Born of the Spirit

[AI translation] One day in a Bible study, a male participant told how disappointed he had been in his faith in Christ. He sees and approves of the lofty way of life that is true Christianity, and would like to live it, but is unable to. In particular, he has many struggles with his own quick-tempered, impulsive nature. Every little thing upsets him and he cannot control himself. He told me how much he has prayed to God to give him the strength to overcome his impulses, but to no avail, his efforts always fail again. I told him not to ask for strength, not to beg for strength enough to control himself, but to confess to God frankly his wickedness, his powerlessness, his inability to do any good, and to beg that Jesus Christ himself might take the mastery over his tempers. We cannot control ourselves, but He can control us. What we have failed to do, despite our best efforts, He will do! The same man appeared at the next Bible study with a happy smile and told us that things were very different now, that the uncontrollable temper he could not control was now being tamed before a higher will. He gave them over to Jesus and He took them over.It would be a terrible thing if Jesus were only to show us the way to a higher life, but not to make it possible for us to walk in it. Well, the very point of Pentecost is that Jesus left us not only his teachings, but also himself, his own person through the Holy Spirit. To believe in Him is not only to accept His ideas and teachings, but to receive His person into myself! If ever, at Pentecost, it is really about not waiting for something from God, some gift, some blessing, some power - but for Someone: Himself, as He gives it in the Holy Spirit. The miracle that this divine Someone, Jesus Christ, does not speak to us from the outside, but begins to work in us from the inside: the Bible calls it rebirth.
So being born again means that a change takes place in me, similar to what happened at the dawn of the creation of the world. The condition of the human heart is similar to this - as if we were reading a description of our own inner life - formless, barren and desolate, with darkness hanging over the face of the abyss. Shapeless: confused, not held together, united by any definite end, falling apart. It is a tangled mass of elemental forces, of emotions. And empty: the consciousness of futile and pointless struggle, the feeling of inability, of helplessness, the aimlessness, the emptiness of life. And there is darkness over the abyss: we feel as if there were some bottomless abyss within us, full of uncertain darkness. And then the Holy Spirit comes quietly, like the dawn breaking. There he hovers over the wild confusion of our inner life, and something happens, a mysterious miracle of inner rebirth takes place. We don't understand how, how, but we know that the sense of the former purposelessness and meaninglessness of our lives is no longer there: the emptiness is gone, the darkness has been driven away by the light!
Just as the Spirit of God, who hovered over the waters, warmed and moved the primordial chaos and confusion into a cosmos - an ordered world that unfolded ever more richly, stretched by the life forces within - so He warms the confusion of our poor lives, and creates out of the inner chaos a cosmos, harmony, peace, inner unity. It is as if man is born anew. This miracle cannot be explained or denied - it is not imagination, it is a happy reality! The born-again person knows God in a completely different way than before. Not by the experience of others, not by description, not by hearsay, but by the experiential fact that he now lives in a whole new world: he is in God, in the kingdom of God, in Jesus Christ!
Someone described this miracle in a letter the other day. I was filled with an overwhelming joy and I was captivated. I now know and feel with joy that I have finally found my way home to my Father's house. The whole world has become my Father's house for me. And everything is so unspeakably beautiful: the trees, the clouds, the spring flowers. Praying is a joy, it is like pouring out my whole heart before my Father. The Bible has suddenly become an open book for me, God himself speaking to me through the words of that book. My feelings and attitude towards people have changed completely. God is leading me in all things as if He were holding my hand!"
Something undeniably happened here, a miracle: a new birth! The religious man in prayer asks God for all kinds of things, so that he may rejoice in all kinds of things! The religious man always has something from God, some gift, for example, his consolation, his light that shines up and down, his peace that calms storms. But the born-again man has Someone: the living Christ in his heart, through the Holy Spirit! And so is everyone who is born of the Spirit.
