Please take your Bibles in hand or keep them in hand and turn this time to the New Testament scriptures as we continue to think about the great subject of the new birth from Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in the first fifteen verses of John chapter 3; John 3, verses 1 through 15. And for the next few weeks I want to drill down a little bit and to think with you about the marks of the new birth. The marks of the new birth. We’ve insisted that we must be born again, we’ve described how it happens when we’re born again, by what means the new birth takes place in the human heart, but what does it look like when it has happened? What are its effects? How can we know we have been born again? So we’re thinking today, and again God willing next week, about the marks or the effects or the evidences of the new birth. And there are many that we could talk about or we could mention from the New Testament scriptures.
There are five that emerge from our text in John 3 in particular that I want to highlight. We’re going to consider the first two today and come back next week to look at the remaining three. So the first two today. The new birth results in a new person and a new perception. A new person and a new perception. Then next week, the new birth results in a new power, a new principle, and a new purity. So today, a new person and a new perception. Before we consider those themes, we need to read the text. Before we do that, let’s pray once again for the Lord to help us. Let us all pray.
O God, by nature we suppress the truth in unrighteousness. We prefer the lie to the truth of God. Yet You have taken hold of us, we who are Your children, and made us new, that we may see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And so now we ask You to show Him to us again, and in His light, help us to see ourselves, to see ourselves in humility and with realism and honesty, and doing so, grant to us the comfort and assurance of knowing that You are at work within us to will and to work for Your good pleasure. For we ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.
John 3 at verse 1. This is the Word of Almighty God:
“Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, ‘Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.’ Jesus answered him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’
Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can these things be?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’”
Amen.
When Euan, my first child, was born, my parents loved to make side by side comparisons of photographs of me as a baby and images of Euan when he was small. And unsurprisingly, we looked very much alike in those early days. One difference was in the eyes. Euan has Sheena’s blue eyes. But he looked like a Strain and a MacLennan – my family and Sheena’s family. That’s who he is, after all, though where his height comes from is anyone’s guess! It’s pretty comical watching my tiny, wee wife scold my enormous son as he towers over her! The fact that they are so temperamentally alike just makes it all the more comical! But the point is, my children, your children, they bear the family likeness both in their temperament and in their features.
And Jesus is saying something like that when He told Nicodemus in verse 6, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Whatever the flesh does, always will bear the marks and the characteristics of fleshliness, of worldliness, of life without God. The flesh only makes more flesh. And of course the opposite is also true. When the Spirit does His mighty work in our spiritually dead hearts and causes us to be “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” when we are raised from the tomb of our natural condition to new spiritual life, the new thing that is created in us bears the marks of the family characteristics of a child of God. “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
So just like you can sometimes identify members of the same family without having been introduced to them, simply by noticing, you know, “He has his mother’s eyes. She has her daddy’s nose,” and so on, and you can sort of see, “She must go with that family. Surely he’s a sibling of this one.” You can figure it out just by observation. So too we can say the children of God have certain distinguishing marks that make them distinct from the world. A Christian, remember, is not the same as anyone else. They are aliens and strangers in the world. As an immigrant to this country, being told that, “You ain’t from around here,” gets a little old when people hear me roll my “r”s. And yet there’s a sense, isn’t there, in which that is precisely the experience of every single Christian. None of us are from around here if we are followers of Jesus, not any more. We are citizens of another world. And we have the accents of heaven. We have the marks of belonging in another place. In our character, in our behavior, in our speech and our habits, we demonstrate that we come from another world and people can see it; it’s observable.
A New Person
But what is it that they can see? Well, as I said earlier, the first mark of the new birth that Jesus highlights is that when you are born again you become a new person. That’s clear, isn’t it, in the metaphor. The principle metaphor of “birth” in verse 3 and again in verse 7. What is a birth, after all, if not the beginning of a new life bursting into the world. That’s what it means to be born again. We’ve said this several times already, haven’t we, so far. The new birth is not a change of allegiance. It’s not a fresh resolution to live a moral and upright life. It’s not a commitment to a particular theological position or a tradition in the church. It’s not the mechanical result of the administration of the waters of baptism or even simply of praying a prayer after an altar call in a church one Sunday, for that matter. Rather, we’ve said the new birth is the beginning of a new person, a new nature.
