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.

Dead to Sin like a Tree in Winter

Towards the end of summer into fall, trees take on an interesting character.  Green chlorophyll production ceases and the process of photosynthesis closes down, as the leaves change color in preparations for the dead of winter.  As a result, by the time the snow hits the bark, the tree is void of any photosynthetic leaves and the tree goes through seemingly no energy production or cellular respiration throughout the winter months, only to begin the process of growing green, photosynthetic leaves in the spring.  In a sense, the tree is dead for the winter, unable to feel or to utilize the sun because it does not have the necessary receptors in place to do so.

Humans are much like a tree in the winter of this world, dead to the warmth of God and unable to feel His presence or receive His grace because our leaves have long blown away, leaving us cold, calloused, and dorment to the Lord.  As Paul says clearly, that before we have accessed God's grace in Christ through faith, we are "dead in our sin and trespass (Eph. 2:1-3).

This death, like a supreme dullness to God, is pervasively holistic in that it has permeated to the very depths of our beings, preventing us from receiving God or the things of God due to the fact that we have become dorment in our minds, in our hearts, and in our souls (Eph. 4:18).  And because the things of God are spiritually discerned, the fleshly, darkened, hibernating-to-death man is unable to access God (1 Cor. 2:14).

Fortunately, God has made a way for us to shed the dullness of our winter hibernations in order that we may experience the warmth of the Holy Lord.  It is by His grace that, though we were dead to Him in our sin and trespasses, He died for us in order that we may be made alive to Him (Eph. 2:4-7).  It is as if God has taken our barren limbs and caused them to grow new leaves so that we may be alive in and to Him.

In truth, we all are snow-laden trees, hibernating in the winter of this world, unable to feel the warmth of God's grace and love because our photosynthetic cells are not working.  Only through the work of the Holy Spirit, who causes us to receive God's grace, will we be able to bask in the light of the Lord and take part in the work of His Son.  Our part in this is repentance.  We recognize our state and we seek out the warmth to change it from death to life, from wintered inaction to summer blooming.  Let us then take part in the awesomeness of God in repentance and faith and, like a spring tree, shed ourselves of the snow in order to bud in Him!