Steven Malcolm - The Overflow DevoSample

Hotboy

Made Alive in the Son That should tell you enough I’m a Hotboy!

In John 3, a man named Nicodemus was interested in what this Jewish Rabbi with a growing following could offer. As was true of many who spoke to Jesus about spirituality and God, Nicodemus was quickly confused by the words of Jesus.: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3 - ESV).

Nicodemus responds coarsely to Jesus because they were focused on two very different things. 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?” (John 3:4 - ESV). Nicodemus was focused on the physical, here and now impact that Jesus could have on his life. Jesus was much more concerned with the spiritual condition of Nicodemus than the physical.

Being “born again” spiritually is directly tied to the hope offered to all by Jesus. According to Ephesians 2, we are all born spiritually dead. This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:22 that “in Adam all die”. Adam was the first human God created, as well as our human representative before God. When Adam sinned and fell in the garden (Genesis 3), his sin and rebellion against God became ours. We inherited a spiritual sin nature just as a child might inherit brown eyes from a parent. We sin by nature and by choice and are therefore “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2). We need a better representative than Adam and this is this why Jesus came.

Jesus is the greater Adam (1 Corinthians 15) and our perfect new representative. Without Jesus, we are spiritually and eternally dead. Dead people don’t drive themselves to the hospital, and spiritually dead people are incapable of changing our terrible spiritual condition without the intervention of Jesus. But, through faith in Jesus and the finished work of His sinless life, death on the cross in our place, and glorious resurrection from the grave, we are spiritually dead people invited to be eternally made alive by Jesus!

Being made alive through faith in Jesus means that through His Spirit, we are given new hearts of flesh to replace our cold, hard, dead hearts of stone (Ezekiel 36). Being made alive through faith in Jesus means that we have been made spiritually fit for eternal, personal, relationship with God our Creator, even when we sin. How can this be?

Through faith in Jesus, the wrath we deserve for our sins against God is placed onto Jesus on the cross, and the perfect sinlessness of Jesus is credited to us by God as if we had achieved it ourselves. This is called our justification. This means when we sin, when we wander, when we doubt God, He does not frown or turn His back on us, but He continues to love us perfectly and forgive us eternally. Through being made alive, we now look spiritually just like Jesus. All Christ followers are loved equally and fully by God, even when we sin, because of the complete work of Jesus Christ on our behalf.

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