How To Be Born Again

[Armchair Apologist]

Brings you or forces you?
Teaches you or believes for you?
Points the way or drags you down it?

The ultimate question that shows the difference between beliefs is what you may do when you get to the point that the Holy Spirit brings you to. Does the Holy Spirit make you trust or does He allow you to reject the Saviour?

I’m not denying the work of the Holy Spirit. I’m not denying that salvation is of the Lord.
I don’t see any Scripture that indicates acceptance is of the Lord. The gift is without doubt. The acceptance is on the person. That is why we are told to believe and have faith.

Is it really worth arguing over such semantics?

The Holy Spirit of God brings you to repentance and faith. You can argue over whether regeneration precedes faith but most would agree that regeneration brings forth both repentance and faith and that such occurs through the power of God!

If we can agree upon this, it is understood that God chooses the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe and that such goes far beyond our feeble attempts at trying to understand everything.

This is about as far as I would care to dip my toes into the Calvinism/Arminianism debate.

 

[Armchair Apologist]

The wonder is that they do believe that the Holy Spirit doesn’t act in the case of certain people.

Are you trying to say that the Holy Spirit acts in the case of all people?

If so, why aren't all receptive to the hearing of the gospel message? Why is it that so many adamantly reject the gospel and want nothing to do with it regardless of you abilities to "persuade" them?

And that they believe that the Holy Spirit has decided to never act upon someone at anytime in their lives makes them wrong.

We do not have the slightest clue as to how, when, or if the Holy Spirit acts upon anyone! All we are able to do is faithfully proclaim the Gospel to all if perchance the Holy Spirit sovereignly decides to move on their behalf.

 

[Armchair Apologist]

What would happen if you decide to believe and immediately have a heart attack, before you were born again? It really doesn't matter in itself - no one who believes in Christ is not born again and no one who is born again doesn't believe. I know where the theologies can go off in either direction of course. Does God wait, hoping that you will believe so that he can regenerate you? That doesn't seem to be what John 3 is saying. But is there some responsibility for you to choose to rationally believe - and warning of what it means if you don't? That's in John 3 also. That's why I say it doesn't matter.

The "Ordo Saludis" is an exercise that is useful perhaps in a Seminary classroom when discussing soteriology. It is also a means by which one may go out and pick a righteous theological "barfight" but such can also turn into profane and vain babbling of which we need to be careful to avoid.

As the man who was born blind observed - "all I know is that once I was blind, now I can see!"

 

[DaveXR650]

If you decide to believe that is believing, for all intents and purposes. I don’t mean decide to look into it soon. What I am saying is that you cannot believe and not be born again.

Yeah I agree. I'm just saying that if you reduce it to you simply believing you have to still deal with a rather odd John 3:6-8 where clearly something more is going on than your decisive action to believe. You have both things going on. Some Calvinists dwell only on the supernatural aspect and camp only on verses 6-8 and neglect that you are to believe on Christ, as a command and an invitation. But some non-Calvinists skip verses 6-8 and act like this is all a matter of you exercising your will, unaided or unchanged by the Holy Spirit. But verses 6-8 are there, and cannot be ignored.

 

[Anthony Pritchard]

I am very cautious regarding any sort of "Methodology" these days. Looking at your major points here, I do not see any place where I would disagree with your presentation but the words "How to be saved" brings me to hesistate and push back just a little.

The Philippian Jailor asked "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" and I cannot think of any better way he could've worded it but what I do see here is our human nature at work always focusing on what "we must do" when the answer is there is nothing we can do aside from turning to God in repentance and in faith, believing the gospel! There is no doubt that Paul had been dealing with this Philippian Jailor earlier that day (or whenever it was that Paul was remanded to his custody) and I am sure that Paul stuck to the clarity of the Gospel message and this is what we ought to stick to as well!

Born again - what happens inside you. Born from above - where it comes from. Saved - what it accomplishes.

 

[DaveXR650]

The wonder is that they do believe that the Holy Spirit doesn’t act in the case of certain people.

That's true. Personally, I believe that we all should be able to come to Christ upon hearing the gospel and at any rate we all should be able to seek God and attempt to do his will on our own, even if we haven't heard the gospel yet. But it's also true that we by our own free will - don't. So, we are all guilty and truly so. But I see no evidence that God has created some people for the purpose of being damned. And I do believe that when a person is not saved in some sense, even though God is sovereign, he is unhappy and it goes against his will - that they were lost. I have to leave the specifics of how that works to Him.

Some Calvinists say that puts man in charge or makes God impotent and weak. The way I look at it is that throughout life, on our own we become harder and more ingrained in sin. Most of us who are saved are objects of grace beyond simply hearing the gospel truths. God has done much more to rescue us from various levels of depravity and individual lives of sin than we will ever understand. We just have to leave it there because the fact is that there does seem to be others who, while just as naturally nice and decent as we are, don't seem to get saved and most of us are not bold enough to claim that the only difference was that we turned out to be wiser or superior to them.

 

[DaveXR650]

The "Ordo Saludis" is an exercise that is useful perhaps in a Seminary classroom when discussing soteriology. It is also a means by which one may go out and pick a righteous theological "barfight" but such can also turn into profane and vain babbling of which we need to be careful to avoid.

Yep. Because it can split a good church right down the middle. And for no good reason.

 

[Ascetic X]

Having said that, we use the word "lost" to refer to unsaved sinners across the board.

Gentiles are never lost, they are unsaved. Who would have lost them? They never belonged to the Father.

Gentiles were not lost. Israel was lost for Israel is the family that belonged to God the Father.

In the Bible, being "lost" means being spiritually separated from God, lacking salvation, and unable to find your way back.

Lost is not necessarily limited to souls God once had, then escaped from His grip.

Being without Christ, having no hope, being without God in the world is a sure definition of what it means to be spiritually lost.

While Israel belongs to God in a special, privileged sense, all souls belong to God as their Creator and Benefactor.


Ephesians 18:4,5

That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world:

But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.



Ezekiel 18:4

Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.