A New Entity
First of all, you have an entity: "That which is born of the flesh." That is an entity. That is not difficult to understand on the natural side. Every little new-born baby is an entity of the flesh: it is something quite concrete, something quite definite, and you do not find two in every respect alike. So far as the flesh is concerned, and the natural, that which is born is a definite, concrete entity - we know that. And, in just the same way, "that which is born of the Spirit" is a distinct, definite, concrete entity, altogether different, but absolutely real. That entity, born of the Spirit, is something quite definite and altogether distinct from that which is born of the flesh. With the new birth of every child of God, a spiritual entity has been brought into being, different entirely from the entity and the constitution of the natural,but just as real, just as definite.
I repeat: very, very few Christians seem to understand or know this. We have "joined" something, we have "joined Christianity", we have "gone into the Christian religion" - put it how you will. It is something objective; we have come over into some other sphere of interests and activity and life and conduct. That is the idea about Christianity. The Lord Jesus here is saying - what the New Testament confirms through and through - that this is an altogether different thing; this is not one bit of the order of the natural, this is "spiritual"; the natural and the spiritual belong to two different orders and kingdoms. That is the context of these words. And therefore every born-again child of God is, in the innermost truth of their being, a different entity. It is not that they have "taken on" something, or "gone into" something. I have often used the word "species" - they are a different kind of person in their very being, with another constitution, something constituted by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, all from above.
People are talking nowadays about visiting the moon. At the end of the century men will perhaps have landed on the moon - but not with their bare earthly constitution! No man, just as he is, will ever do that. He will have to have an apparatus which constitutes him. in effect. a different kind of person, in order to live out there. To go into that realm as he is would be disaster, destruction. And you and I will never be able to go to Heaven without a new constitution - and not an artificial one either! No make-up about this! It has got to be constitutional. Thee is a clear gulf, broad and unbridgeable, between what we are naturally and what we are as children of God.
If you really are a child of God, if you have come to the Lord, if you have really had the experience of salvation, you know that something has happened to you. This is explaining what has happened. And the Holy Spirit says, "Look here, things have got off that basis." We have got to get back there. We have got to recognize again this broad line of difference and division between what is natural and what is spiritual in Christianity. There are few things more important than that as we Christians should be able to recognize the fundamental difference between what is natural and what is spiritual. We have a new constitution, a different constitution, by the Holy Spirit.
~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 60 - (Natural Versus Spiritual)
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