Finally alive - An extract from a new book by John Piper

New birth, Barna, and the Bible

Jesus’s declaration that we must be born again (John 3.7) is either deluded or devastating to the one who would be captain of his soul.

Not many biblical realities are better designed by God to reveal our helplessness in sin. ‘The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3.8). It is the Wind, not we, who finally rules the soul.

But not everyone today is jealous to esteem this miracle for the wonder that it is. If you go to research groups online, you can read things like this: ‘Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce As Are Non-Christians’. The same kind of statistics are given by Ron Sider in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? and by Mark Regnerus in his book Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers.

What matters most is the way the term ‘born again’ is being used. The Barna Group in particular has used it in reporting their research. Barna uses the word ‘evangelicals’ interchangeably with ‘born again’ and reports that:

* Only 9% of evangelicals tithe.
* Of 12,000 teenagers who took the pledge to wait for marriage, 80% had sex outside marriage in the next seven years.
* 26% of traditional evangelicals do not think premarital sex is wrong.
* White evangelicals are more likely than Catholics and mainline Protestants to object to having black neighbours.

In other words, the broadly defined evangelical church as a whole in America and the West in general is apparently not very unlike the world. It goes to church on Sunday and has a veneer of religion, but its religion is basically an add-on to the same way of life the world lives, not a transforming power.

A profound mistake

I want to say loud and clear that when the Barna Group uses the term ‘born again’ to describe these churchgoers whose lives are indistinguishable from the world, it is making a profound mistake. It is using the biblical term ‘born again’ in a way that would make it unrecognisable by Jesus and the biblical writers.

Here is the way the researchers defined born again in their research:

‘Born again Christians’ were defined in these surveys as people who said they have made ‘a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in their life today’ and who also indicated they believe that when they die they will go to heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Respondents were not asked to describe themselves as ‘born again’. Being classified as ‘born again’ is not dependent upon church or denominational affiliation or involvement.

In other words, in this research the term ‘born again’ refers to people who say things. They say, ‘I have a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. It’s important to me’. They say, ‘I believe that I will go to heaven when I die. I have confessed my sins and accepted Jesus Christ as my Saviour’. Then the Barna Group takes them at their word, ascribes to them the infinitely important reality of the new birth, and then slanders that precious biblical reality by saying that regenerate hearts have no more victory over sin than unregenerate hearts.

NT’s opposite direction

I’m not saying their research is wrong. It appears to be appallingly right. I am not saying that the church is not as worldly as they say it is. I am saying that the writers of the NT think in exactly the opposite direction about being born again. Instead of moving from a profession of faith, to the label ‘born again’, to the worldliness of these so-called born again people, to the conclusion that the new birth does not radically change people, the New Testament moves in the other direction.

It moves from the absolute certainty that the new birth radically changes people, to the observation that many professing Christians are indeed (as the Barna Group says) not radically changed, to the conclusion that they are not born again. The NT, unlike the Barna Group, does not defile the new birth with the worldliness of unregenerate, professing Christians.

For example, one of the main points of the First Epistle of John is to drive home this very truth:

* 1 John 2.29: ‘If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practises righteousness has been born of him.’
* 1 John 3.9: ‘No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God.’
* 1 John 4.7: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.’
* 1 John 5.4: ‘Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith.’
* 1 John 5.18: ‘We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.’

There are many questions to answer, and we will distance ourselves plainly from perfectionism and deal realistically with the failures of genuine Christians. But, for now, is it not true that these statements appear to be written with the very claims of the Barna Group in mind? Are these texts not addressed to the false claim that born again people are morally indistinguishable from the world? The Bible is profoundly aware of such people in the church. That is one reason why 1 John was written. But instead of following the Barna Group, the Bible says that the research is not finding that born again people are permeated with worldliness; the research is finding that the church is permeated by people who are not born again.

What must happen

There are millions of people who do not yet follow Christ. They are not born again. Some of them are church attenders and church members, even leaders. But they are not born again. They are cultural Christians. Religion is a formal, external thing. There has been no true inner awakening from spiritual death to spiritual life.

I want to serve those people by showing them what must happen to them. And by the word and the prayers of believers and the Spirit of God, I hope that my book will be a means of many being born again. The new birth, as we will see, is not a work of man. No human makes the new birth happen. No preacher and no writer can make it happen. You can’t make it happen to yourself. God makes it happen. It happens to us, not by us. But it always happens through the word of God. Here is the way the apostle Peter puts it: ‘Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God. And this word is the good news that was preached to you’ (1 Peter 1.23Ð25).

So, even though God is the one who begets his children, the seed by which he does it is the word of God, the gospel that we preach. So I pray that one of the great effects of my very human chapters will be that very supernatural miracle. My aim is to explain the new birth as clearly as I can from the Bible so that readers can see it for themselves.

There are several crucial questions we will be asking. One is, What is the new birth? That is, what actually happens? What is it like? What changes? What comes into being that wasn’t there before?

Much is at stake in seeing the new birth in true biblical proportions. Heaven and hell are at stake — and a church in the world now that acts more like Jesus and less like the culture around it. I don’t think that the new birth makes us perfect in this life. Sin remains, and the fight of faith is a daily necessity. Some unbelievers look like better people than some believers. But that is because some pretty bad people have been born again, and the process of transformation is not always as fast as we would like.

It’s also because there are unregenerate people who, for all kinds of genetic and social reasons, conform to an outward morality while being God-indifferent or God-hostile on the inside. God sees the line between the regenerate and the unregenerate perfectly. We don’t. But there is such a line, and those who have been born again are being changed, even if slowly, from one degree of humility and love to the next. This matters. It matters for eternity, and it matters for the glory of Christ in this life. If people are to enter finally into the kingdom of God (John 3.3), and if the church is to let her light shine on earth that people may give glory to God (Matthew 5.16), then the new birth must be experienced.

God is the great Doer in this miracle of regeneration. And he has not been silent about it. This means that he does not want us to be ignorant of what he does in the new birth. It means that knowing what he has revealed about the new birth is good for us. When Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘You must be born again’ (John 3.7), he was not sharing interesting and unimportant information. He was leading him to eternal life.

John Piper,
pastor for preaching and vision, Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

This article is an edited extract from John Piper’s new book Finally Alive (ISBN 978-1-84550-421-2, £8.99), published by Christian Focus this month, and used with permission.