May 11, 2022 (Wednesday)

Theme for the week: Words About Our Salvation

I follow a theme each week and write five blogs under that theme. Five theological words that seem to be most important when discussing the great salvation that is ours in Christ are: 1.Repentance, 2.Faith, 3.Regeneration, 4.Grace, 5.Justification. If each subject became a command, the list would read: 1.Change your mind! 2.Believe in Jesus! 3.Be born again! 4.Accept God’s gift of salvation! and 5.Thank God for a fresh start!

When Jimmy Carter was president he said something one day about being “born again.” That phrase is in everyone’s Bible, but millions of people reacted as if they had never heard those words before. It set off a blitzkrieg of news stories all over the country and even around the world. What on earth did Jimmy Carter mean by saying he had been born again?

It is estimated that there are billions of copies of the Bible in many translations, and every one of them plainly quotes Jesus saying to Nicodemus, “You must be born again.” Why, then, should the country and the world find the terminology strange and surprising? The answer, as far as I am concerned, is that even though the Bible is the best selling book, it is not the most read book.

A little child, hearing adults discussing the Bible, suddenly interrrupted, saying “I know everything that’s in the Bible!” When asked to explain, he said, “There is an old report card, somebody’s birth certificate, some old pictures, and a lot of other stuff like that!”

The public, and even many “church folks,” may not know what the Bible teaches about being “Born Again,” but it is an important doctrine, better know by Bible scholars as “Regeneration.” A great verse about it is 2 Corinthians 5:17, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (ESV).”

Would you like an example of the new birth? Then read the Book of Acts and discover how a man by the name of Saul studied all his life to become a Pharisee and became convinced that Christians were perverting his beliefs. Suddenly, one day he had an experience that turned him into another man. He was born again and became a missionary representing Jesus Christ for the rest of his life, never even considering any other life. We will always remember him as the Apostle Paul, who went everywhere telling people what Christ had done for him. His influence reaches down through the centuries and across the world, so that the gospel finally reached us, and we owe everything to Christ.