"IknowHimDoYou" <IknowHim@leavingsoon.com> wrote in message
news:IknowHim-2110030832250001@pm6-23.kalama.com...

The Beautiful Lie

There are two contrasting interprtations of the new birth(born again or
born from above). Jn 3:3
One is true and the other is the beautiful lie which subverts the truth.

The Beautiful Lie:
-"the spiritual life is a kind of renaissance, an inner quickening brought
about by the play of mystical forces which hover round the soul, rousing
it from torpor as the spring sun wakens the sleeping seed, stirring
already existant but dormant energies into activity-a lifting up of what
we already possess to a higher plane, or tide, and a consequent flooding
of hitherto unvisisted, unvitalized areas, whose inhibited forces and
functions it straightway releases and relates to consciousness within and
to service without"

Typical new age thinking, or if you prefer an older name for it, Gnosticism.

The Truth:
"the new birth is the reception of an entirely new and different life,
required to be generated from above by a specific act of Devine
impregnation(not infused)- aquite new and original endowment which has
never before been in our human life, and which remains an altogether other
life that is not in us by nature, but a unique and miraculous
generation-as Christ is."
T. Austin-Sparks, "What Is Man", Ministry of Life, Inc.

Well spoken, and much more Biblically accurate than that other view.

Adam was created by God as innocent and sinless, but not perfect. If Adam
had stayed the course God wished for him he would have been able to eat of
the Tree of Life and receive eternal life. His choice ws to disobey God's
Word and accept the Beautiful Lie. And so it is today with us...

Don't accept reformation in place of regeneration.

But I wish a few more Christians would show signs of reformation along with
their regeneration.

PC