![]() Now notice that there is one positive statement. How wonderful it is to have Christian parents and friends who are solicitous for our spiritual welfare! – but the most saintly man or woman cannot produce within us a spiritual re-birth. Good men and women can do a great many things to help us. ![]() It would not be enough to say: “I’m tired of being a commoner, so I have made up my mind to become a member of the royal family!” Suppose I wanted to become a child of royalty. No amount of decision or resolution on our part will make us members of God’s family, for it is “not of human decision”. No one can make himself a child of God by any amount of self-determination or self-effort. Christian parents do not automatically produce Christian children. We inherit a great many things from our parents – their dispositions, temperaments, and perhaps their features but there is one thing we do not inherit from them, and that is spiritual grace. This means that the birth spoken of here is not the result of human generation we do not inherit membership in the family of God. How, then, is one born into the family of God? Notice that in John 1: 13 there are three negatives:. Nobody ever became a child without being born a child and no one ever becomes a member of God’s family without being born into that family. We can only become children of God by the same process by which we become children of our earthly parents – that is, by birth – look at John 1: 13 – “children born ”. This raises a very important question:- 2. Christians are only the children of God because they have put their “faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 26). In that God has created us, He is our Father but when we turn to such verses as John 1: 12 and Galatians 3: 26, we discover that there is a far more intimate relationship into which we need to come, and into which we may come, where in a spiritual sense we know God as our loving heavenly Father. But are we not already the children of God?Īre not all people, everywhere, God’s children? Is not God the Father of all? In a creatorial sense He is our Father and we are His children – look up Malachi 2: 10 and Acts 17:28. What a wonderful thing it is that poor sinning creatures such as we are can actually become children of the most High God! We can well understand the apostle John’s sense of awe as he wrote 1 John 3: 1! 1. The way of entrance into an earthly family is by physical birth, and the way of entrance into the heavenly family is by the miracle of a spiritual birth – a second birth, a birth from above – look up John 3: 3-8. ![]() There is only one way of entrance into the family of God, and that is by being born into that family. Series 4 Study 1 BEING BORN INTO GOD’S FAMILY
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