Tozer on Regeneration and the Lordship of Christ

An excellent online book of A. W. Tozer's "I call it heresy" using 1 Peter. Read it here.

So, there is a divine principle here - the fact that a man truly born again is a man who has experienced regenesis, supernatural regenesis. Just as God generated the heavens and the earth in the beginning, He generates again in the breast of the believing man!

Just as surely as God's calling the world out of nothing was a major miracle, the work of God in making a believing Christian out of a sinner is a major miracle as well.

In the light of what God is willing to do and wants to do, consider how we try to "get them in" in modern Christianity.

We get them in any way we can. Then we try to work on them - to adjust them and to reform them.

I may be misunderstood when I say this, but we even have two works of grace because the first was so apologetically meaningless that we try to have two.

I do not speak against the second work of grace; but I am pleading for the work that ought to be done in a man's heart when he first meets God. What I am asking is this: Why should we be forced to invent some second or third or fourth experience somewhere along the line to obtain what we should have received the first time we met God?

I believe in the anointing of the Holy Spirit after regeneration - but I also believe that we ought not to downgrade the new birth in order to find a place for the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

I have read much and studied long the lives and ministries of many of the old saints of God in past generations. I am inclined to believe that many of them were better Christians when they were just newly-regenerated than the run of the so-called "deeper life" people whom I meet today.

- A. W. Tozer

Now, to be genuinely born again is the miracle of becoming a partaker of the divine nature. It is more than just a religious expression; more than the hyphenated adjective we often hear, such as "He's a born-again man."

Some evangelicals are slow to admit it, but I know that this important matter of the new birth has fallen into cold hands, along with many other important Bible teachings. I don't have to tell you that in many Christian churches you will feel as though you are in a mortuary instead of the church of the Living God.

Christians who have been miraculously begotten again ought to be rejoicing in their deliverance from the tomb of spiritual death. Instead, we often feel as though we are in the presence of a corpse just brought in from the street. Sad indeed that the words "born again" have become words that seem to mean precious little because the emphasis of supernatural grace has dwindled away, even in some fundamentalist circles.

The new birth is still a miracle of God - it is not a matter of the mind, not just a mental thing. It is my judgment that there are many who talk about being born again on the basis of their mental assent to Christian principles. I think there are many who have received Christ mentally who have never discovered the supernatural quality of the grace of God or of the acts of God.

- A. W. Tozer