Beginnings

Understanding How We Experience the New Birth

Stephen Smallman

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781596389465
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christliche Theologie

This study of real-life conversion stories explores the ways people experience being "born again" and shows how Christians can best serve others as spiritual midwives rather than spiritual salespeople.

Chapter 1

Kathy’s Story

Kathy was a young woman who lived the good life that the Washington, DC, of the 1990s offered an upwardly mobile woman who was attractive and well educated. She was a successful stockbroker who dressed well, drove a good car, and kept herself in excellent shape for running marathons. Kathy was also living with a man who had promised to marry her when the time was right.

This beautiful life started to crumble when her fiancé announced that he was gay and decided to stop trying to live a straight life. It took a further hit when several months later he called Kathy to tell her that he had just been diagnosed with the HIV virus and urged her to get herself checked. At that early point AIDS was considered to be exclusively a disease of gay men and drug addicts, so Kathy ignored his warnings. However, after several more months she began to notice that she was finding it difficult to get into shape for her next marathon, and she was having a harder and harder time concentrating at work. This went on until she could no longer put off a visit to the doctor. It was then that she found out that not only did she have the HIV virus, but it had grown into full-blown AIDS. She walked out of the doctor’s office having heard her death sentence.

One of the first things Kathy determined she needed to do was to talk to her boss. He was a man she respected, so she was comfortable telling him her exact situation. On hearing her story Carl asked if she would be offended if he set aside business for a moment and talked to her personally. When she expressed her willingness to do this, Carl asked how this was affecting her spiritually. Kathy spoke of a Roman Catholic upbringing from which she had turned away as an adult. She then listened as Carl spoke briefly of his own spiritual journey and the church he and his wife had recently found. He invited Kathy to attend with him and his wife.

A few weeks later Kathy accepted Carl’s invitation and met him and his family at the church, where she insisted on sitting in the back row. But she came back the next week and the next, and even accepted an invitation to attend a Sunday evening gathering of singles. She decided to be frank with them about her situation just as she had been with Carl, and to her surprise and delight they accepted and loved her. Kathy became a regular both Sunday morning and evening, even though she still didn’t think of herself as religious.

I became involved in Kathy’s story in September 1991. I was returning from a nine-month sabbatical and decided to resume my preaching ministry with a series of messages entitled “Meet Your New Pastor.” This seemed to fit because I was personally renewed by my time away (my first significant break after more than twenty years of pastoring the church), and I also knew that a number of people had started attending since I left. For the first message I told the story of my coming to faith as a teenager with no church background at all. At the end of the message I spoke of coming to Christ in very much the same way that a baby is born. A seed of life is planted by God, but it has to grow, very much like a pregnancy. Finally that new life “goes public,” and just like a newborn baby, there is a cry as we confess Christ. I described how I had done that in my conversion experience. I then explained that while not everyone has the same experience, when the time is right to give ourselves to Christ we know it. I had no idea at the time that Kathy was sitting in her familiar seat in the back row of the church that morning, knowing in her heart that this was her time. That evening she told her singles fellowship that their prayers were answered, and she was now trusting in Christ as her Lord and Savior.

Within a week as I was settling back into the routine of serving the church, I had a call from Kathy asking for an appointment, and I began to hear her story. Kathy and I had many conversations over the next two years. She grew spiritually and gave clear evidence by her life and witness that she was “born again.” I still treasure a picture of her taken the day she joined the church, joyfully smiling, with her arms around Carl and me, who she called her “favorite men in the world.” Following the service she gave a big party as an incentive to get all her old friends (including her former lover) to come to church. The disease took its toll, and eventually her body wasted away. In her final days she was lovingly cared for by members of her Sunday evening fellowship group. I served her Communion during the week, and that weekend, while I was away leading a seminar explaining spiritual birth, Kathy peacefully went home to heaven. It was my privilege to conduct Kathy’s funeral and to tell her story to a large gathering that filled our church.

