The Life That Wins

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life.

John 5:24 NASB

While it is difficult for us to believe, it is nonetheless true—God will not force the new life upon us against our will. We must be ready to receive Christ as Lord and Savior with all our hearts. Then the miracle of the new birth takes place. It should be as easy for us to believe in the new birth as it is to believe in the atomic bomb.

I know little about nuclear fission, or of uranium and other elements used in making nuclear explosives; yet I believe in the atomic bomb—so do you. But how can we believe that it exists when we possess no scientific knowledge of how it is manufactured and how it works?

The answer is obvious—by reading accounts of its nature and work and by believing and accepting them. The human mind possesses the ability to accept or reject whatever it reads or hears.

I spend much of my time perusing the pages of a Book—the Bible. It has a message for each of us, and that message is, “Ye must be born again.”

That message contains both a command and a promise. It implies the possibility that I may have a new, changed, transformed nature. And it also implies more emphatically that I will never see the Kingdom of God unless I am born again. Have you accepted the Christ of the Bible into your heart and life? If not, this endless life does not belong to you. If you have opened your heart to Him, it is yours already!

Our Father and our God, thank You for allowing us to be born again into Your family. Thank You for making it possible for me to have a new, changed, transformed nature—a nature more like Yours. Make me like You, Father, Through the power of Christ. Amen.

Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).