The New Birth

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” — JOHN iii. 3.

IT is impossible, I think, for any one to read or hear these words of Jesus Christ without remembering what solemn words they have been to multitudes of our fellow-men. There are hardly any words which Christ ever spoke which have more fascinated and held the hearts of earnest men. They have seemed to describe so truly a great mysterious necessity to which the heart itself, conscious of its own needs, has given its assent, without half knowing what it was that was required. “Ye must be born again.” “Yes, I know I must be born again. My life must make a fresh start, on a new plan “; the heart, aware how wrong it was, has answered, and then sat wondering with itself what the New Birth might be. The words have opened a gateway of possible escape to many a soul that had seemed utterly imprisoned. They have provoked and eluded many a self-satisfied and easy heart, and set it for the first time to thinking, and wakened its deeper consciousness. And to hearts which God had led through the richest experiences and fully introduced into the new life, these words have come as the interpretation of their own wonderful history; and nothing has told their own story to themselves so clearly as the words of Jesus when they took them up and said, “I have been born again.”

Such sacred associations, such hopes and memories gather around this verse; but still its mystery distresses us. Still, when we hear it, we find ourselves saying with Nicodemus, who heard it first: “How can these things be?” Men are tempted by the sound of thoroughness and authority and hopefulness in it, but still it is very vague to them. I wish that I could make it plainer. I know of course that all descriptions of a spiritual experience must be vague, except to those who have experienced it. No man can intelligibly tell what life is save to the living. But the very fact that Jesus Christ chose this common life of ours, with its beginnings and its endings, to represent the soul’s deeper existence, seems to imply that all men who live the physical life may, to some extent at least, understand the spiritual life. At any rate I want to try to make it clearer than it has been to some of us — what Jesus meant when He said that men must be born again.

The fundamental difficulty in understanding the truth of the new birth and the new life lies in attempting to grasp it as a whole, and not in its special activities. All life grows vague if you try to understand its central essence. All life is clear, if you look at its special exhibitions. Ask me what life is in the most commonplace of living men who stands before me, and I utterly fail to tell what it is in its unfound essence, or where it lurks among the hiding-places of the wondrous body; but when he lifts his hand and strikes, when he opens his mouth and talks, then in a moment I know unmistakably the living man. Now, so it is with the spiritual life. It is hard to tell just what the essence of the new Christian life is in any man. Theologians may contend over that, just as the physiologists contend over the essence of life in the body; but the new functions of the new existence, the way in which each separate power works differently, and each separate act is done differently, in the Christian’s experience — this is not hard to trace.

For there are different ways of doing every act, and undergoing every experience of life. There is the superficial and the profound way of doing and being everything. We will start with that. I want you to recognize that, for every deed you do and for every state in which you live, there are two levels; one on which the deed is done or the state is lived in lightly and frivolously; the other, deeper down, in which the same deed is done or the same state lived in, only seriously, profoundly, spiritually. A very large part of the discipline of life consists of crowding men down from the lighter upper level to the deeper lower level. As men are thus transferred from the shallow to the profound form of an experience, it seems at first as if they passed out of the experience altogether; but in the end they find that they are entering into it more completely. There is what we may call a first life and a second life of everything. As the soul passes on from the first life of anything into the second life of that same thing, it seems to lose it, but only to recover it again. It is born into a certain life, lives that life in its first and shallower form, then dies to it, and afterwards is born to it again in its profounder shape. The first birth, the death, and then the second birth, are everywhere.

This sounds, I doubt not, unintelligible enough, stated thus abstractly; but I want to point you to a series of illustrations and examples of it, which may make it clear. Let them not seem too fragmentary and scattered. They shall come together as the illustrations of one single principle before we close.

i. First, then, as simplest of all, I take the matter of happiness. It is easy to recognize the two levels of happiness, and the way in which men pass from the upper and lighter into the profounder and more serious one. Is this man happy, whom I see in the first flush of youth, just feeling his new powers, the red blood strong and swift in all his veins, the exquisite delight of trying his just-discovered faculties of taste and thought and skill filling each day with interest up to the brim? Is he happy, he with his countless friends, his easy home, the tools and toys of life both lying ready at his hand? Most certainly he is. His days sing as they go, and sparkle with a bright delight that makes the generous observer rejoice for him, and makes the jealous envy him.

