SPIRITUAL LIVES, do you have one? God has prepared one for you, and your opportunity to enter into it begins when you are born naturally. But God was at work long before that: Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Jeremiah 1:5
St. Paul says that God “hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: ” Ephesians 1:4 Revelation speaks of a book of Life written from a time in eternity past (can there even be such a thing?) when there was no life, no universe, no matter! And yet God knew us!
Each one of us has a measure of faith (Romans 13:3) but it is faith in the natural. Surely it is divine wiring that imparts to us the expectation we will be cared for and fed, that when we cry someone will answer. But this kind of faith is limited to the natural world. We operate in it sensibly, according to our feelings and comforts and pain, but this is not saving faith. We cannot connect with God in and of ourselves.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 1 Corinthians 2:14
What then is the answer? How do we connect? Jesus has the answer:
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. – John 3:3
What does that mean? You ask along with the man Jesus was talking with who said: How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? John 3:4
Jesus doesn’t reply directly to this focus on “born” as natural birth but goes on to stress the necessity of this experience, this “regeneration,” entering into a new state or condition:
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. – John 3:5-7
Here we see that being “born again” is the first part of a three-step process. Step one is “seeing the kingdom of God.”
Are you there yet? Can you “see” the kingdom of God? Most people cannot! They have no idea that there is a spiritual dimension to life, that this natural life with its focus on matter and the things we can perceive with our bodily senses is not the full picture. They are like the child in the womb thinking that darkness, warmth, and comfort are all there is. But then the child exits the darkness and its safety and enters a world of light, noise, and perception that was unthinkable before birth.
Do you see this spiritual dimension? Are you aware that there is something beyond the world of the empirical? That awareness, that sight is the result of being born again. But how did that happen? What was the process? Again Jesus has the answer:
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. – John 3:8
This is the beginning of SPIRITUAL LIFE!
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