Please explain to me what regeneration is if not "born again"?
Tts 3:5Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost;
Regeneration is that work of the Spirit that takes place during the presentation of the gospel, when the blindness is removed, when the dead is made alive, when the hardened heart is replaced with a flesh that allows the sinner to behold the beauty of Christ and is enabled to repond in repentance and faith in the conversion experience, being justified, and being adopted by God and sealed with the Spirit of adoption.
All taking place at once.
And you do not believe this is being born again when the "dead" are made "alive"?
The following scripture says "regeneration" is being "saved".
Tts 3:5Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost
1. From my understanding, Regeneration as used there in Titus 3:5 captures the whole of salvation, from start to finish.
It is wholly the work of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.
The faith that comes from God that is a gift from Him is His word.
The hardest for men to do is to give up on what the believe and just trust in His word.
We must believe in Jesus to have eternal life and that means given up on one self and just trusting in Jesus. Jesus says
pick up your cross and follow Him. He tell the fisherman to stop and follow Him and He will make them fishers of men.
Some come to God with preconcieved notions and we cling on them and don't let go. If we love anything more than Jesus then we are not worthy of Him.
To come to Jesus as a child and casting everything down and let Him teach us. See it is His word that changes us and regenerates us, when we walk away we walk away from God grace.
We are saved by grace through faith and it is not of our selves, because it is the word of God
So this...particularly the bolded...happens BEFORE faith?!? And how is faith necessary for salvation again if one is justified prior to faith?
This is almost as bad as what the ME'ers teach!
Spiritual life = paragraph upon paragraph of noted theologians, the use of the greek tenses, and what amounts to an advanced level calculus equation to explain what life really is.
This occurs BEFORE faith according to your paragraph...before the last "when". If you go from dead to alive, that is salvation my friend. If faith occurs after this (enabled to respond in repentance and faith), not only is it unnecessary...since you are now spiritually alive...but not a requirement to be made alive.
1. The bondage of the will is removed, the stone heart becomes flesh, so that the sinner desires Christ for the forgiveness of sins and responds in repentance and faith, experiencing conversion and justification.
2. How then does a person dead in sin, hardened by sin and blinded by sin, seeks Christ for salvation?
In my understanding of regeneration, the sinner's eyes are open to sins and the need for a Savior.
Apart from the opening of the eyes to sin, the sinner has no sight to see them and desire the Savior to be cleansed.
#1 is what I refer to the drawing, or conviction of the Gospel. As Ecc. 3:11 points us to, the desire is built within everyone to live forever.
That's not what regeneration is though.
Regeneration is the new birth, born again.
As Allan has pointed out, "dead in sin" is metaphorical in nature, the same way "dead to sin" is.