A New Environment
And that new person, the New Testament teaches us, is defined by at least three things. First, for want of a better word, we are new persons that exist in a new environment, a new environment. Second Corinthians 5:17, Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away and the new has come.” So the person is “new,” notice, because he or she is “in Christ.” Christ is the new sphere of their existence. They have been united to Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 2:5 says, “Even when we were dead in our sins, God made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved.” “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” When God brings about the new birth, He joins us to Jesus Christ by His grace in the power of the Holy Spirit uniting us to Him in His death and resurrection so that the life of the risen Christ flows into us like a sap flowing from the vine into branches that have been grafted in, so that His life flows into us and we live and bear fruit. We are in Christ Jesus. God has raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places. Jesus Christ is our life now. He is the environment. He is our natural habitat.
I love those David Attenborough wildlife documentary series, “The Blue Planet,” “Frozen Planet,” “Planet Earth.” Have you seen them? Do you know what I’m talking about? And they feature stunning wildlife photography; just breathtaking. Your jaw hangs open as you see these extraordinary images. And then you hear Attenborough’s posh English whisper talking in reverential tones about some creature or other, a tree frog or a jaguar or a butterfly, you know, in the Amazon basin. And he’s telling us breathlessly how perfectly adapted this creature is to its environment. It was made to live only here in the world. You can find it nowhere else, he says. In fact, it could not live anywhere else but here. It can only be found in this environment. When the new birth happens, the same thing can be said for us. Jesus Christ becomes our natural habitat. We are remade to belong only in Him. We fit into Him and we can live nowhere else. He becomes our life.
A New Nature
And that means, in the second place, this new person must now also have a new nature that corresponds to that new environment. That was Paul’s point in 2 Corinthians 5:17. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come!” The new birth isn’t just a new attitude or a new outlook on life. The new birth is the implanting of a new nature into us. Listen to the extraordinary language that Peter uses, for example, in 2 Peter chapter 1 verses 3 and 4 where he says that, “God has granted us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us to His own glory and excellence by which He has granted us His very great and precious promises so that through them you may become” – and here’s the stunning language – “partakers of the divine nature.” Isn’t that amazing language? Christians are partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. Now Peter doesn’t mean that we somehow become divine, that some of God Himself becomes part of who we are. That’s not his point. But he is saying that a nature is granted to us that is sourced only in God. It comes to us from Him, given to us. We have the life of God in the soul of man.
A New Identity
So in the new birth we become a new person. That means that we exist only in our new habitat, our new environment. We are in Christ Jesus. And because we are in Him, we are new creatures, perfectly adapted, as it were, for life in union with Christ. And in consequence, the third thing to say about becoming a new person is that it brings with it, therefore, a new identity. A new identity. The implication of being in Christ, of being a new creature, is that we ought no longer to think of ourselves as once we did. We can no longer define ourselves by our old lives, our old priorities, our old sins. And so, for example, 1 Corinthians chapter 6, verses 9 through 11, Paul asks famously, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” What a gloriously hopeful and assuring passage that is. “Such were some of you. Such were some of you, but not anymore!” Praise God, brothers and sisters, though we are not yet that which we wish to be, by the grace of God we are not now who we once were. When God the Holy Spirit performs His renovating, regenerating work in our hearts, Paul says we cease to be the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers and swindlers. That’s not who we are anymore at the level of identity.
