Regeneration Must Precede Sanctification

One of the most confusing areas of distinction in theology and church practice is the distinction between regeneration and sanctification. We often in conservative circles get the order backward, we demand evidence of sanctification via external compliance to certain rules rather than emphasizing regeneration. The reality of human nature is that external adherence to rules will get you so far but no farther. You can control behavior for a while by creating strict controls and instilling them young, and there is something to be said for this, but external conformity is no substitute for regeneration.

We have seen this first hand in conservative Anabaptist groups where a desire to "be not conformed to this world" (Romans 12:2) has morphed into a very rigid set of rules to prove one is not conformed to the world, while at the same time tending to create distinctions not just between the church and the world but just as often distinctions between the church and other parts of the church.

Simon Fry takes aim at this in his new series on Non-conformity. The second post in the series, Nonconformity- (part 2) When Does Transformation Happen?, which looks at non-conformity from a conservative Anabaptist perspective, does a deep dive on how Romans 12:2 and non-conformity are understood in that community. Simon's main point can be summarized in this one sentence:

Though we might not hear it emphasized, transformation must happen first; or nonconformity is worthless.

In other words, or as I might put it, regeneration must precede genuine sanctification. Genuine sanctification includes external signs of a non-conformity to the world but it starts with and is primarily a renewal of the mind, heart and affections away from the things of the world and toward the things of God. I can put a young woman in a homemade yoke-style dress with sleeves to the wrist and hem to the ankles but if she is harboring gossip and slander in her unregenerate heart, she is still conformed to the world no matter what she looks like.

That is not to suggest that there is no place for non-conformity. The Bible teaches modesty so a woman who tells me she is a Christian while intentionally dressing provocatively might get a raised eyebrow. An every-week-church-attending deacon at a conservative church who regularly cheats his customers in business likewise raises questions. I think brothers should be respectable in their communities and honest in their business dealings, sisters should dress modestly and submit to their husbands but only as a response to regeneration, not as a substitute for it.

Check out Simon's post, it is typical for him in being well reasoned, Scripturally based and thoughtful. Also check out the comments, there is some good back and forth going on there as well. Ultimately our Gospel priority is to see the whole man changed and not just the wardrobe.

A New Creation

Crossway posts photos with Scripture verses on their social media and while it seems like a small thing I often find myself deeply impacted by what they post. I pray that I never lose the sense of wonder that Scripture gives me. How can it be that God Himself condescended to communicate to us and preserve what He has communicated throughout the ages so that nearly 2000 years later I have it at my fingertips? Has there been a greater crime against the people of God than those who sought to deny access to the revealed will of God in His Word? Having God's revelation preserved for us is one of the greatest of all miracles.

Today Crossway posted one of the most powerful Scriptures in all of the New Testament, a Scripture that teaches us and reinforces for us one of the most powerful truths in the Bible. When an unbeliever, dead in his sins, is made alive in Christ, something miraculous happens. We are born-again, born not of woman but of the Holy Spirit (John 1:12-13). We used to be one thing, and now we are something completely different. Paul describes it like this:

Christians are a new creation. Everything has changed, some in subtle ways and others in major ways. I wrote on Facebook: Justification is a change in your very nature, not simply a temporary change in your attitude. As I have written before, the doctrine of the new birth, of regeneration, is one of the most neglected and misunderstood of any in the Bible.

I really think if people pondered verses like 2 Corinthians 5:17, in context with the entire New Testament, it would dramatically change how they understand a lot of issues.

1 John 2 and Regeneration

I have been deeply and profoundly drawn to how important and yet how neglected the doctrine of regeneration is to the church. I think a lot of the confusion over eternal security or the preservation of the saints has to do with not correctly understanding what happens in regeneration and this in turn skews our understanding of the church. Being born-again or regenerate is not something that we drift in and out of depending on the day. When one is born-again, you become a new creation in Christ:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 2 Corinthians 5:17

A new creation. Not a change in attitude but a change in nature, in substance. Where once there was a dead in sins and trespasses enemy of God with a heart of stone there is now after regeneration a new creature, a brand new creation just as the universe was once a new creation, a living, breathing child of God with a heart of flesh with the law of God written upon it. I don't want to get too deeply into this question because it is too complex for a quick note like this. However I was watching John Piper's take on 1 John 2:18-19 and I thought it was worth watching and passing on to others. As a reminder the verses in question say this:

Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us. 1 John 2:18-19

As Piper points out, one can be part of the visible church and yet leave but that is not because their regeneration has been undone but rather because they were never one of us to begin with. Taken together with John's Gospel account I think John (the apostle, not Piper) paints a picture of the perseverance of the saints that answers the question of how we are held safe by Christ (being a new creation after being born-again, held in the omnipotent power of God, ex. John 10:28) as well as why it seems sometimes that people we thought were Christians turned out to not have been truly born-again in the first place. Here is the video, give it a watch because I think this sort of deep diving on a verse and drawing from it the doctrines that it portrays is very important to understanding the bigger picture...