But then you lose sight of him for a while, and years after you come on him again. The man is changed. All is so altered! Everything is sobered. Is he happy still? As you look into his face you. cannot doubt his happiness a moment, but neither can you fail to see that this new happiness is some thing very different from that which sparkled there before. This is serene and steady, and as you look at it you see that its newness lies in this: that it is a happiness in principles and character, while the other was a happiness in circumstances. The man whom you used to know was happy because every thing was right about him, because his self was thoroughly indulged, because the sun shone and he was strong. The man whom you know now is happy because there is goodness in the world, because God is governing it, because in his own character the discipline of God is going on. The first sort of happiness was self-indulgent; the new sort is built on and around self-sacrifice. The man you left was “enjoying himself,” as we say; the man you find is at peace in God. And to reach that peace in God, in principles, he must have lost his old self-enjoyment. The loss may have been violent, or it may have been easy. He may have been torn and wrung away from his selfishness, or the strings that bound him to it may have been gently untwisted; but, however it has come, he has died to his superficial enjoyment of self and entered into a deeper happiness, which could have come only through that death. Can we not see the three levels as they lie under one another — the surface-life of enjoyment in which men are frolicking or basking; the middle-life of disappointment in which souls are struggling, as they let go the old to take the new; and the under-life of peace, where men and women are at rest in God?

When we make ourselves spectators in the world, how often as we look at some man whom we know we can seem to see him enter the uppermost of these layers of life, and then pass down as if a great hand pressed him, till he rests in the profoundest; beginning with selfish enjoyment, passing thence into disappointment, and then into godly peace; born into superficial pleasure, dying to that in discontent, and born again into profound and peaceful joy.

2. Or take another point, the point of knowledge. There is a shallow and a deep, an upper and a lower knowledge. The quick perception that catches the mere outside of things, and, recognizing the current condition of affairs, is able to throw itself in with them and so achieve a certain cheap success; and the calm, philosophic wisdom which looks down to the roots of things and sees their causes, and really helps to govern them — those are the two. Many a young man, in politics or in business or in the church, starts with the first of these. He knows all the outside of things. People’s small ways and habits, their superficial symptoms, he is familiar with them all. He prides himself upon his knowledge. But what happens, by and by? Something occurs that teaches him his ignorance; and then, baffled, confused, dismayed, his old knowledge lying dead at his feet, he is born again into a profounder knowledge of the heart of things, into a wisdom which is moral and spiritual as well as intellectual, of the heart and conscience as well as of the head.

Have you never heard a man talking flippantly to-day of the world’s system, of the government of life, of the secrets of existence? and to-morrow some blow, some surprise has come right into the midst of his knowledge and killed it. Things have gone entirely different from what he expected, from what he prophesied. He has found how ignorant he is, and has been driven to the deeper understanding of a Will that works under everything, to that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge, ignorance, wisdom — here are the strata of life again; the first birth into one, death through the second, and a new birth into the third.

3. Our doctrine applies perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the matter of religious faith. There is a first faith and a second faith. The first faith is the easy, traditional belief of childhood, taken from other people, believed because it belongs to the time and land. The second faith is the personal conviction of the soul. It is the heart knowing, because God has spoken to it, the things of God, the afterfaith that means communion. The first faith has a certain regulative force, but it has no real, life-giving power in it. The second faith is full of life. It, and it alone, is the belief which brings salvation. What comes between the two, many of you can tell out of your own experience. Between the shallow faith and the profound, between the faith of tradition and conviction, comes so often doubt. Not always. Sometimes the old faith dies into the new as gently as the morning opens into noon, or the spring spreads its full life abroad and is the summer. That is the best and noblest way. But often between the seasons comes the equinoctial storm. The old traditional faith is shaken with the wind of doubt. The tempest lasts through a long night, perhaps, before the morning dawns in sunshine, and the soul knows what it believes and why, and is filled with the energy and peace of the deeper faith. Mere faith of tradition does not save a man, or bring him unto God. Except he be “born again” into a faith of personal conviction, he cannot see God’s kingdom. Faith of tradition — doubt, — faith of conviction, — so lie the strata of the deepening life through which many of the best and ripest souls have passed.

