Born Again in the Same World, but it's Different - 01 & 02
How do I interpret life?
I was in my 2nd year of college when I committed to follow Jesus Christ. It was as if God had opened my eyes and I could see a reality I’d never known before. That is what it seemed like to me at least, and looking back, it still does. I remember how, all-of-a-sudden, God was important and real and nearby. I could tell, the world belonged to Him and He was actively involved with it. And the things He wanted were the things I now wanted.
I attribute the experience to what Jesus called being born a second time.1 The Holy Spirit used my poor, college-age choices with its consequential sin and guilt, combined it with the Bible, and breathed into it. He mixed a cocktail of conversion and saved me.
I compare it to the conversion of the Apostle Paul once the scales fell from his eyes in Acts 9:18, or a feeling similar to what those men had on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35) when Jesus explained the truth to them and it says, “And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’”
In any case, I was a new creation. I was new to caring about God. I was a newborn in regard to wanting His approval. At 20 years old, I’d become a baby, hungry and eager to learn.
I was still very ignorant of the kingdom I now realized was all around me. Things looked similar to the world I had grown up in, but now the trees were His trees. The animals and buildings and governments belonged to Him. And people were each one made in His image and I could sense they were choosing daily to respect or refuse Him. So, in one way, it was the same world, but now I could see it more vividly and had to learn how to interpret things with my new eyes. Reality, from this perspective, needed to become clearer to me.2
I realized the lens I needed was the Bible. One reason was that I’d grown up in a Lutheran Church and it was the Bible that was sermonized from every Sunday. I’d been taught Bible stories in Sunday School. So, even based on my carnal mind and my personal, historical experience, the Bible held the position as the Word of God. It was the source of authority. Secondly, I was reading the Bible when the scales came off. The things I read had flipped on the flashlight. New Scriptural thoughts were sent as flashlight beams into the darkness of my mind.
It was something the Lord said to Nicodemus in John 3:3. He was a ruler of the Jews (3:1), a teacher of Israel (3:10), and yet he did not get it. He was missing the ability to see the kingdom of God.
It is still something I work at daily. Cornelius Van Til says that we are to think God’s thoughts after Him. Van Til wrote, “God is the original while man is the derivative. Man’s thoughts must therefore be patterned after God’s thoughts. Man must, as we often express it, think God’s thoughts after Him.” - from Essays on Christian Education.