Regeneration Is Not An Attitude

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor 5:17)

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, "Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him." Jesus answered him, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus said to him, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.' The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:1-8)

Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of salvation in the broader evangelical church, up and down the spectrum, is the simple truth that salvation is entirely a work of God. Every bit of it. Jesus didn't die to make good men better or to create a potential, possible salvation maybe for anyone pious enough to grab it, a kind of faith meritocracy. Salvation is nothing less than a miracle, a greater miracle than parting the Red Sea or knocking down the walls of Jericho or Jesus walking on water, feeding the multitude or healing the sick and blind.

Instead of embracing the awesome and fearful image of a God who can and does save as He desires, we make salvation into a decision people make like deciding which house to buy or whether to go to Burger King or McDonalds. That decisional sovereignty might make sense if a right standing with God is predicated on your current attitude but that is not what Scripture teaches.

What troubles me about the language of "personal relationship with Jesus" and "Jesus wants a relationship not a religion" that is so in vogue in religious circles these days, other than the obvious issue of it not being anywhere in the Bible, is that it sidesteps the necessity of regeneration. There is no relationship with Christ apart from a supernatural act of regeneration and adoption. The "relationship" between an unregenerate man and God is one of an enemy and a criminal who will be held to account with no hope of acquittal. You can talk about your "personal relationship with Jesus" all you like but it is good for nothing more than making you look like a moral person in the eyes of your fellow man. It certainly changes nothing in your standing before God. Only being regenerate counts, only being born-again. That is why it is so maddening and inane when people talk about avowed unbelievers like Gandhi as if they are paragons of Christian virtues when the one thing that matters most in the Gospel was absent from their lives. They were never born again and therefore will not partake in life eternal. I have no problem with saying that Gandhi and anyone else who refuses to bow the knee to Christ in this life will face an eternal hell, one that is infinitely just. I take no pleasure in it but I would be ashamed to deny what Christ taught.

When a person is regenerated, it is not merely the taking on of a new attitude. A Christian who has been born-again is something completely new. He hasn't merely changed his mind. He was dead and now he is alive again. He was an enemy of God, a child of wrath and now he is reconciled to God and a child of The Most High. One does not waffle back and forth like a particularly fickle adolescent girl, this day, this hour in love with God and saved and the next falling out of love and unsaved. Salvation is not a spectrum where you get to 50% +1 units of saved and you get in (unless you slide back to 50% - 1 right before  you die). It is all or nothing. You are born-again or you are not. If you are, you a in the Kingdom of God, adopted and justified. If you are not you will never see the Kingdom no matter how many good works and acts of religious piety you perform.

When the church that has a doctrine un-moored from the necessity of regeneration it ceases to be the church of Jesus Christ. It might be a swell place to hang out, it may feed lots of poor people, it might have a fat bank account but it is not the church, the both invisible and visible temporal embodiment of the Kingdom of God. We are in real danger of losing this most precious, most necessary doctrine of regeneration. If we do we have nothing to offer the world but our own piety and that will save no one from the judgment to come.

You must be born again.

It doesn't get much clearer than that. 

Flock membership precedes belief

I am struck repeatedly by the Good Shepherd discourse in John 10 and what it says about a question that so many people wrestle with. When it comes to evangelism, why do so few people believe even when they hear the same Gospel presentation? Free will doesn’t explain it because all unregenerate people are in the same boat, dead in trespasses and sins (Eph 2: 1-3). Why then do some believe and not others? Jesus answers this question very clearly in this pivotal chapter of John’s Gospel record…

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. (John 10: 14-16)

Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not part of my flock. (John 10: 25-26)

To summarize...

- You are not part of the flock because you believe, you believe because you are part of His flock.

- People are not outside of His flock because they don’t believe, they don’t believe because they are not part of His flock.

- When someone who is part of the flock, those God the Father has given to the Son, hears the Gospel proclamation at the appointed time, they believe it.

This seems so straightforward. The Pharisees didn’t believe because they were not part of His flock. We who do believe do so because we are part of the flock. We were given by the Father to the Son (John 10: 29) to be part of His flock, all of those given to the Son by the Father will hear His voice, all will come to Him and none will be lost. As clear as this is, it is the source of so much confusion for people. Scripture and plain old common sense tell us that dead sinners don’t respond unless acted on first by an outside source but the majority report in evangelicalism is focused on us choosing God of our own volition. Little wonder that evangelism is so muddled in the church.

