Have you ever considered the term Born Again Christian a tautology? That means it’s an unnecessary repetition or redundant phrase because according to Jesus, it‘s impossible to be a Christian and not be born again. In other words they are two ways of expressing the same idea. Nevertheless, I understand why people say it in this day and age where so many people’s idea of what constitutes a Christian is entirely nebulous and unbiblical. Indeed, many who would claim to be Christians if casually questioned, if interrogated a little more thoroughly and asked if they were born again would emphatically answer, ’Not me!’ There may be at least two possible explanations for their response: either they are mistaken and are born again but don’t properly understand that being born again and being Christian are synonymous, or they are correct inasmuch as they were never Christian in the first place but just the bearers of a poorly defined social label – ‘I’m a Christian because I’m kind to animals and help old ladies across the road; I’m a good person and go to church (now and then)’.

In the West of Scotland where we live, we see this dichotomy all the time expressed in terms of religious bigotry. Ask many Glaswegians what their religion is and they will answer either that they are Catholic or Protestant. In many cases however, neither claim is true because they don’t really believe in the tenets of either denomination (indeed, they probably have no idea what those tenets are) but merely adhere to an outward show of shallow conformity that they have inherited from generations of like conformers.

In my experience however, it is more common among those who espouse even the slenderest affiliation to the Church of Rome to have at least some positive notion of what their faith entails. They go to mass at Christmas and Easter, and turn up at chapel for weddings and funerals, whereas many self-styled Protestants would never be seen dead in a church nor have read a Bible in their lives. Common to both however, is extent to which their stated religion is really just a negative statement of which tribe they are not part of. To them, the claim that they are Protestant is not an assertion of what they believe but a demonstration of their aversion to Catholicism.

Nevertheless, I wish to very clear here that I am not referring at all to the many sincere and devout Christian believers who sail under the flag of Roman Catholicism or behind the banner of the Reformed faith. I know many wonderful believers who love the Lord Jesus Christ deeply and are happy to call themselves Catholic or Protestant and it is not with them but their dark religious counterfeits that I take issue.

I remember many years ago, when I was a cop in the Saracen area of Glasgow, being asked by a bigot of the Old School:

“Son, are you a Catholic or a Protestant?”

“Neither“, I replied, “I’m a Christian”.

“Naw, naw, naw son! Ye cannae be just a Christian. Ye’re either a Proddy or a Tim. So, which is it?”

“Neither“, I insisted, “I’m a non-denominational Christian”.

“Naw, listen son! Ye cannae sit on the fence. Ye have to be one or the other, so are you a Protestant Christian or a Catholic Christian?”

“The question’s irrelevant“, I maintained, “I’m a Christian. I believe in God and I believe that Jesus Christ the Son of God died for my sins. But I don‘t believe in religious labels”.

By now the old cop was clearly becoming exasperated with this upstart whippersnapper of a religious ignoramus who obviously couldn’t see the sense of his point of view.

“All right young fellow“, he persisted. “I’m sure you’re a great guy, but are you a Catholic?”

“No”, I replied.

“Then you’re a Protestant!” he beamed triumphantly. At last he had a handle he could grasp hold of.

He was a nice enough fellow, but a dyed-in-the-wool bigot whose definition of a Protestant was anyone or anything that wasn’t Roman Catholic.

‘Anything’? I hear you ask.

Oh, yes. In Glasgow and much of the West of Scotland many people take their religion very seriously indeed. If you’re a ‘Protestant’ then your car is a Protestant car, your dog is a Protestant dog, your parrot is a Protestant parrot and yer Protestant mammy will cook you proper Protestant dinners until you marry your Protestant wife in a Protestant church (although somebody might have to tell you where that is) and you have Protestant kids who you’ll send to a Protestant school, and you’ll support Scotland’s Protestant football team: Glasgow Rangers. The ‘Teddy Bears’ as they affectionately known, which in the Glaswegian patois rhymes with ‘Gers’, although they are also proudly known as The Huns.