Sometimes we can feel this sting of our sin very keenly, can’t we? Our consciences trouble and accuse us. We are ashamed and we grieve that we should still struggle like this after all this time as a believer in Jesus. And so we begin to believe this is actually who we still are. We are greedy, we are angry, we are gay, we are drunk, we are cheats. But listen, it’s one thing to use those adjectives as incidental descriptions of sins we may commit from time to time. It is quite another to embrace them as marks of our basic identity. Beloved in Christ, this is no longer who we are. Now, you are a new creature in Christ. The old has gone. The new has come. That’s who you are now. If you start by saying, “I am a hopeless slave to my lusts, that’s who I am necessarily and fundamentally,” you’re likely going to regard the grace of Jesus Christ in your life as a weak overlay, a thin veneer that barely coats the ugly truth of your true self. And so you’ll begin to face every temptation in the conviction that fundamentally you are beaten already. And that while you may well win the odd skirmish with temptation from time to time, in the long run, let’s face it – the leopard does not change his spots. “This is just who you are. You are an angry person, so what can you do? You are a greedy person, a lustful person; it’s just who you are!”
But do you see, if you adopt that stance you are strangling what little fight is left in you to resist sin and strive to be godly. You are giving up on any realistic expectation of obedience and lasting change. And so Satan comes to tempt you and you try to resist him and he tells you that resistance like that is an empty and futile thing. “After all, David Strain, this is who you really are. You can’t help yourself.” And then in support of his claim, he can rehearse for you all of your past failures and point to all of your besetting sins. And he tells you, “You’re deluding yourself if you think you can change your ways! Face it, this is just who you are!”
What should you do in such a moment? Well, you must say with your head held high, “It’s true, enough, devil, I was indeed such a thing, but no longer. No longer. I sin still, and I will till Jesus comes to take me home, but I am a sinner no more. That’s my identity no longer. Now, I am a man in Christ.” Or you might say, “I am a woman in Christ. The old has gone and the new has come.” You have a new identity, brothers and sisters, you are a child of God – born of God, born from above, made alive together with Christ, raised up with Him and seated with Him in the heavenly places, made a partaker of the divine nature. The life of God beats in your remade heart. “That which is from the Spirit is spirit.” He dwells in you to make you new. You need to preach that truth to yourself. It will put steel in your spine and enable you to say, “No,” to sin. It is not inevitable that you must cave in to temptation’s every demand.
So the first thing to mark the new birth, do you see it, is that you become a new person. That is to say, you have come to reside, to dwell in a new environment, a new, natural habitat. You are united to Christ. And you have a new nature that fits you and makes you suitable for life in union with Him. And that means you have a new identity. You are changed and being changed. You once we defined by your sin, but now no longer; you are defined now by your union with Jesus Christ. Now you have been washed and sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. A new person.
A New Perception
And then the second thing I want to highlight is a new perception. A new perception is the other mark of the new birth we are considering this morning. Jesus told Nicodemus in verse 3, “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The absence of the new birth, Nicodemus, means an inability even to perceive the kingdom. You can’t see it. You can’t comprehend it. You can’t understand it. You can’t fathom it. You are blind to it unless you are born again.
If you’ll look at 1 Corinthians chapter 2 beginning at verse 14 you’ll see Paul make the same point with considerable force. First Corinthians 2:14, “The natural person,” he says, “does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for they are folly to him. He is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” Okay, so the natural person, the person that Jesus, in John 3 calls, someone who is “in the flesh,” this person is incapable of understanding the Gospel. It is spiritually discerned. That is to say, it can be perceived, seen, discerned, known only by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Unless you are born again you can’t see the kingdom. You won’t make any sense of it. It will be incomprehensible at a fundamental level.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones tells the story of William Wilberforce, the great evangelical, anti-slavery campaigner in England, Wilberforce and his close friend, William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister at that time of England. Wilberforce was greatly concerned about Pitt’s spiritual condition, exercised about his salvation. And on one occasion, Lloyd-Jones says Wilberforce was particularly anxious that Pitt should go with him to listen to a famous evangelical preacher called Richard Cecil. So Wilberforce worked on Pitt for weeks and months. At last, Pitt promised that the next Sunday morning he would go with him to listen to this preacher. So Wilberforce was praying, full of anticipation. And they went to the service and sat together. Richard Cecil preached and expounded the glories of the kingdom of God and the relationship of the child of God to the Father. And Wilberforce, says Lloyd-Jones, “Wilberforce was in ecstasy, rejoicing, reveling in this glorious truth,” and he was wondering the whole time what was happening to his friend, Pitt.
