I Didn’t Ask to Be Born!

Coming into this world wasn’t easy. It was a cold, noisy, glaring shock to my system. Sure, at the time I didn’t really know that I had a system to be shocked, but the experience was real enough. I didn’t know what I was or where I was. All I knew was that I was. And I am told that I made sure everybody around me knew how profoundly needy and how deeply disturbed I was about the whole incident. I screamed my lungs out. You see - I hadn’t asked to be born.

There is not a person on earth who ever asked to be born. We exist by God’s fiat. The moment God created - in those words “let us make” and “let there be” - there was contained and sealed all that would follow. As soon as there was Adam then there was you and me. We were in Him, waiting to be revealed. And we would be revealed just as surely as God said, “Let there be…”

There was no consultation process with the creation itself prior to its existence. Such a thought is ludicrous. Whatever is – all of it, including you and me – springs from the mind and will and eternal counsels of a God, Who needs no other to give Him assent or advice or permission. That is what “God” means. There is no hope, no power, no origination apart from Him – and He is de facto unopposable.

So when we hear our kids (or ourselves) whining that we didn’t ask to be born, in rebellion against whatever form of authority God has ordained for us to be submitted to – then we truly know that it is a foolish plaint. Nobody asked to be born. God did it anyway. Grow up and get used to it. And, to be fair, most of us do just that.

But once we are grown up we tend to forget. We forget that birth was an involuntary act, which was ordained for each of us personally by the creative pleasure of God. He made not just mankind, but this man. He chose to work it out through the will and desires of my parents and their parents and so on…all the way back to Adam – but there can be no discussion on the underlying truth that He did it.

So, what of the new birth? Are we now tempted to think that spiritual rebirth falls outside the creative prerogative of God alone? Does He now need additional counsel or impetus from the creation He already made without any input from outside of Himself?

When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus He said, “You must be born again or you cannot see the kingdom of God.” He did not command Nicodemus to do something that he was incapable of doing. He did not say, “Be born again…” He said, “You must be born again…” It is about what must be done for you, not what you can do of yourself.

If you have been born again, God has worked it out through your own will and desires to the point where you asked Him to be the Lord of you life. But to think that you did that on your own account belies the truth of the creative sovereignty of your Maker. You are no more born again of your own will and power than you were born the first time of your own volition. You were literally nothing before the creation and you are still nothing. Give God the glory and let go of the stubborn desire to think that you contributed to your salvation by deciding to accept Christ when it was already decided for you in the counsels of eternity.

Experientially, you heard and understood and accepted Christ because God worked it out through people and His providence and His Spirit until you came to an acceptance of Him. Positionally, however, you were saved before you were ever created, because God purposed to do it. Listen to the words of Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation by the grace of God:

“If any man doth ascribe aught of salvation, even the very least, to the free will of man, he knoweth nothing of grace, and he hath not learned Jesus Christ aright.”

It is important to understand that man’s will is not eradicated by this truth. It is subjugated. God’s will is given its rightful place as supreme. Nothing that He does ultimately depends upon what we decide. He decided in advance. It is simply that we finite, sin-darkened, blind sheep do not know the end from the beginning like God does. We walk in the discovery of ordained reality through the exercise of our own will. But our volition doesn’t determine the outcome. It does, however, determine our accountability - since God judges the hearts of men. Our intentions mean far more to God than our so-called “accomplishments”.

Just as our physical birth was not a decision we were in a position to make, so our spiritual rebirth is not a decision we made either. It is a condition we discovered through the providence of God and the working of His mighty Spirit, as He brought us to the salvation He had prepared for us all along.

This is not easy stuff. It is not the milk of the gospel. But there has been a peculiar reluctance to move on to the meat in recent years. And that reluctance (if it were possible) robs God of His glory whenever it assigns anything at all to the creature. All things are from and through and to Jesus Christ. In Him all things are held together. He is sovereign Lord of all that His hands have made, including the will of His creatures. By not giving in to this, a last bastion of satanic desperation is left behind God’s own lines, and it “hinders” the prosecution of the war.

Better to be found seeking His face, by His grace, so that perhaps we might discover that our very seeking is the means by which He will bolster the lines and bring us into a fuller submission to Him. The closer we come to this, the closer we come to the understanding that - as Oswald Chambers said – we are the will of God.