On the other side of the divide is Glasgow Celtic, the Catholic football team or the Buoys, supported by those who send their offspring to Catholic schools, drive their Catholic cars and walk their Catholic dogs, and their Catholic mammies go to chapel while Catholic husbands get blootered down the Catholic pub.

Indeed, you’ll seldom if ever find a supporter from either side in a church or chapel because their religion is not about Christian faith but tribal affiliation, and both sides are really just gigantic gangs with enormous membership. Nor is that an empty metaphor: In Glasgow people have been murdered for wearing the wrong jersey; knifed or beaten or kicked to death for walking down a Protestant street in a Celtic scarf or into a Catholic pub in a Rangers top.

As I say, in Glasgow we take our religion deadly seriously.

And like a lot of tribalism it’s very contradictory. Rangers fans follow their team religiously every Saturday; mobs of milling inebriates, resplendent in their true blue team colours, flying their loyalist Union Jacks with triumphal zeal, while their Celtic counterparts go attired in green, white and yellow, while waving the Irish Tricolour. Yet when Scotland’s international team play against England, the self-same supporters will unite under the Scottish Saltire and wear the nation’s blue colours to boo the very provocation of an ‘Sassenach’ Union Jack being flown in Our Country.

‘Hey, Daddy? Do we hate the Catholics this week, or do we hate the English?’

“No, son. The Labour Party Conference is on. So this is the week we hate the Tories.”

‘Thanks Dad. I’d hate to kick in the heid o’ the wrong guy. We don’t want the polis efter us.’

‘Aw son! We always hate the polis!’

It’s all about context and tribal affiliations driven by mutual hatred for a common enemy. It’s about religion and politics or any other excuse to hate. In Glasgow it involves flags and football colours whereas in some US States it has traditionally been more associated with burning crosses and pointy hoods but the sentiments are essentially the same. Indeed, I’m reminded of a line from the pointedly political lyrics of a song ‘You’ve got to be carefully taught’, from one of my favourite Rogers and Hammerstein musicals South Pacific. It‘s the tragic lament of a young American officer at the attitudes of his own people to interracial marriage, which, if memory serves me right, goes something like this:

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid,

Of people whose skin is a different shade;

Or people whose eyes are oddly made.

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six, or seven, or eight;

To hate all the people your relatives hate.

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

So, are Rangers and Celtic fans born again? Some of them are. But in my personal experience most of them aren’t because they’re not Christians; merely people whose Christian profession is a negative assertion of what they‘re not. To most of them Jesus Christ may be a mantra or a swear word, with no more reality and a whole lot less relevance than Santa Claus. It would shock many of them to discover that Jesus was a Jew and not a Catholic or a Protestant, while any suggestion he might be their Lord and Saviour is the theological raving of a religious fanatic. For them it’s all perfectly straightforward: Jesus was a Protestant, Mary was a Catholic and I’m going to heaven because I put a pound in the tin the Salvation Army lassie rattled in the pub last Friday night.

It reminds me of an old Billy Connolly joke that mirrored my own real life experience in Saracen Police Station. In it, Billy tells of a Jew walking down a Catholic street in Belfast one day when a gang of masked thugs jump out of a close onto the pavement and accost him. (A common close as it is properly called is the shared entrance to a Glasgow tenement .)

“Heh, you!” they dare him, “Are you a Proddy?”

“No”, he says.

“Awright, then. Beat it! Shoo!”

So, he continues on through a Protestant area where he’s waylaid by another group of yobs.

“Haw, you! Are you a Tim?”

“No.”

“Are you a Proddy?”

“No.”

“What are you then?”

“I’m a Jew.”

“Well, what kind of Jew are you: Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”

“Neither.”

“Ok, then. Shoo! Go on! Get ootta here!”

So he continues on up the road until he gets to a street corner where an Arab jumps out a close and stabs him.

It’s very Billy Connolly, very dark but very well observed, especially the line “Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” which excellently exemplifies the religious bigotry typical of Connolly’s own Glasgow Catholic upbringing.

