Jun 14
21
WHAT IS THE NEW BIRTH?
In conversion the soul is ushered into a new, spiritual world—emphatically born again. The first birth introduces us into the natural world; the second introduces us into a spiritual world. The first birth ushers us into a world of sin, and woe, and death; the second birth, into a world of holiness, and happiness, and life. It is the birth of the soul into grace…
The truly-converted soul is a living soul, quickened from a death of sin into a life of righteousness. The life, the new-born life, which now animates him, is the life of God, communicated in virtue of his union with Christ, who is our Life, and by the agency of the Holy Spirit, the Divine Quickener. All now is life: new, spiritual, holy, deathless life. The bitterness of spiritual death is past, its sovereign dethroned, its dominion destroyed and the glory, the reign, and the power of a divine and new-born life triumphantly enter the soul; and from henceforth exists an empire as lasting as the being of Him who created it…
And now the soul begins really to live. It swims in an infinite sea of life, the life of God. As from and in Him, so to and for Him that life is now lived. Christ is his life, and to Christ that life is consecrated. Spiritual death—dead faith, dead obedience, dead hope—is abolished, and the spiritually-quickened soul bathes itself in a divine ocean of vitality and bliss…How precious are its actings! Prayer, is life breathing; faith, is life trusting; love, is life adoring; service, is life laboring; submission, is life patiently suffering. Life of God in the soul of man!…
The New Birth likewise consists in the restoration of the Divine image to the soul. The moral image of God was effaced in the fall of the first Adam…The righteousness and holiness in which God originally created us gave place to the empire and reign of sin…But the New Birth is a restoration of the lost image of God to man. By Christ, the Second Man, it is effectually and indelibly recovered…
The New Birth, then, is the restoration of the image of God to the soul of man. But the apostle puts it yet more distinctly, “The new man, which after God [or, the image of God] is created in righteousness and true holiness.” (Eph 4:24.) We know not a more correct, and at the same time a more precious, view of the New Birth than this…”Partakers of the divine nature”—”Partakers of His holiness”—for these are the expressions of the Holy Spirit. Octavius Winslow (1808-1878)