26th October 2024

My last study may have left you feeling discouraged about the state of our hearts – dark, corrupt and deceitful above all things – or wondering about my reasoning in bringing up something we don’t like to think about. But watching the changes in the season – late sunrises, early sunsets, leaves changing colours and all of nature getting ready to ‘hibernate’ for the winter – makes me think of a word we don’t often use: regeneration. 

Every spring, we see the regeneration of everything that seemed to be dead. New life bursts forth all around us and gives us a renewed sense of energy and enthusiasm. Just as we have to get through the winter before we can enjoy Spring, to get to our new life, we first have to go through death – death to self, death to our pride and death to self-worship. 

But just as the world comes to life again in the Spring, we come alive through the regeneration of our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3 that we must be born again, born of the Spirit. And Peter tells us this has already happened in Christ: ‘You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.’ (1 Peter 1:23, CSB). 

Jesus is the imperishable seed, planted in our hearts by the Spirit. He is the only one who can, by the ‘washing of regeneration’ (Titus 3:4-6), revive our dead black hearts into living testimonies of his love and grace. 

Our hearts were not just in a state of hibernation, but were in fact, dead; but now in Christ, we have been made alive and he lives in us. For all of us on the verge of the symbolic winter death, let’s be reminded that as the seeds and bulbs will experience their own regeneration when the days begin to get longer, in the same way, we are experiencing regeneration in our hearts. 

The Holy Spirit makes us alive with his life, renewing and revitalising our hearts every day with his unfathomable love.

First published on 8 October 2024, at www.gemsofgodsgrace.wordpress.com a personal blog which is not sponsored by Grace Communion International.

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