What is the One New Beginning That Truly Changes Everything, and I Mean Everything

If you lived in the path of Hurricane Irma, do you feel a little bit that you’re trying to pick up again where you left off?  Do you know what I mean?   For those of us in her path, when Hurricane Irma started coming our way, normal life sort of stopped.   School stopped.  Work stopped.   All sorts of new things started.  You fortified your home.   You stocked up on supplies.  You may even have left the area, taken a hurrication so to speak.

Now after the storm ended, hopefully after not too many days without power and too much damage to life and property, normal life kind of began again.   But it probably doesn’t feel exactly the same.  It can’t after something like that.   It’s normal life, yes. But it’s a new normal.  Life after Irma just looks (for example, who know when the fallen trees on our streets are going to go away) and it just feels a bit different than before.   

Life has lots of new beginnings like that, lots of new normals, including ones much bigger than the stress and strain of these last few weeks.   You graduate from school.  Or heck if you are a little kid, you start school.  That’s a big beginning right there.  You get married.  You have kids.   You start a new job.  You move to a new place, sometimes a new country. I could go on.  These new beginnings, they change you.   Your life becomes something different.  A new, sometimes a radically new normal begins.  

These new beginnings can be hard, but life has to have them, doesn’t it?  You can’t live what life is supposed to be without them.   Today, in the words that you’re about to hear, God tells you about the ultimate new beginning.  This new beginning doesn’t just change something.  It changes everything.    And if you don’t experience it, then you have missed in the deepest way possible what your life is supposed to be.

What is this new beginning?  How can you be sure that you don’t miss it?  In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 

I John 2:28- 3:3

What is the ultimate new beginning, the new beginning that changes everything? Why, if you don’t experience it, do you miss what life is supposed to be?   God tells you here.  In this new beginning, God brings you back to the beginning.  God begins restoring you to who God intended you to be, God’s very child.   And how do you get there?   You don’t get there.  Only God can get you there.   Only God can do this in you.

You see.  New beginnings happen in every life.   But what John describes here blows away any other new beginning.    John compares it to being reborn.   John basically says. This new beginning can only be compared to the one that began you, your very birth.   And when John says that, he is only quoting Jesus, who said much the same thing.  But what does it mean to be reborn like that?     

Have you ever sensed that you’re missing something, that you’re intended for something bigger, grander than who you are right now?   Have you ever felt that something greater lives inside you but it’s always just a bit beyond your grasp?  If you’ve felt that, you’re right.

When I was growing up, I loved this book called Escape to Witch Mountain.   By the way, lots of other folks love it too. They’ve made it into a movie five times.  The last one came out in 2009.    Dwayne Johnson starred in it.     

In the book, these two orphans, Tony and Tia, discover they have these unusual gifts, but they don’t remember where they came from.  But Tia has this purse with a strange symbol on it.   This nun recognizes the symbol.  She tells Tia.  I received a letter with that same symbol years ago from a man in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  He was looking for children with unusual abilities.  In other words, he was looking for them.  So, with help from an old priest, and through many close calls, Tony and Tia discover who they are, refugees from a dying planet.   And they make a daring escape to their people’s hidden refuge, a place called Witch Mountain.   

I loved that book.  Why?  I wanted to be one of those kids.   But forget that book, look at the plot of every superhero movie.   It’s the same idea.   Person discovers hidden ability or secret destiny.  Why do human beings love stories like that?   It’s because they’re getting at something true.   As C.S. Lewis put it.   “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

When John talks about a new birth, that’s what he’s getting at.  In this new beginning, you don’t just get a new belief or a new spiritual practice.   You don’t even become something new.  You become what God intended you to be from the very beginning.   You become God’s very child.   And God isn’t talking some Hallmark card here.  God is saying in John’s words.  You become the very offspring of God.

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer, said it better than anyone:  

Jesus’ command Be ye perfect [Matt. 5:48] is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. Jesus is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. God said (in the Bible) that we were "gods" and he is going to make good His words. If we let Jesus - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. God meant what he said.