The thing about Glasgow, though, is not just its ingrained religious prejudices but the caricatured polarity of its bigotry. You couldn’t make it up. But neither could you miss it. It’s ugly but it’s also open for all to see. What it shows is the danger of ignorance and the damage done when faith is allowed to degenerate into form. And the thing is, it’s nothing new. If Jesus were to physically walk through the streets of Glasgow today he would find many familiar attitudes, unchanged from those of first century Galilee, Judea and Jerusalem. For Rangers and Celtic, Proddies and Tims, read Jews and Samaritans; for religious bigots read scribes and Pharisees. There’s nothing new under the sun.

But what’s any of it got to do with whether we’re born again? The answer is one of perception, because ‘All that glisters is not gold’, and not everyone who wears a cross, carries a Bible or goes to church is a Christian. Unfortunately, too many people think otherwise and many perceive themselves as Christians based on their wrong concept of Christianity gleaned from centuries of religious denominational tradition but not from the Bible. They don’t know God, they’re not born again or acquainted with his Word. However, that much is not that big a secret and can be quite easily spotted by any half-educated outsider. What is far more subtle though, is how so many who have been born again do not walk in the reality of their Christian faith, having never been told of the true extent of what it means.

The term born again is introduced to us as part of a private conversation between Jesus and a sincere Pharisee called Nicodemus, recorded for us in John chapter 3:3 & 5-7 where Jesus famously tells him:

“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God...Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you that you must be born again.”

But what exactly is Jesus talking about? What is he saying to Nicodemus? What does God actually mean by born again? It’s one of those expressions that has become so well known as to be almost trite; an epithet that trips off our tongues so glibly that few of us any longer give it much thought. But it must mean something. To begin to fully appreciate what Jesus means we have to examine at least some of the expression’s scriptural parallels because the Bible is essentially saying the same thing in a surprisingly diverse number of ways, some of which are patently synonymous while others are altogether less obvious. Even Nicodemus, whom Jesus was directly addressing, appears a little confused in verse 4 where he retorts:

“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother‘s womb and be born?”

In fact, Nicodemus was no ordinary Pharisee but a prominent and educated man, a member of the Sanhedrin, so I suspect he was being a bit disingenuous here because the expression ‘born again’ would have been neither new to him nor to Judaism, nor particularly obscure among the learned of his day. The actual Greek term is gennéthé anóthen, which the RSV renders as ‘born anew’ and can also be translated ‘born from above’, and it should have been quite obvious to Nicodemus that Jesus was speaking about spiritual rebirth even before he spelt it out to him. We see an immediate parallel of this idea in 2 Corinthians 5:17-19, where Paul writes:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold all things have become new. Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.

There it is in verse 17; ‘we are a new creation’: in Greek - kainé ktisis (an entirely novel creation which has not previously existed). In other words, being born again is not a metaphor for a mere repair of something broken but its complete replacement with something entirely new. But how so? And why? Because, as Paul says, ‘old things have passed away’: Something of the old self has died. You see, mankind is made in the image and likeness of God and just as God is three Persons in One, so are we a oneness of three, in which our human spirit, our human soul and our human body combine to form the complete human being (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Even a secular non-believer like Sigmund Freud recognized this three-fold nature of man when he postulated that the human mind operates on three levels: the id, the ego and the super ego; an observation that approximates wuite well with the Biblical model if we regard the id as our flesh, the ego as our soul, and the super ego as our spirit. And although the process of salvation affects them all in the same way, it does so at different times inasmuch as the Bible reveals that when we are born again our spirit is renewed; a process which for believers is now in he past and complete. However, our soul (by which we generally mean our mind, our will and our emotions) is in a continual process of ongoing renewal which the Bible expresses in the present tense; while the resurrection of our physical bodies is something the scriptures still anticipate in the future tense.