He who is born of the Spirit is as a believing Christian said of himself, "I am like a light bulb. I have no light in myself, but God twists me here and there in his current. Sometimes I need to shine brightly, sometimes I just need to give a little direction. But in any case I am His, and He places me where I can best serve Him." Spencer said, "The power an organism gives out of itself is equal to the power it takes in from without." So it is spiritually. Thus it is possible for a man of little ability to accomplish truly great things if he draws strength not from within himself but from above, if the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ is at work in and through him. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. So it is that in the person of Jesus he receives a new, higher life!
It is into this higher life to which we human beings are called - what the Bible calls the kingdom of God - that a person is brought by being born again of the Holy Spirit. This statement of Jesus becomes immediately clearer to us when we consider that there are five areas of life, five successive stages of life. The first degree is the mineral world, the next is the vegetable world, above that is the animal world, above the animal world is the human world, and above the human world is the world of God, the kingdom of God. We humans are between two worlds: below us is the animal world, above us is the world of God. The animal world is the world of the uninhibited struggle for existence, where the stronger devours the weaker, the world of the unbridled instinct of selfishness. In the world above us, on the contrary, the supreme law is sacrifice. It is not the destruction of the weak and the incapable, but their salvation and elevation. Not fighting and strife, but harmony and peace. Not death, but life!
Now life can come from above and from below. Which laws rule our instincts, guide our thoughts and actions: those of the animal kingdom or those of the kingdom of God? And is it possible to rise from the lower to the higher form of life? For example, is it possible to go from the mineral world to the vegetable world? Someone describes a beautiful, pure, white lotus flower blooming on the mirror of a lake. Underneath it is dirty, muddy mud. The lotus flower and the mud belong to two different life forms, there is a big gap between them. Suppose the mud wanted to come up from the depths and share in the lotus' beautiful life. The will itself, the good will, would not be enough, nor would any clear teaching about that higher life suffice. For it is not teaching or enlightenment that is needed, but transformation. What, then, must happen? The lotus flower stretches out its roots in the muddy ground and says to it, "If you want to share my life, first give up your old mud life and trust yourself entirely to me." This the mud does, and then he rises, ever higher, above himself, out of his old life, and without knowing how, another life takes possession of him, and all at once he is blooming there in the beauty of the lotus flower.
We men cannot ascend into the kingdom of God, however much we may want to. (How much Peter wanted to, he vowed. Our own good intentions are not enough, though he truly had them.) Neither is education, nor teaching in itself, enough. From us there is no way up to the world of God, to the kingdom of God, but from him there is a way down to the world of men! God walks this path! Jesus, the heavenly Lotus flower, sends down his roots here, into the depths. His Holy Spirit comes down to us in the human world and says: "Give up this old life and trust your life to my life!" Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it! And when we do that, we are taken over by a power that is not of us. His life flows into us, transforms us, changes us, and makes us part of a whole new world, the kingdom of God. We are born again! From above - by the Spirit of Christ! The heavenly electricity is turned on and the light bulb goes on, lighting up, serving!
How can we share in this miracle? Jesus' answer is incredibly simple. This intensification means asking not only with our mouths, but with our whole lives, earnestly, persistently, almost urgently, as if we know that we are waiting for the only, life-saving solution to all our difficulties! Ask, seek, call again, until something happens, until the source itself is revealed to you: the person of Christ in the reality of His Holy Spirit. He is for us the higher life that we long for, that we were originally created for: true life!
On that first Pentecost, God poured this life on the earth, and it is still hovering around us, mysterious as the wind, waiting for us to give it the opportunity to penetrate us! Behold, God gives himself in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit! Let us now try to ask with a truly open heart:
God's living Spirit, come and blessed descend upon me,
Let your eternal flame pass through my heart and mouth!
Untie me, send me away, fill me with fire!
Living Spirit of God, come and bless me!
Canto 463, verse 1
Amen
Date: 29 May 1955 Pentecost.