4. Or take another region of our life. Think of our friendships and the way they deepen. There is the first friendship of mere sentiment, the easy liking by which boys and girls are drawn together at school, or men in the same street or hotel. Such intimacies usually depend upon indulgence. Your friend must flatter and agree with you; he must think like you and be like you; that is the bond that fastens you to one another. The pleasure of a kindred spirit who will treat you well, and fall in with your wishes, and keep alive your self-esteem, — that is what draws you to him, and makes you haunt the places where you know that he will be. But, by and by, that bond breaks. Some jar comes in, some incongruity appears. You do not think alike. He will not bend to all your whims; and in some disappointment at his non-compliance, the easy sentimental friendship of your moral childhood dies.

And what then? Do we not know? The question is whether you are man enough to substitute a man’s friendship for that mere childish intimacy. Can you give up the shallow pleasure of hearing your opinions echoed, and having all your fancies indulged, and like a man meet another manly soul, and submit to the rebukes of his example, yield to him where he is a better man than you, mount with a strain and effort up to his level, or forgive and try to help him where he fails and disappoints you? A boy’s fondness and a man’s friendship! Have you not friends with whom you began superficially, but with whom you are now living profoundly? Think of John and James, leaving the boat and fol lowing Jesus Christ because His voice charmed them; then disappointed in Him because he did not set up the kingdom they desired; at last, drinking of His cup and being baptized with the baptism of martyrdom for Him. Easy fondness, discovered differences, deep friendship, — these are the levels in the life which we live with one another.

5. Take another illustration from man’s tendency to be self-satisfied. There is a bad and a good self-satisfaction. The bad self-satisfaction is only too common. It is what we call self-conceit. A man seems to himself sufficient for everything. There is no task that he will not accept. He does not look outside himself. The strength is in his own arm, which he can make strong as iron to subdue his foes; in his own heart, which he can make hard as a rock to bear his troubles. For doing or enduring he needs nothing but himself. He can do anything. That self-conceit must die, or the man is a failure. Somehow or other, the man must learn that in himself he can do nothing. Then comes humility; and when in his humility he casts himself upon another strength, and expects to do nothing save in the power of God, then he is born again into a new self-satisfaction. To find himself taken by God; to feel that God is giving him His strength; to say, “I can do anything through Christ “; to face the world not in his own power, but in his Master’s — that is the new, the deeper self-satisfaction. He has fallen from the old, through self-contempt, into this new. Self-contempt is not the permanent place for any human soul. The man despises himself only that he may find a new self which he cannot despise, the self which God made, the self for which Christ died, the self which has great, solemn duties here and the heritage of eternity awaiting it. That is a self that he must honor and respect. He has fallen out of self-conceit through the vast void of self-contempt, only to be caught in the great hands of God, who knows the value of his soul. Oh, prone as we are to sink and not to rise, let us be thankful that God is under us to catch us when we fall, as well as over us to receive us when we rise to Him.

6. One more illustration, and let it be the solemnest of all — the history of the fall and the recovery of the moral life; that account which is written for us in the endlessly appealing story of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. There is a first and second goodness. Man is born into a garden, as that story runs. Right impulses, perceptions that the good is better and more beautiful than the bad — these are not wanting in the early, the unregenerate life.