This does not negate our need to preach the Gospel to all people everywhere. One of His sheep doesn’t look much different from someone who is not His sheep. In fact, to our sinful eyes it sometimes might seem that some people look more like His sheep to us than those who really are because of our biases. It is often the unlovely, the poor, the unwise who are His sheep instead of the respectable, well-educated and wealthy. This knowledge does (or should) give us boldness because we know that those who are the sheep of His flock will believe the Word. It is not up to us through clever arguments or impassioned sermons or evangelistic methods. His sheep hear His voice and follow Him. If someone rejects the message, it is not because of you, it is because they are not His sheep.

I for one am glad that my status as one of His sheep was not left up to me.

The faith or regeneration question

Christians affirm that we are saved by faith alone. That saving faith results in good works, works that are possible and pleasant to us after we are saved. Those works of course do not save us, help to save us or make us "saveable". Christians also recognize the necessity for regeneration, that we must be born-again to see the Kingdom of God (John 3:3). These two truths bring up a "chicken or the egg" dilemma. Which comes first, faith which leads to regeneration or regeneration which leads to faith?

Traditional Reformed theology holds that faith of necessity follows regeneration, that an unregenerate heart is incapable of saving faith. This is my position. Most evangelicals today (and for much of recent history) would say the opposite, that we are regenerated or born-again when we have in faith. I have been thinking about this since we met with the church last Wednesday and discussed the role of the Holy Spirit in regeneration.

Most evangelicals will affirm a couple of key points of doctrine:

- Man is depraved, dead in sins and trespasses.

- Someone who is born again is a new creation, which is something that you cannot undo. You cannot be "un-born again"

The problem is that while the majority of the church agrees with those two points, and rightly so, the disconnect comes when you deal with the necessary implications of those two doctrines if you take them in a vacuum. In other words:

- How does a spiritually dead sinner respond in faith to the Gospel?

- If someone can of their own volition exercise faith, why can't they stop exercising it?

Those questions are impossible to answer if faith precedes regeneration. If man is able to save himself by choosing to exercise faith in Christ, than Jesus died to enable men to save themselves and man becomes the ultimate arbiter of his own salvation. That sounds awfully palatable to our ears but theologically there would be nothing more cruel than for God to leave the "decision" up to spiritually dead sinners and indeed I would argue that if the final decision was left up to man, there wouldn't be a single sinner redeemed and Christ would have died in vain.

The New Covenant in Christ that we celebrate with the Lord's Supper was not that if we have faith, then God would reward us with salvation. It was that God would initiate salvation by creating a new heart in dead sinners (Eze 36:26), that He would put His spirit within us, that He would write His law upon our hearts (Jer 31: 33) and that He would remember our sins no more (Jer 31: 34). That is the Gospel of grace, a monergistic faith that makes salvation truly all of grace, not a cooperative effort. When you gather with the church today you can truly sing "Amazing Grace" because grace that is all of God truly is amazing.

The Reformers had many faults, missed the mark in many places and were flat-out wrong in some. You have to hand it to them though, when it comes to recovering the glorious doctrines of God's sovereign grace in salvation they were right on. I thank God this morning that He didn't leave it up to me or wait for me to save myself. In His mercy, He saved us while we were yet sinners incapable of saving ourselves or even showing faith in Christ.

But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life. The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. (Titus 3:4-8)

(See here for an excellent introduction to monergistic regeneration)

Very helpful answer on regeneration preceding faith

I hold that regeneration precedes and causes faith. I found this at Monergism in response to a questioner who was told that John 20:31 proves the opposite (which makes no sense at all but I digress). I especially liked this explanation of the relationship between regeneration and faith.

Faith is to regeneration as heat is to fire. They do not happen at different times but simultaneously ... yet we know that one causes the other. Similarly When one strikes a pool ball and it hits the other ball, the two actually strike one another at the same time, but it is actually the momentum of one which causes the other one to move. When a baby is born, he breathes. Likewise, when the Spirit regenerates us, we believe. It is part of the new nature to do so. And the Spirit does it in conjunction with the word, with preaching. The preaching of the word is like seed cast into the ground, but for the seed to take root, God must plow up the fallow ground of our hearts and like rain from heaven, he must geminate the seed with the Spirit. Without that we are hardened to the gospel and remain unfruitful. So all the glory goes to God alone in our salvation.

It is inadequate as are all analogies by nature, but it makes a lot of sense as do the verses quoted in the body of the response. Faith is a result of, is caused by regeneration. With regeneration, faith is impossible.