I've been reading Chuck Colson's book The Faith and have become stuck in a chapter called Exchanging Identities. In that chapter Colson writes about the real work of salvation and contrasts it with the ideas so common in America's re-branded Christianity.The words "born again" and "being saved" roll off our tongues so quickly that we forget just how radical the idea really is. Sometimes when I read the third chapter of John's gospel, I think that Nicodemus must have left his thinking cap at home on the night he visited Jesus. "How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?" (John 3:4) The idea of a new birth is really hard to understand, especially when you have position and prestige.
It is the exchange of our old identity for the identification with Christ that is at the heart of being "born again." It's being ready to let go of who I am, what I do, and where I'll go that is at the calling. It is understanding that it's not about how I can change me, but how surrendering to Jesus will bring the real change in me. The point of being born again is not that I resolve my issues with guilt and sin, but that I take on a new identity. I choose to cooperate with grace and let His will be done in my life.
Colson tells of the radical transformation that comes with being born again. Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to faith in 1931 and changed. He became a leader in the confessing church which would not submit to Nazi control. He lost his university position, was denied access to the airwaves and forbidden to publish or speak in public. In June of 1939, he arrived in New York where he could have waited out the war in relative safety. His understanding of the cost of grace compelled him to return to Germany, spy for the Allies, and plot the assassination of Hitler. He could not stand idly by while the machinery of the Holocaust consumed its victims. His actions ultimately resulted in his execution only three weeks before the liberation of Berlin. While in prison he modeled the life that Christ calls us to. His prison camp doctor said of him,"In the almost fifty years I have worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God."
That is the radical change that being born again calls us to -- to choose to follow Christ when it would be easier and safer to stay away. To find the work that is set before us and do it unto His glory. When we think about salvation as something that is about us, we do miss the point. It is about living our lives under His control, for His purposes and for His glory.
The apostle Paul tells us how we are saved, who saved us and why we are saved in the second chapter of Ephesians -- For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:8-10)
There's nothing so radical as being redeemed and born again. There's nothing so costly as the free gift of salvation, and no victory so sweet as surrender to Christ.
Keep the faith.