And yet that life is unregenerate. It must be born again. Those good impulses, that mere sense of the beauty of goodness, that ignorance of vice, are not the true strength of the moral man, in which he can resist temptation and really grow to God. That fails. He dies out of that; and, once out of that, he never can go back to it again. The angels and the flaming sword are at the gate, to keep any man who has been innocent, and sinned, from ever returning to innocence again.

You who read the strange first pages of your Bible, and wonder whether in their strangeness they be true or not, would it not be well if you could turn the current of your thoughts, and think how wonderfully true those pages are to you and to the life that you have lived? Do you remember when you were pure, when no foul thought had ever crossed your mind, when no wind from any quarter stirred one passionate desire? What a garden life was then! How God Himself walked with you among its trees!

And then the devil came. One day you lusted for impurity. Some temptation, no bigger than an apple, was too strong for you. Have you ever gone back? Has there been one moment since which is like what all the moments and the months were before? Has not a flaming sword been at the gate out of which you passed with that first lustful thought or deed? Has not your life, like all the Bible history, thenceforth strained and reached forward to a second goodness, to be gained only by forgiveness and by struggle? — a holiness that knows wickedness and has escaped from it, — not a garden into which man was born at first, but a heaven into which he has been brought past the very mouth of hell. Innocence, Sin, Redemption — these are the birth, the death, and the new birth of the moral life. It was all written first in the Bible, and it is written anew in the experience of every man who comes to God. I will not multiply our illustrations. Here are more than enough. And now, what have we reached? What is our doctrine? Here, everywhere, in every thing we do and are, there is a first and second way of doing or of being it; the first a shallow, light, unspiritual way of being happy, of knowing things, of believing truth, of knowing people, of valuing ourselves, or of doing right; the second, a profound and serious and spiritual way of doing those same things. Here are the two clear strata of life. One lies under the other. The parts correspond; the actions are the same; but every act has grown profound and rich and earnest, as you pass from the first into the second. Now take those acts; combine them, and they make a life; they make a man. Combine them in the upper, lighter level, and they make a light and superficial man; combine them in the deeper level and they make a strong, profound man. For it is these acts and states which make up a man’s manhood. As a man enjoys, knows, believes, makes his friends, values his life, attains to goodness, so he is. These are the constituent elements of life. Their aggregate makes up the man. Let him do all these lightly, and the man is light. If he does all these profoundly, then he is profound.

Now, where is the first man to be found, the man who does all these life-actions in the first, the lightest way? Need I tell you? Is he not all about you? Here, in the world that sparkles all over with mere gayety, that rings with superficial information, shallow belief, the noisy intimacies of an hour; in the world full of men tumid with self-conceit, men who know no higher law of right than impulse, is not our first man everywhere in this world? Bright, pleasant, quick, friendly, we meet him at every turn — the man who, intellectually, morally, spiritually, lives on the surface always. There is no suggestion of eternity or of the other world in anything he says or does or is. He belongs entirely to time and earth. He enjoys and knows and believes and loves in the first way. He is the man of the first creation, what the Bible calls the “natural man.” He has only entered into the upper layer of life. He has been born only once. The Bible has just the account of him which we have tried to give, when it says that he is the “first Adam.”

And then, where is the second kind of man? — the man who does all these great life-actions in the second way, who is profound in his happiness, his wisdom, his belief, his friendship, his self-respect, his holiness; the man in whom each of these acts is done at its fullest and richest? Ah, there is one Life whose happiness goes so deep that the world loses it and calls it misery, whose wisdom is so profound that the world loses sight of it and calls it folly, whose faith is the constant witness of its own nature, whose friendship is the perfection of sympathy, whose self-respect is the self-consciousness of the Son of God, whose holiness is perfection. Can you feel, as you read the life of Jesus Christ, that He was truly human, and yet that He carried every human action and experience down to its profoundest and filled it full of richness? Can you understand that you are happy and Jesus Christ was happy, and yet that His happiness lies far down under yours, His peace under your gayety, as a deeper and profounder thing; that all the things which you do lightly He does seriously, what you do carnally He does spiritually? If you can see that, then you understand what I mean by saying that Jesus Christ lived in the second way, — what St. Paul meant when he said that in Him we have the “second Adam,”