The simple analogy of comparing spiritual birth to physical birth is one I have been using in preaching, teaching, and personal conversation for over twenty years. It originally came together after a sermon I preached from John 3 (Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus), in which I tried to think through with the congregation what it means to actually experience the new birth Jesus talked about. In the congregation that morning were two members of the new ministry Prison Fellowship, which grew out of Charles Colson’s highly publicized conversion (more about that later in the book). After the service they approached me and asked if I would give that same message to a group of inmates who would be coming to town. I still remember how they expressed their request. “There is no group of people who are more evangelized than those in prison. They are exhorted over and over to ‘get saved’ or ‘give their hearts to Jesus.’ But no one explains God’s part in their getting saved. You just did, and we would like you to tell that to the inmates.”

When I prepared to talk to the Prison Fellowship group, I illustrated my teaching by drawing a simple diagram that drew a parallel between physical and spiritual birth, which I believe was Jesus’ intention in John 3. Little did I know it then, but that diagram (what I came to call the birthline) marked a turning point in the way I have done ministry ever since. It is not the diagram itself as much as the ideas it suggests that have had such an impact on my ministry.

My intention in writing this book is still the one I started with many years ago—to help understand in practical terms how people actually experience the new birth. We can study it biblically and theologically, but what does it look like in the lives of real people? This is the question that has faced me as a pastor and that those of you who are serving in prison ministries, youth work, as Bible study leaders, missionaries, and parents are dealing with every day. I have presented these ideas in many settings and have received insights and suggestions from people of all different backgrounds. What I am going to present in this book is the result of contributions from many, many people.

I believe the place to start in helping others is to try to understand as best we can just how the Spirit worked in our hearts. That is where I will begin. We will do some study of key Scripture passages, so that our experience is put into a biblical setting, and then I will ask you to reflect on how this has worked in your own experience.

For some of you, reading this may be your opportunity to consider whether or not you have been born again. Perhaps you have heard that phrase but are not quite sure what it means. Today people often make a distinction between Christians and “born again” Christians. What is the difference? Or is there a difference? I hope what I write will be helpful to you personally, even if you feel you are very much a beginner in the Christian walk.

The second part of the book will be an application to ministry. By ministry I don’t necessarily mean the formal or ordained ministry. I mean those of you who are involved with people in a setting where you are discussing matters involving their spiritual standing before God. That applies to everyone who has experienced the new birth. God used others to bring you to faith, and you need to be available to be used in passing the faith along to yet others. In one chapter I want to speak particularly to parents and those involved with ministry to children from Christian homes about the spiritual birth of our children. The phrase I use to describe our involvement with the new birth of others is spiritual midwives. It is God who causes the birth, but we can be there to help the process along.

This book will be full of personal stories like the one I just told about Kathy. We all love to hear stories, and it could be tempting to skip the substance of the book and just read the stories. But every story I will relate is included to serve as a case study of the basic principles of the biblical teaching about the new birth. In particular I want to show how the Holy Spirit works before people actually exercise faith in Jesus, in what we usually call conversion. In the hundreds of settings where I have presented this idea it has seldom failed to be immediately recognized as true to people’s personal experience. But what that actually looks like is as varied as the people themselves. As we will see, factors such as family, personal circumstances, and temperaments are all part of how the Spirit works. A variety of stories will make this truth clear, but they will also remind us that we should not expect particular experiences to be duplicated. I will offer an analysis of many of the stories, and I hope this will encourage you to begin thinking in the same way about your own story and those of people you are encountering in ministry or everyday life.

In the case of Kathy, for example, consider all the elements that led to her coming to faith in Christ. She was shocked into an awareness of her need for help (but not necessarily her need for a Savior), but she was able to express that to a Christian supervisor who was willing to share his faith. Kathy also experienced the reality of Christ’s love and acceptance in a welcoming community even as she began to hear about it in preaching and teaching. And then, at just the right time, my story and the idea of the baby calling out gave her the nudge she needed to surrender her life to Christ and confess him to others. We can observe all of these pieces, but at the root of it all we also see the gracious working of God directing the whole process. Not many stories will be as dramatic as Kathy’s, and not everyone has such a specific point of conversion as she did. But what will be common to all authentic experiences of the new birth is the inward work of the Holy Spirit bringing us to a simpl...