As strange as that may seem, it is congruent with the order of Adam’s fall, in which he ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and died spiritually the same day, after which his soul degenerated for another 900 years before he physically expired. Adam died first In spirit, then in soul and finally in body, and it is in that same order that we are restored. So, the two ideas, of spiritual rebirth and being made a new creation are inextricably linked as part of the same continuum. The process starts in the spirit but doesn’t end there, any more than when we born for the first time. The thing is, if believers are born again to become new creations what happens to our old selves? The answer to that question is the flipside of the conundrum because in order to be born again, we first have to die. Paul puts it this way, in Romans 6:1-7.

What shall we say then? Shall we continue to sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many as were baptized in Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead, by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we have been united in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin.

That’s a chunk of scripture, but basically corroborates what I’ve just said; that we are born again new creatures in Christ because we are identified with him in his death, which also means that we share in his resurrection. Jesus himself talked about this very thing in several places where he mentions ‘taking up our cross’. For example, in Matthew 10:38-39 and 16:24.

And he who does not take his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.

And:

If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Whoa, whoa! What’s all this talk about death? Weren’t we discussing new birth?

Again, check out what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:38-49.

But someone will say, ‘How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?’ Foolish one, what you sow is not made alive unless it dies. And what you sow, you do not sow that body that shall be, but mere grain - perhaps wheat or some other grain. But God gives it a body as he pleases, and to each seed its own body. All flesh is not the same flesh, but one flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, another of birds. Also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, but the glory of the celestial body is one and that of the terrestrial another. One glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for star differs from star in glory.

So also in the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being.” The last Adam a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man of the earth, of dust; the second man the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those of dust; and as the heavenly man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man.

Hold on there! Paul isn’t talking here about being born again; he’s writing about the resurrection of the dead. Well spotted, except that he is actually, because verses 50-57 continue:

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption.

Behold I tell you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed - in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.

So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.“

“O Death, where is your sting?

O Hades, where is your victory?”

The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin the law. But thanks to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Remember when I said that Salvation is an ongoing process: Spirit, Soul and Body: Past, Present and Future. This is sometimes described in these terms: We were justified in the past, we are being sanctified in the present, and we shall be glorified in the future. These Biblical but somewhat theological terms can be hard to grasp, so to dispel confusion:

Justification describes how God imputes Jesus’ very own righteousness to us through faith;

Sanctification refers to our journey of faith in which our walk becomes consistent with that imputation of righteousness; and

Glorification is the end result whereby we become indistinguishable from Jesus.

However, even this is an oversimplification because when we were born again all three aspects (justification, sanctification and glorification) were fulfilled in our spirit, whereas our body and soul, although justified, are still undergoing the process of sanctification by the renewal of our mind, and await their glorification at Christ‘s return. So, in 1 Corinthians Paul is talking about the fullness of the believer’s body finally being born again just as our spirits already have been, a point corroborated by Romans 8:11 & 23-25:

But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you...Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for sonship, the redemption of our body. For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one still hope for what he sees?

And there are several references to our being given the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of precisely this promise, such as 2 Corinthians 5:1-5.

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be fond naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up in life. Now he who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has also given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

It’s mind-blowing stuff, but completely integral to the idea of being born again. It’s the inheritance of every believer.

Even the apostle Peter gets in on the act in 1 Peter 1:23, where he describes believers as ‘having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever’.

But what’s all this business about dying to self and taking up our cross? Well, if we envisage our spirit being born anew as something past, and our bodies being resurrected incorruptible as some future then; then dying to self and taking up our cross is our now. But a now that has been greatly misunderstood and enormously misrepresented.

As you might imagine, Dying to Self and Taking Ones Cross are essentially synonymous: They’re saying exactly the same thing: Surrender to God. But do we? I’m sorry to say that from what I have observed and in my own experience, the Church as a whole is extraordinarily bad in this regard. In a word, the Church is full of Pride. You see, a couple of other synonymous terms in this regard as Repentance and Renewing the Mind, neither of which do Christians appear to be particularly good at, nor the Church particularly adept at teaching, because by and large they are taught upside down.