Now Pitt was, says Lloyd-Jones, “an abler man” than William Wilberforce. He was the Prime Minister. At the end of the service they walked out and Wilberforce wondered what all of this had meant to Pitt. And he didn’t have long to wait. Just as they got outside the vestibule, Pitt turned to Wilberforce who had been so ravished by the exposition of the Word of God and said, “I didn’t understand a word of what that man was talking about. What was it? I didn’t understand a word. What was that?”
When you are born again, spiritual things that once were dark and mysterious and uninteresting and dull and incomprehensible now suddenly become alive with beauty and truth and goodness. What has happened to you? Well the message hasn’t changed, but you have. You have new eyes to see it, new ears to hear it. Now you embrace it gladly. You revel in it. You rejoice in it. You drink it in. They say when your kids are small they think you know everything. And then when they become teenagers they conclude that you don’t know anything. And then when they leave home and get out in the world and live a little, they are amazed at how much you have learned in such a short period of time! And the same thing happens in preaching. Sometimes people will say, “Pastor, I never used to be able to make head nor tail of your message. It’s not just that you talk funny; it just doesn’t do anything for me. But lately things seem to be different. I don’t know what you have done exactly, but the message is really landing with me now all of a sudden.” What is the explanation of that? Well certainly, the preacher may have improved, but as often as not, it’s not the message that has changed in any appreciable way. What has changed is your heart. You have a new perception. You’ve begun to see the kingdom because, perhaps quietly and all unnoticed, and yet really and wonderfully as you’ve listened to the Word of the Gospel proclaimed, God has made you His child. You have been born again.
Friends, do not rest until you have this new perception, this new sight, till you come to see for yourself the kingdom. Don’t content yourself with abstract knowledge in your head. You may remember the story in Mark chapter 8 of the blind man that was brought to Jesus for healing. And when Jesus first touched his eyes, remember, he saw shapes. They were indistinct. Jesus asked him, “What do you see?” “I see men like trees, walking.” He has some awareness, but it’s vague and clouded; blurred and obscure. And I have to tell you that I fear many of us have come to rest content with only that much. We have truths to which we ascent. We have head knowledge, but we do not see Jesus – not clearly, not truly. We’ve stopped short. We’ve contented ourselves, perhaps, with churchly tradition, with religious routine, with doctrinal abstractions, with looking the part and talking the talk without walking the walk. And we’ve not gone on and demanded more. We’ve not pressed and pursued the Lord Jesus for full, clear sight. That is what the new birth brings – a new perception, a clear sight of His face, a new delight in the truth of God and of His ways with us in the Gospel. Only the touch of the Lord Jesus Christ can give it to us. He can open your eyes, but only He can. Have you gone seeking the new birth and new perception, new sight, from the hand of the Lord Jesus Christ?
So these are the first two marks of the new birth – a new person and a new perception. Are you a new creature? Are you? Living in your new, natural, supernatural environment? You’re united to Christ with a new nature? You are now a man or a woman in Him with a new identity, no longer a hopeless slave to sin but transformed? “The old has gone and the new has come.” “Such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.” And a new perception. Do you have new eyes to see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God shining on every page of His holy Word, shining into your heart that you might see His kingdom and revel in His grace? These are the marks of the new birth. Do you know them for yourself? Does your heart display them to you?
May the Lord be gracious to give to us clarity that we may know, not only that Christ is an all sufficient Savior, but that we are His by His saving grace. Let’s pray together.
Lord Jesus, thank You that Your work is not always imperceptible within us, but it bears fruit. There are evidences of spiritual life; there are life signs. There is a spiritual pulse that can be discerned. Help us to see it by first looking to and leaning on and resting in You alone for new creation and new perception, to see Your face. And then, in the light of Your smile, to begin to see ourselves truly at last – sinners who often wander away, yet made new in union with You. O Lord, be at work in our hearts. And for any who are yet strangers to the new birth, may You draw them to Yourself, even today. For we ask this in Your name, amen.