be the same as any other human person.  Yet for those who are actually living the Christian life we would have to assert that the Christian is something altogether other than the average.  However, the diference in the Christian, as has been already noted, is an internal one.  More concisely, the mark of the Christian is a constitutional one; the difference is foundational, in the very nature of the person.

This may seem all fine and good unless we begin to consider the external alterations that a Christian will incur as the change occurring.  It is not enough to say that the Christian lives right or has good morals or is virtuous.  Apart from the internal transformation, these external evidences are worthless.  It is the internal change that prompts and precedes everything.  To think otherwise would be to betray the very heart of the Christian message and thus forms the core of Christian life.

This would be akin to going to a funeral, walking to the coffin, and asking the dead man to try to live.  As preposterous as this sounds, this is exactly what I mean by focusing on the externals while disregarding the necessary internal transformation.  A dead man cannot do anything.  More than that, the dead man is not capable of coming alive–he needs a rebirth, a new life to be able to do anything other than being dead.

At this point, we run into the challenging reality that must be confronted: apart from direct relationship to He who is life, we are dead.  Sin relegates us to death because it separates us from the One who is life.  By virtue of that death, the human is by all rights dead only pretending to live.  Once we overcome this fact, then we are able to assess the process of rebirth, that by a renewed and reconciled relationship to God through Christ, we are made alive.  Recognizing this, we can begin to understand that Jesus is not spiritualizing when He tells Nicodemus that a man must be reborn.  Surely, we can now see that the Christian life is, at its core, a matter of a new nature that pours forth in new life style, new morality, and new virtues.