Now that process just begins now, but that’s where it’s going.  As John puts it: Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”  In other words, you can’t even imagine what’s coming.    Do you see how this new beginning blows any other away, how it changes everything?

So how do you get this?  How do you become the very offspring of God? How does that happen?  Well, you can’t make it happen.  You can only let it happen.   What do I mean?

Let’s go back to the image of being born.   How are babies ideally supposed to come into the world?   They come through an act of love, an act of committed communion between two people.    But that love only happens, when these two people let go, when they risk being truly vulnerable, when they open themselves, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually to this other person.   Now no human relationship gets that perfectly, but that’s the ideal.

God brings about this birth inside you in much the same way.  In Jesus, God has already let go of everything for you, already entered into ultimate vulnerability, even death itself.  And God did it out of love for you.   And as you let go, as you let go of your own fears, as you let go of your delusions of self-sufficiency, as you let go of your own feelings of guilt or unworthiness, you open yourself to God coming in, to God transforming you.  But you don’t even have to actually let that all that stuff go.  God will begin doing that in you, if only you ask. 

So, if it’s that easy, why don’t people do it?   Why don’t people just ask?  Well, maybe they came across people who said this very thing happened to them, that they were born again.   But their transformation didn’t look that inspiring.   A legendary San Francisco columnist, Herb Caen, said it well.   “The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are a bigger pain the second time around.”  

Caen said something kinda true.  It’s possible to not really let go, but act as if you have.  You join a church.  You obey all the right rules.  You believe all the right things.  You even memorize the right scriptures.   But inside, you haven’t let go.  So instead of becoming greater, you become smaller, more judgmental, more fearful, more uptight.  

And even if you let go, if you experience this new birth, you’ve still only begun the journey.  Yes, you’re a child of God, but you’re still growing into what that actually means.

In the Bible, God delivers the Israelite slaves from their Egyptian masters. God miraculously parts the waters of the Red Sea, and takes them through.   Now when they reach the other side, and their Egyptian masters get crushed in the waves behind, God has delivered them out of slavery.   But they’ll stay wander in the desert for forty years.  Why?  God might have delivered

them out of slavery in a moment, but it will take a life for God to get the slavery out of them. 

When God brings about this new beginning, it’s just that.  It’s a new beginning, the start of a journey that will a lifetime.  

The writer George McDonald put it this way: 

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what God is doing. God is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently God starts knocking the house about in a way the hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is God up to? The explanation is that God is building quite a different house from the one you thought of –throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but God is building a palace. [Why?]  God intends to come and live there Himself.

Do you want to start becoming the palace that God destined you to be?   Do you want to become the very offspring of God?   That journey can begin today.   All you need to do is ask.

And if you don’t want to do that today, if you still doubt that this thing could be real, that’s ok.    Keep coming back.   Keep testing the waters.   If this is real, then you are hearing the most life-changing news ever.  And if you open yourself to it, if you let it work in you, it will change you, maybe instantly or maybe you so gradually you won’t even realize it at first.

Sometimes you fall in love in a whirlwind, and in just a moment you know, this is the person for you.    But lots of times, someone enters your life, and only as you get to know them, does it happen.   And then you realize, this person has become more than a friend.   Somewhere along the way you fell into love.  And you will never be the same.

It happens the same way with God.  Some folks here can tell you a moment that it all changed.  Others can’t remember a moment, but they know that it happened nonetheless. 

As the writer Lewis put it.  If you’re on a train traveling from Paris to Berlin, some folks will be awake, when the train crosses the border.  Others will be asleep.   But what matters is not that you were asleep or awake when it happened.  What matters is you know. You are no longer in Paris.  You are now in Berlin.

Your life will have all sorts of new beginnings, new normals.   But no beginning will remake you like this one.   No beginning will be as big as your very birth, the beginning that began you.    If you want this beginning, this beginning that makes you into the very offspring of God, all you need to do is ask.   You may be coming here for the first time or you may have been coming here for years.   You may have grown up in church, but never gotten what it was actually all about.    Whatever the case, if this new beginning hasn’t yet happened for you, it can happen even today, even in these next moments.   All you need to do is ask.