Too many Christians have been taught that false modesty is a virtue, while true humility is pride. Too many believers have been deceived that self-deprecation is a sign of humility, when in fact it is mostly steeped in insincerity and fishing for a compliment - if the only the warm fuzzy of having some conspiratorial sympathiser patting them on the back and congratulating their wonderful humility. We’ve all heard the sort of thing:

“O Lord, I’m such a sinner. If it be your will, I beseech thee, please forgive the iniquities of my heart with which thy humble servant hast offended thee. In Jesus name. Amen”

Humble? Well, if it was prayed by some sinner coming to repentance before God for the very first time, it would just about score a C-Plus. After all, Jesus said that one of the ministries of the Holy Spirit is to ‘convict the world of sin’ (John 16:8-11). What Jesus didn’t say but most of the Church world seems to have redacted in there, is that the Holy Spirit would convict believers of sin: On the contrary, he convicts them of righteousness. A little glance at the small print confirms this:

And when he [the Holy Spirit] has come, he will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement:

of sin, because they do not believe in me;

of righteousness, because I go to my Father and you see me no more;

of judgement, because the ruler of this world is judged.

Had verse 8 stood alone and unqualified it would have been sufficiently ambiguous to sanction the prevailing fallacy that Jesus said that God’s Holy Spirit would convict us all of sin. However, Jesus did not leave it unqualified, but painstakingly specified that those the Spirit convicts of sin are ‘the world’ and ‘they [who] do not believe in me’; neither of which description fits any believer. On the other hand, those whom the Spirit convicts of righteousness, Jesus addresses as ‘you’, in other words his disciples or believers. Conviction of judgement refers not our being judged but the assurance that Satan has already been judged and sentenced and has no more power or authority over the believer, except for that which we choose to give him. You see, when the believer was born again and became a new creation in Christ, his old identity as a sinner died. In God’s eyes he is now a saint - a holy one in whom the Spirit of Holiness dwells. So, to call what God calls holy ‘sinful’ is a lie: Blasphemy, in fact. If you doubt me, then see for yourself what God told Peter in Acts 10:9-15.

And a voice spoke to him again the second time and said: “What God has cleansed you must not call common.”

But did you realise that this is precisely what happens every time a Christian confesses themselves a sinner. Yes, we sin, but we do so as saints in transition. We are no longer sinners because the sinner has died and been born again as a saint. To insist otherwise is to spit in God’s eye and call him a liar: Worse still, it is to say that Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross was given in vain. Taking up your cross daily is not about how low a Christian can grovel but how high a believer can walk. Paul put it like this, in Romans 12:2.

And do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of you mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

‘Be-ye-not-conformed’ is two words in Greek - me suschematizesthe and basically means don’t be outwardly moulded. ‘Be-ye-transformed’ is metamorphousthe from which biology derives the term metamorphosis, the process whereby a caterpillar turns into a butterfly or a tadpole into a toad - which speaks of profound inner transformation into something unrecognisably different, as opposed to a mere superficial change in appearance. And how this dramatic metamorphosis is accomplished is by something Paul calls anakainosei tou noos - ‘renewing of the mind’.

You might recognise the kaino part from kainé ktisis (new creation) mentioned earlier, while noos (the Greek word for mind) is pronounced no-os and not noose. It’s where we get the suffix -noia from, as is paranoia, which also occurs in a very important New Testament term: metanoia - which is translated as repent. So the idea of renewing the mind closely parallels the idea of metanoia which literally means ‘change of mind’, which so often is not how repentance is taught, but makes a great deal of sense when understood in terms of an inner transformation working itself out. So, taking up our cross and dying to ourselves is really about thinking in a totally different way with a totally different mind. And that new way of thinking is all about focussing on Jesus and not on ourselves. It may sound humble to weep and grovel and decry our own unworthiness but in the end it’s all about us, all about me, myself and I. Whereas glory in Greek is doxa, which means opinion or reputation. So, whenever we focus on our own performance rather than on God’s grace we glorify ourselves, albeit by in the manner of a backhanded compliment.

