I can, at times, be slow on the uptake. I’ve been on this Christian journey, with varying degrees of intentionality, since 1985. The past couple of years have been a bit of a wilderness experience, and the past 9-10 months, especially, have been a time of refining.

Though I’d opened it occasionally over many years, for most of 2019 I’ve been using Ozwald Chambers’ devotional “My Utmost For His Highest”, and as I’m reading, I’ve often felt like “I’m not this person you’re describing. I can’t be this focused, obedient follower of Jesus. I’m too self-centered, too fickle, too ‘prone to wander’ as the old hymn goes”. Then I read last Sunday’s (Oct. 6th) entry, and things kind of clicked into place for me, and it’s been in the back of my mind all week.

I was right. I can’t live up to the standard of holiness that God demands. Even though part of me knew better, I was still trying to do it of my own volition, using my own internal well of resources. And I was consistently – and predictably – coming up short.

I guess I’m at a point where some of those pieces are starting to fit together. I had read similar ideas before, and on some level understood it, but not fully. I probably still don’t understand it fully. And that’s probably because surrender is a never-ending process, at least on this side of eternity.

If Jesus Christ is going to regenerate me, what is the problem He faces? It is simply this— I have a heredity in which I had no say or decision; I am not holy, nor am I likely to be; and if all Jesus Christ can do is tell me that I must be holy, His teaching only causes me to despair. But if Jesus Christ is truly a regenerator, someone who can put His own heredity of holiness into me, then I can begin to see what He means when He says that I have to be holy. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into anyone the hereditary nature that was in Himself, and all the standards He gives us are based on that nature — His teaching is meant to be applied to the life which He puts within us. The proper action on my part is simply to agree with God’s verdict on sin as judged on the Cross of Christ.

The New Testament teaching about regeneration is that when a person is hit by his own sense of need, God will put the Holy Spirit into his spirit, and his personal spirit will be energized by the Spirit of the Son of God — “…until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). The moral miracle of redemption is that God can put a new nature into me through which I can live a totally new life. When I finally reach the edge of my need and know my own limitations, then Jesus says, “Blessed are you…” (Matthew 5:11). But I must get to that point. God cannot put into me, the responsible moral person that I am, the nature that was in Jesus Christ unless I am aware of my need for it.

Just as the nature of sin entered into the human race through one man, the Holy Spirit entered into the human race through another Man (see Romans 5:12-19). And redemption means that I can be delivered from the heredity of sin, and that through Jesus Christ I can receive a pure and spotless heredity, namely, the Holy Spirit.