And then, what next? If Christ really has the power of bringing men to be like His manhood; if, as St. Paul says, the second Adam “was made a quickening spirit”; not merely a “living soul,” subsisting for Himself, but a “quickening spirit,” enlivening others into His likeness; then it is He that draws men down and transfers them from the superficialness of the first to the depth of the second life. He takes them, living superficially, and, fastening them to Himself by His love awakening theirs, makes them live profoundly. He takes them, living the first life, and makes them live the second life. The beginning of life is birth. The beginning of a new life is the new birth; and so the coming by Christ into that deeper world where Christ lives, into that Kingdom of God which is His home, is being “born again “; and except one is born again he cannot enter there.

That seems so plain. That is as plain as we can make it to ourselves, until it becomes part of our own experience; and then a flood of perfect light runs over all of it, and we grow impatient at the startling imperfectness of any description of that which has become so gloriously clear to us. Christ takes us to Himself. That is, by the power of love we gradually grow more and more like Him. As that change slowly goes on in us our life slowly deepens. Down from the surface to the soul of things He draws us. “Where I am, there shall also my servant be”; He is fulfilling that promise in our lives. We used to be happy when circumstances were prosperous; He makes us incapable of any real happiness without the sense of goodness. He makes us impatient of any knowledge that does not go back and find His intention. The soul which He has called gives up merely traditional belief, and holds to its own personal assurance of Him. It learns from His friendship to count no friendship real save heart-communion. Losing its self-conceit, it acquires a deep, daily, self-satisfaction in His ser vice. Learning its sinfulness, it enters on the obedient and grateful holiness of the forgiven soul. Everywhere the strong power of Christ draws it down from the shallow into the profound. The deeper life of everything is evident to it. It is satisfied with nothing but the roots of things. It passes from the weak life to the strong life, from the shallow life to the deep life, by Christ. It is “born again” by the power of Christ. “He that hath the Son hath life.”

Born again! The new birth! Oh, these old words which so many souls have puzzled over and could not understand, and yet have been fascinated by so that they could not let them go! In silent chambers souls have agonized and wondered, “What is it to be born again?” In silent chambers, souls, conscious of a richer and fuller life, have dreamed and questioned timidly: “Is it possible, then, that this is the new birth? Have we come any nearer to an answer to it all to-day? Have we passed from the shallow life to the profound, from the unspiritual to the spiritual, from the first life to the second?”

My dear friends, do not believe that that change can ever come to a man by any mere course of nature. As you grow older you become mature and sober; your first excitements chill, your follies grow less flagrant. It is easy for you to think that tameness wisdom, and cheat yourself into believing that because the pool of life grows stagnant it grows deep. The profoundness and spirituality of the new man is not the mere result of age. Old men and women may be very shallow, and little children may be already drawn by the Saviour whom they love down into the deepness of His life. Not by mere growing old, not by piling years upon years, not by continuing the shallow life forever does life grow deep; but by beginning a new life, by having our whole nature taken possession of by the strong new power of gratitude to Him who died for us; by being born again through love of Him into likeness of Him. So only does the life deepen as we look deeper into it; its petty waves grow still and there is peace; its noisy feebleness is swallowed up and folded into a calm strength. The bed on which it flows sinks away from us till we lose sight of it altogether, and when we gaze down into it we see Eternity.

As we enter into Christ these great things come to us. Oh, I plead with you for a profounder life! It will not come to you with the mere lapse of events and years. You may grow old, and your white hair will cover as vacant laughter and as unmeaning tears, as idle thoughts and trivial fancies, as you carry about now. You must take Christ — you must let Christ take you and draw you down into Him, that you may see everything in Him. Then everything will be new to you, and you will be new to everything. The life that you then live in the flesh, you will live by the faith of the Son of God. You will have been born again; you will have entered into the kingdom of God.