Three Divine Acts at the New Birth • Deshen Daily

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit (John 3:6 KJV)

The new birth is instantaneous, but it is the greatest demonstration of the operation of the power and wisdom of God in any human being’s life today. The only other event that stands next to it is the future resurrection or the instantaneous transformation of the physical bodies of believers into the glorious body Christ now possesses.

Therefore, it behooves us to grasp what happened to us at the new birth. Let me summarize three distinct but related glorious divine acts that occurred when we accepted Jesus as our Savior and Lord: the new creation, adoption, and union with Christ.

God recreated us when His Word came into our hearts, and we believed in Jesus. The believer is a new creation, not symbolic but as literal as God created Adam in Genesis 2:7. The only difference is that the recreation occurs in steps that are years apart. He recreated our human spirits first, and then the new body will be given to us many years later in the future when Jesus returns. However, this is the point: God recreated and made a brand new human being by the same Word that created the universe in Genesis.

But the new creation is different from the first creation of man as recorded in Genesis. If God had just recreated our human spirit and stopped, we would have been like a new original version of Adam. However, after recreating the new man, He adopted them into His family as His children. So the new creation was not only made but begotten of God—God fathered us. And how did He do this? He gave us the Spirit of His Son, the nature of His Son, the very nature of God, by the seed of His Word to be in our hearts. This was not the case with the creation of Adam.

Beyond the recreation and adoption, God united us to become one with His Son. This union, our oneness with Christ, is the crown of Christianity. It is indeed the hope of glory. In fact, one could say that the previous two steps were simply perquisites to make this union possible; God recreated us, gave us His Spirit, and then united His Spirit with our human spirit.

In summary, the new creation is a wonder to behold—except that the new creatures themselves are still to know who they are for the most part. This new creation is the product of a new creative act of God but is also the son of God in the order of the Son of God, Jesus Christ!

MEDITATE

Please ponder and mutter on John 3:6 above in light of the devotional above. Let those words revolve in your mind, again and again, to dig deeper into the ground of your heart.

APPLY THE WORD

Two things stand between us(God’s children) and their inheritance—revelation and faith. Sin or Satan does not stand a chance before the new creation. The only reason they do, and indeed they still oppress us—sometimes miserably—is because we are not in our place. Keep soaking in the Word. Keep growing in your fellowship of the Spirit, and the world will soon see Christ in you show up in glory!

Ask the Lord to open our eyes to see and our hearts to honestly believe what His Word says about us.