regeneration

There’s a lot of talk about revival these days. National networks are noticing and reporting on a surge of interest in Christianity, particularly among young men on the political right. Many are attributing it to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, with perhaps a reaction against policies hostile to Christian thinking that are widely viewed as “nutty.” The most obvious of these, I suppose, would be the transgender movement, especially policies promoting the participation of biological males in women’s sports and the encouraging of puberty-blocker hormone treatments and surgeries in minors. Many pundits think that young males have just had it up to here with what they see as the fruits of secularism and are turning to Christianity.

Maybe they are. I certainly would like to see that happen. (I’d also like to see a similar surge in that thinking among young females, but it doesn’t appear to be happening.)

But I’ve noticed something about the current discussions of this phenomenon that gives me pause.

The evidences that I’ve seen cited for this revival are all external.

By that I mean things like attendance at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, and increased attendance at church, and Bible sales, and app downloads, and streaming of Christian music. News outlets and podcasters are chattering about these statistical shifts.

Now, these are all good things to one degree or another, but they’re not revival.

I suppose that in order to support that statement, I need to define my terms.

Historically, the term revival has been used of a renewal of dedication to God among Christians. It’s not technically a wave of conversions; that’s evangelism. For our purposes, though, I’m happy to just lump those two phenomena together as a broad move toward Christian thinking, regardless of the subject’s previous religious state.

The little itch that I need to scratch is the apparent confusion between a sociological phenomenon and a genuine experience of Christian conversion or renewal.

The Bible speaks of revival, or conversion, as a work of God’s Spirit in the individual heart. The Spirit convicts someone of his sin; he draws him to himself. As a result, the person repents of that sin and turns to Christ, seeking him and trusting him as the source of forgiveness and spiritual life. He becomes a servant of God, and his priorities are radically reordered.

Maybe that’s happening on a large scale today. I hope so. But the simple fact is that we can’t possibly know that yet. Jesus said that we know his followers by their fruits; and Paul names the fruit of the Spirit as a set of character traits: love, joy, peace, endurance, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, and self-control (Ga 5.22-23).

We see precious little of that these days, on the right or the left. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Now, I really don’t think I’m the curmudgeon here (shades of Andy Rooney), or the stereotypical fundamentalist (“no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental”). I think the body of this blog demonstrates that I’m fundamentally an optimist. But I know from experience that young people get swept up in various emotional causes. I note that a recent study suggests that the transgender movement among young people may be powered as much by peer pressure as genuine sexual dysmorphia.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the response to Charlie Kirk’s death were in any significant way another example of the same phenomenon?

So what do we do?

To start, we seek to understand accurately what’s happening. Becoming a Republican, or a fan of President Trump, or of Charlie Kirk, is not regeneration. Going to church is not conversion; in fact church is designed to be a gathering of people who are already believers, not a way to become one. Listening to Christian music, especially considering how broadly defined that genre is, may not be evidence of any particular mindset.

Let’s see what’s actually there, and not what we wish for.

And then, we steward the opportunity this social phenomenon represents. We interact with those who show up in our churches, showing them what the Scripture says about regeneration and the Spirit who gives that life, and showing them what the consequent life of sanctification looks like. We challenge the deviancies of professing Christians on both the right and the left. And we do these things in a way that reflects the fruit of the Spirit, bringing grace, mercy, and peace to those we serve.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Introduction
Our relationship to sin: Conviction / Repentance / Regeneration / Forgiveness / Redemption / Justification
Our relationship to God:
Before conversion: Election / Drawing / Faith
At conversion: Reconciliation / Positional sanctification / Adoption / Union with Christ / Spirit Baptism / Sealing / Indwelling / Assurance
After conversion: Progressive sanctification / Filling / Glorification
Conclusion

Our repentance is the spiritual equivalent of an atomic bomb. It blows up everything, setting off multiple chain reactions that change everything about us—the way we feel, the way we think, the way we live out our thinking, the course of our life, and the course of eternity.

Everything.

A whole bunch of stuff happens in the instant of our repentance. The most significant of those things, and the one that makes all the others possible, is simply unbelievable.

We rise from the dead.

Oh, we didn’t feel dead before we repented. We were thinking, and feeling, and doing things. But we were alive in only the physical sense—and we are much more than just a physical body, just a collection of about a buck’s worth of chemicals. As I’ve noted before, God created us in his image, with a physical body, of course, but with much more than that—with a non-physical part that survives the death of the body (2Co 5.1-8) and that is in fact the most important part of us (Lk 12.4). And that part of us—the part that really lives, the part that can know God—that part of us was dead.

Like a doornail.

Paul puts it this way:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest (Eph 2.1-3).

Dead. Not kinda dead, not sorta dead, not even mostly dead.

Dead.

Now if someone is truly dead, he’s going to need help—divine help—to change his state. People talk about their having “died” on the operating table, but what they mean is that their heart stopped—perhaps because of sudden cardiac arrest that was quickly reversed, or perhaps intentionally, during open-heart surgery. But these people weren’t really dead—they were full of cellular life, and their brains were still producing waves. A few years ago medics were stunned to find that cold-water “drowning” victims could be resuscitated after they had been immersed for astonishing lengths of time. None of these people were really dead.

Now, Lazarus—he was dead. He’d been in the tomb for 4 days, and as his sister Martha so indelicately put it, “by this time he stinketh” (Jn 11.39). And he was not coming back without divine assistance.

That was our state. We were dead and decomposed, and we stankethed.

And in an instant, He made us alive.

We call that regeneration. Rebirth. Being “born again,” or born from above, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus (Jn 3.3).

Now that has a lot of implications for the days ahead. We’ll explore those in the second phase of the series, when we discuss the changes that salvation brings to our relationship with God. For now, though, I want to think about what it means for our relationship to sin.

Paul says that when we became alive to Christ, we died to sin (Rom 6.2). It’s an odd picture: we were dead, but now we’re alive, which means that we’re dead to what we were before. But that’s precisely the language that Paul uses.

What does it mean to be dead to sin?

Well, it doesn’t mean that we don’t sin anymore; Paul makes that clear in Romans 7, and John makes the same point in 1John 1.8-10. But it does mean that we’re now disconnected from our old lifestyle—that we have options now that we never had before.

We don’t have to sin. We can say no.

I’ll say more about this idea when we get to the gift of redemption, but for now let’s just revel in that thought for a moment.

You’re alive. You can do things. You have choices. And among those choices is the ability to tell your old life and your old slave-driver to just get lost.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Dan Olinger

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On Revival

The Gifts of Salvation, Part 4: Regeneration