During this festive season of the year when the Christian world harks back to that day when the Son of God came wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger, it is well that we give careful attention to the words of this same Jesus, when He said, "Ye must be born again."
The birth of Jesus as the manger child, His sinless life, His death and resurrection, all give assurance that man can become a "brand new person" (2 Cor. 5:17, Taylor)* in Him.
This new birth that Jesus called for and that He so graciously provides is the experience of conversion. Conversion is essential to salvation. It is a basic condition for membership in the family of God. It is a must for all who would gain eternal life.
These words are so trite. We speak them so casually. It is so easy for them to roll from our tongues. But is it only lip service that we give? Do we really understand the great and desperate need for genuine conversion? Have we actually experienced the changes that it brings to the life? Are we thoroughly enjoying the benefits of this personal relationship with our Lord?
Kenneth W. Linsley, lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force, declares that the basic questions human beings want most to have answered today are: "Does God really intervene to change men's lives? Is Christian conversion a reality? Can something really happen to a man that transforms his life?"—Christianity Today, April 12, 1968.
These are questions that obviously demand an answer by experience. Words alone will not do. To proclaim and define and explain are all essential, and should be done with clarity and simplicity, but this alone is not enough. The disheartened, disillusioned, impatient "now" generation demands more than this. They have listened for years to the claims of Christianity and have been so little in practice. Now their challenge is "Show me! If God is alive and if surrender to the Lordship of Christ really makes a difference, where is the evidence in your life?"
Because practice hasn't measured up with preachments, the church of today, and particularly the ministry, is in trouble. Whether we like to admit it or not, the prestige of the ministry has plummeted to a new low. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans conducted by Lou Harris and Associates, clergymen are down in public esteem and confidence to a rating below that of doctors, bankers, scientists, military leaders, educators, corporation heads, psychiatrists, and even local retailers. In fact, the ministry ran a scant one per cent ahead of Congressmen and Federal Government leaders.
This must be due partly to the fact that when it comes to discussing such elementary subjects as the new birth, many clergymen have little or nothing to say. They see no great significance in the words "Ye must be born again." Others may know the theory of it and be able to explain it but are woefully lacking in the experience.
It is of this sham and hypocrisy that the younger generation is particularly tired. We see many evidences of this on our own academy and college campuses. If these young people are to be reached they must have evidence—visible, living evidence—of what changes can take place when a life is surrendered wholly to Jesus Christ.
This challenge comes with particular force to us, the ministers, teachers, and other leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. God is looking to us for this kind of testimony to what He can do. This is the kind of demonstration to which we should be committed. None other will win the following that is needed, particularly among the youth who must constitute the leadership of the church of tomorrow. This demonstration will not be accompanied with placards and marching bands and news-hungry photographers, but it must be the real thing, the natural, visible, radiant response to a genuine inner experience. With the apostle Paul, we must be able to say, "For me to live is Christ." Only such a whole-souled, thoroughgoing, noncompromising witness can offer a challenge to our present materialistic, secularistic society. In an age when everything must be proved in the laboratory or test tube, only the living witness of the miracle-working power of God to alter lives will catch a hearing.
Above everything else this is what the youth of our own church are asking for. They have been fooled and disappointed too often. They dislike spiritual schizophrenia. Now they demand that the words we speak be backed up by example. We must take to heart the words of Paul, "The kingdom of God is not just talking; it is living by God's power" (1 Cor. 4:20, Taylor).*
The greatest challenge of our church today is that of saving our own youth. The most effective contribution we can personally make toward the realization of this objective is not in the better sermons we may preach and the better counsel we may give, but in the better lives we may live.
As we pass through another Christmas season and by song and word review the story of Bethlehem, let us take a new fresh look at the words of Jesus to Nicodemus, spoken that moonlit night in old Jerusalem, when He said, "Ye must be born again."
* The texts in this article credited to Taylor are from Living Letters, the Paraphrased Epistles, by Kenneth N. Taylor. Copyright 1962 by Tyndale House, Publishers