When you hear the term regeneration or new birth, what’s your initial response? Perhaps gratitude for God’s goodness. Or humility that God chose you. Or maybe even longing that God would do this miracle for someone you love. All those are good responses, but if your gut reaction to regeneration does not include astonishment — well, you’re missing out.
What God does in regeneration should ignite in us wonder that erupts into worship. In an effort to stoke that astonishment, I want to consider just three of the many benefits of the new birth: new sight, new source, and new taste.
New Birth Begets New Sight
Scripture makes it plain that before God granted us new sight, we were blind, utterly unable to see God’s beauty (2 Corinthians 4:4). Like a blindfolded man in a furniture store, we walked around smacking our shins against majesty, tripping over splendors, repeatedly running face-first into glory in God’s word and his world, and yet we could not see — because we would not see — how all the beauties point to God. We were particularly blind to the pinnacle of beauty, “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). We were damnably destitute of vision.
That is, until God said, “Let there be light.” In a miracle no less magical than the creation of light, God’s sovereign call creates what it commands. Saint, you have spiritual eyes because God said, “See.” You behold because he beckoned. New birth is the begetting of new sight.
However, like an infant learning to see, our new eyes are still dim (1 Corinthians 13:12). We long to see more of God’s majesty. We lament the sin that smudges our vision. We often say with Moses, “Show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18). We follow David’s hunt for beauty: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: . . . to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord” (Psalm 27:4).
But never forget that both the looking and the longing are God’s gift. Beauty himself must seize us before we can see him. Before we, like David, can ever say, “Your face, Lord, do I seek,” the King must issue the command that creates: “Seek my face” (Psalm 27:8). We gaze upon God’s beauty only because God’s grace gave us sight. New birth begets new sight.
New Birth Draws to a New Source
In the time of our darkness, before God granted us new sight, we were thirsty — desperately thirsty, dying-in-the-desert thirsty. Our souls were bone dry. We longed for living water. Like the woman at the well, we had an ocean-sized thirst. Yet we refused to come to the only source that can satisfy such a deep desire.
We fell under God’s withering condemnation in Jeremiah 2:13: You forsook me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out for yourselves cisterns, cracked cisterns that can hold no water. In other words, we tried to sate our thirst by digging our own wells. Need I remind you what a dry, empty, pointless affair that was?
But regeneration redirects us to a new source, the only Fountain that can fill souls made for God. The new birth dethrones the petty pleasures that once reigned in our hearts by usurping them with a superior Pleasure. Grace releases a deluge of living waters. Here’s how Isaiah describes the torrent:
When the poor and needy seek water,
and there is none,
and their tongue is parched with thirst,
I the Lord will answer them;
I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
I will open rivers on the bare heights,
and fountains in the midst of the valleys.
I will make the wilderness a pool of water,
and the dry land springs of water.
I will put in the wilderness the cedar,
the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive.
I will set in the desert the cypress,
the plane and the pine together,
that they may see and know,
may consider and understand together,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
the Holy One of Israel has created it. (Isaiah 41:17–20)
The triune God is full and overflowing. He turns our inner desert into Eden. What once was an endless stretch of cracked ground and broken cisterns becomes a fruitful garden. Aching thirst is replaced by what Augustine calls “the sober intoxication of [God’s] wine” (Confessions 5.13.23). Wonder of wonders, the gospel opens the floodgates of God’s fullness, inviting us to drink forever from the river of his delights. What a salvation!
New Birth Inspires a New Taste
I hate cilantro. Unfortunately, my wife loves it — and loves to cook with it. Over the years, I’ve tried (I really have!) to like cilantro. I’ve mustered all the willpower I can to delight in those cursed green leaves. But willpower has little to do with taste. It turns out, I don’t have the capacity to enjoy cilantro. People who hate the stuff have a genetic variant that makes cilantro’s aldehydes taste like soap. We literally can’t enjoy it (unless you like Dawn on your tacos).
That’s all of us before grace breaks in. We don’t have the capacity to enjoy God. We have a spiritual bent (we call it total depravity) that makes delight in God impossible. Like dish soap on burritos, we hated the taste of holiness. We needed new soul-buds before we could savor God.
That is why conversion must create a whole new capacity. Augustine famously describes his new birth as the triumph of a new taste:
How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose! . . . You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place, you who are sweeter than all pleasure. . . . You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (Confessions 9.1.1; 10.27.38)
Here is a new creature indeed, a Christian Hedonist freed from all the tentacles of lust that held him captive for so many years. Here is the faith that pleases God. As John Piper reminds us, “Beneath and behind and in the act of faith that pleases God, a new taste has been created — a taste for the glory of God and the beauty of Christ” (Desiring God, 62).
Perhaps even more amazing, this new taste for God turns out to be God’s own taste for God in us. Piper goes on to say, “The taste for God that begets saving faith is God’s very taste for himself, imparted to us in measure by the Holy Spirit” (Desiring God, 63). Or in Augustine’s own words to God,
When people see these things with the help of your Spirit, it is you who are seeing in them. . . . Whatever pleases them for your sake is pleasing you in them. The things which, by the help of your Spirit, delight us are delighting you in us. (Confessions 13.31.46)
Saint, you delight in God because God delights in God in you. If that’s not cause for astonishment, I don’t know what is.
New Joy
C.S. Lewis once said, “The real way of mending a man’s taste is not to denigrate his favorites but to teach him how to enjoy something better” (Experiment in Criticism, 112). That’s a wonderful summary of our salvation. At the new birth, the Father teaches us to enjoy something far better — namely, King Jesus — by giving us his Spirit to beget new sight, draw to a new source, and inspire a new taste.
In other words, conversion is the creation of a Christian Hedonist, one who glories in the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. And how could it be otherwise? If God has given us a new sight of his beauty, a new source of superior pleasure in him, and a new taste for all the golden goodness of God, how could we not relentlessly hunt our happiness in him? And how could we not ceaselessly invite others into this same marvelously happy way of life?
Desiring God