What Is the Spirit’s Role in Regeneration?

Question 04040.

The work of the Spirit in regeneration is the hidden hinge on which the whole of conversion turns. Behind every genuine coming to Jesus there lies a deeper miracle that no preacher can perform and no sinner can manufacture for himself, the giving of new life to a soul that was spiritually dead. Scripture calls it being born again, born from above, born of the Spirit, and without it no one can so much as see the kingdom of God.

Because this work is invisible, it is easily misunderstood. Some treat the new birth as a decision a person makes on his own, others as a warm feeling that washes over him in a meeting. I want to set out plainly what the Bible actually teaches about regeneration, why the Spirit in regeneration is the doing of God from first to last, and how that work relates to the faith He calls every sinner to exercise. Get this right and much else in the Christian life falls into place.

The Problem the Spirit in Regeneration Answers

Before we can value the Spirit in regeneration, we have to feel the full weight of the problem it meets. Scripture describes the unconverted not as unwell but as dead in trespasses and sins, blind to the truth, and unable in their own strength to please God. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. This is not an exaggeration meant to shame us; it is a diagnosis meant to drive us to the only remedy.

A dead man cannot raise himself, and a blind man cannot give himself sight. If the lost are to live, life must be given to them from outside, by a power that is not their own. That is precisely what regeneration is, the impartation of spiritual life to those who had none, and it explains why the new birth is always credited to God and never to human effort or willpower. The Spirit in regeneration is the answer to a problem far deeper than most people imagine their own to be, and the depth of the cure tells us the depth of the disease.

Born of the Spirit in John 3

Jesus laid all this out for Nicodemus in John 3. Unless one is born again, He said, he cannot see the kingdom of God, and that birth is of water and the Spirit. The wind blows where it wishes, He went on, and you hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. The Greek word for wind and for Spirit is the same, pneuma, and the picture is chosen with deliberate care.

The point of the wind is its freedom and its hiddenness. You cannot summon it, you cannot trace its course or command its coming, but you can feel it on your face and see its effects all around you. So it is with the Spirit in regeneration. We cannot engineer the new birth or watch the moment it happens, but we see the unmistakable evidence afterwards in a changed life, a new love for God where there was none, a new hatred of sin, a new tenderness toward the things of Jesus. The cause is unseen, but the fruit is plain for all to read.

A Washing and a Renewal

Paul gives the same truth a different image in Titus 3:5, where he speaks of the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. Regeneration is at once a cleansing and a renewing, a making new of the inner person from the ground up. Ezekiel had promised exactly this centuries before, in Ezekiel 36:26: I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will put my Spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes.

Notice that in every one of these texts the actor is God by His Spirit, and the recipient is passive in the moment of being made alive. We are washed, we are renewed, we are given a new heart, we are born, and not one of those is something a person does to himself by trying harder. The Spirit in regeneration is the work of One, even though the life it produces immediately becomes active in faith and love and obedience. The new heart God gives is a heart that then beats, but God is the one who gives it, and the glory of the new birth belongs entirely to Him.

Does Faith Come Before or After?

Here I part ways with my Reformed friends, and I want to do so honestly and without heat. Many of them teach that regeneration must come first in the order, that the Spirit makes a person alive and only then is that person able to believe. I read the order the other way around. Scripture repeatedly ties life to faith as its instrument, telling us that whoever believes has eternal life, and that we are born again through the living word as it is received and trusted.

As I understand the Spirit in regeneration, the Spirit’s drawing and conviction bring a person to the very point of faith, and it is the one who believes who is then born again and indwelt. Faith is not the achievement of an already regenerate heart; it is the empty hand that the Spirit enables a helpless sinner to open and hold out. This keeps the whole work gracious from beginning to end, since even that faith is the Spirit’s gift, while it also honours the Bible’s plain and constant summons to believe on the Lord Jesus and be saved. We are not told to wait passively for regeneration; we are told to believe.

What Regeneration Is Not

It clears the ground to say what the Spirit in regeneration is not. Regeneration is not baptism, though baptism pictures it beautifully. It is not joining a church, walking an aisle, or signing a card, though any of these may happen to accompany it. It is not a gradual self-improvement that we accomplish by discipline and effort over the years. The new birth is a decisive act of God that happens once, at conversion, when a soul that was dead is made alive in a moment that may pass quite unnoticed by the person himself.

Nor is regeneration the same as the Spirit’s later, lifelong work of sanctifying us. Regeneration is the starting gun, not the race itself. It plants the new life; sanctification grows it over many years. Confusing the two leads either to despair, when we expect instant perfection from a newborn believer, or to complacency, when we treat the new birth as the whole of the Christian life rather than its true beginning. The Spirit in regeneration gives life that is meant to grow, and growth is the business of the years that follow.

The Assurance Regeneration Gives

Because the Spirit in regeneration is God’s work and not ours, it carries a deep and steadying comfort. The life He gives is His own gift, and the same Spirit who imparts that life also seals the believer and bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God. Our security does not rest finally on the strength of our own grip but on the firmness of His, which is why I tie assurance so closely to the Spirit’s witness rather than to our own fluctuating performance.

If you have been born of the Spirit, then you did not give yourself that life, and you cannot lose it by failing to be impressive on a hard day. The One who began this good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus. That is the steadiness the new birth was always meant to bring, a life rooted in God’s faithfulness rather than our own, and it is one of the sweetest fruits of understanding the Spirit in regeneration correctly. The believer rests not on what he did, but on what God did in him.

So, now what?

Do not measure your standing with God by how you happen to feel on a given grey morning. Ask instead whether the marks of new life are truly there: a love for Jesus you did not used to have, a genuine grief over sin that is your own, a real hunger for His word. Those are the footprints of the Spirit’s reviving work, and they outlast any passing mood.

If you sense no spiritual life in yourself at all, do not try to manufacture it by effort or emotion. Come to Jesus exactly as you are, trust Him, and ask the Spirit to do what only He can do. The new birth is His gift to give, not your prize to earn, and He has never once turned away a sinner who came to Him believing.

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

John 3:5 (ESV)