Dying to self is not about self-flagellation nor is crucifying our flesh about scourging our egos, nor taking up our cross about self-condemnation, they are all about taking the focus off ourselves entirely and placing it on Christ Jesus and his finished work on the Cross. When we do that, instead of slandering Jesus and blaspheming God, we agree with him that we are the righteousness of God in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:21), seated at the right hand of the Father in Christ (Ephesians 1:20, 2:5-6), joint heirs with Christ (Galatians 4:7) and sons of the Father (Romans 8:15); not because I am better than any other believer but because a dead man has no opinion.

You see, no believer is saved according to how he sees himself, but through faith in the risen Son of God and his perfect work on the Cross, whereby ‘he who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him’ (2 Corinthians 5:21). It’s not about what I think or how you feel, but about what God’s word says. Which is why Christianity is called a Faith, because ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1).

When we believe like that, we please God (Hebrews 11:6) and something radical begins to happen: Our minds are renewed, our thinking changes and we become transformed from the inside out. Of course there is one who condemns; however, his name isn’t God but the one of whom Revelation 12:9-11 says this:

So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast down to the earth, and his messengers were cast down with him. Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now Salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death”.

Hmmm: ‘the great dragon...that serpent of old...called the Devil’ and Satan, who deceives the whole world...the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night’. That’s some curriculum vitae; and here’s a word to the wise: Be careful you don’t come into agreement with him. His is not the voice of the Holy Spirit, but he would be delighted to have you think it was. That’s why in 1 Peter 5:8 the apostle says:

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

The important phrase here is, ‘like a roaring lion’, because there is a real ‘roaring lion’ of whom Satan himself is afraid and of whom the devil is merely a counterfeit. For instance, in Amos 3:7-8.

Surely the Lord Yahweh does nothing, unless he reveals his secret to his servants the prophets.A lion has roared! Who will not fear? The Lord Yahweh has spoken! Who can but prophesy.

It’s a principle that the New Testament corroborates in 2 Corinthians 11:13-15.

For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.

But didn’t Jesus lay into the scribes and Pharisees and even call them serpents and hypocrites? Yes, he did. But you tell me? Were the Pharisees saved? No, they weren’t - although they thought they were. Rather, Jesus revealed, they were as lost as any other sinner but so consumed by their own self righteousness that they imagined themselves without any need of a Saviour. Jesus’ remarks to them were intended to sting in order to convict them of their religious complacency, because Jesus loved them too much to let them go to hell without warning them where they were headed.

Loren Bradley is a missionary friend of mine from Arizona. He and his wife Debi love skiing and about his hobby he says this:

“The most important thing to remember when skiing is to look where you’re going. Because, whatever your looking at is where you’re going to go. If you’re looking at a tree, then that’s what you’ll ski towards. If you don’t want to ski right into a tree, then keep your eyes on the piste.”

And that’s excellent advice for every Christian. Because Satan is well aware that when we beat ourselves up and talk ourselves down because we do his work for him and over the years I‘ve seen countless believers struggle with sins, temptations and addictions of all kinds because they failed to understand this basic principle that whatever you focus on is where you’ll go. That’s why beating ourselves up over past mistakes is the biggest mistake of all. So long as we’re obsessed with a harmful habit or sin we want to avoid, we will never avoid it. Trying to give up smoking by concentrating on not smoking merely moves the thought of smoking to centre stage where it can consume every thought and fibre of the smoker’s being. Then they wonder why they couldn’t give it up. Similarly, when those with an anger problem try to deal with it by focussing on not being angry, they are on a hiding to nothing because anger becomes foremost in their mind.

But when we focus on the love of the Father, the compassion of Jesus and the graciousness of the Holy Spirit our sin is no longer at the forefront of our thinking and eventually fades from view altogether. Because when God becomes everything, everything else becomes nothing. When we’re absorbed in the Father’s love for us we want to rise to the level of his expectation. And when we realise that truth and come to true repentance our new birth will be transformed from mere talk about ourselves to a love walk with our Daddy.