Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1455
“You must be born again.” John 3:7.
WHEN men are perishing all around you it would be cruel to waste time in attempting to interest their minds or to amuse their fancies. We must do something more practical and give earnest heed to their pressing necessities. Is it famine which slays them? Let us feed them. Is it cold? Let us supply them with covering. Is it disease? Let us administer medicine. When the case is urgent, we confine ourselves to necessities and attend with our whole heart to that which must have our attention. That which may can wait, but that which must demands our immediate care.
Now, the spiritual needs of men are urgent and among them the most pressing is their regeneration—they must be born again or they are lost! Therefore, at this time we will dwell on this topic and give it our whole consideration, letting other interesting matters wait till this most weighty business is happily over. This is a must and we must press it upon you at once with our whole heart! Our earnest desire is for a great ingathering of souls to the garner of salvation, but in order to this they must be born again. We have had many of you hovering round about us like birds around the fowler, but you are not, as yet, taken in the Gospel net. This state of things cannot content us—we need to see you decided for Christ and truly born again.
You have long been hearers, but, alas, you remain hearers, only, and are not “doers of the Word of God.” We do not want the fault to lie with us—if you continue unsaved it shall not be because we have not preached the Gospel and kept to preaching it and preached it as a matter of life and death! Again, then, we aim at the one point, the point of absolute necessity—“You must be born again.” We trust that if one arrow does not reach the mark, another may. At any rate, we will continue driving at the one target—the conversion of your souls. O you who as yet have not been brought to know the Lord, may the Holy Spirit guide the arrow at this hour!
And now we will have a little simple talk about the great experience called regeneration, or the new birth, without which no man can see the kingdom of Heaven, much less enter it.
I. And we shall remark concerning it, in the first place, that the change which is worked in us by the new birth is MOST THOROUGH. “You must be born again.” A new birth is the most sweeping and entire process conceivable. It is, in fact, more than a change, it is a creation. Regeneration is a great deal more than reformation of life, or a becoming religious, for it is not, “You must be washed, you must be improved, you must be elevated,” but, “you must be born.” It is not enough that the present life, as already possessed, should be renovated; that the existing nature should receive fresh vigor and new tone, but “you must be born again”—a new life must be received and no improving the present life will suffice in its place.
It is also a great deal more than any change of opinion. I am always afraid of those persons who glory in being converted from one set of religious opinions to another. The best converts to a Church are those who are brought into it from the world—those who migrate from other sections of Christianity are not often the most valuable acquisitions. Sometimes, like the convicts who leave their country for their country’s good, they benefit their party best by leaving it and do not come to the newly adopted section of the Church as an unmixed gain. The text says not, “You must change your opinions and drink in new notions,” but, “You must have a new nature; you must be born again.” Notions may be altered again and again and yet the man may be no nearer being a child of God—but let the nature be changed by the Holy Spirit—and then the matter is accomplished!
This it is and nothing short of this can land a man in Heaven—he must become a new creature in Christ Jesus. The process of the new birth is so thorough that it is a great deal more than an alteration of a man’s way of thinking, even upon the best of topics. A man may now think it his duty to be religious, whereas once he was debauched. He may now conceive it to be his duty to be sober, whereas before he was a drunk. He may feel it his duty, now, to be diligent, whereas
before he was a sluggard. But all these put together would not amount to a new birth! We rejoice in reformation of any sort. The less sin there is in the world the better, but, for all that, the vital point will not have been reached with all the alterations of thought and even of life, of which a man is capable!
The text remains in force after all the renovations, conversions and reformations that are possible to unaided flesh and blood—and it cries with stern, unchanging voice—“You must be born again.” The person concerned may have passed through a long series of ceremonies. He may have been received with a welcome into a so-called church and from the hands of those who think themselves priests there may have distilled the aqueous imposture which is said to regenerate the soul. But there is something more needed than priests can convey, or than water can effect. Our Lord Jesus Christ meant something far other than the hocus pocus of an empty form when He said, “You must be born again.”