Turning Point

Guest (Male): When you become a Christian, you gain eternal life with the Father in heaven. But you also get something else: a second birthday. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah reveals the vital importance of that second birth when both salvation and the Holy Spirit enter your life. From his new series, *The Holy Spirit You May Not Know*, here is David to introduce today's message, "Born of the Spirit."

Dr. David Jeremiah: And thank you for joining us today. We are studying the third person of the Trinity. We're talking about the Holy Spirit. You know, I have talked to hundreds of people throughout my life about the faith and knowing Christ, and one of the most sticky wickets for so many people is this whole doctrine of the Holy Spirit.

I remember speaking to a young man who came out of another religion, and he actually said to me, "I could accept everything you believe except one thing. I cannot accept the Holy Spirit." Well, you can't be a Christian and not accept the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is necessary for your birth into Christendom.

You've probably heard it said people are born again. That's true. You're born once physically, but you have to be born again spiritually. And the way you get born again spiritually is through the contribution of the Word of God and the Spirit of God. You need both of them to become a Christian, and we're going to talk about that today as we open our Bibles together to the third chapter of the Gospel of John.

Don't forget, friends, this is the month for you to get your copy of the book, *The Holy Spirit You May Not Know*. This 250-page book has just been completed. We got it done just in time for the series so that we could offer it to you as our way of saying thank you for your continued encouragement and support for Turning Point.

When you send your gift to Turning Point during the month of June, all you have to do is say, "Send me the book on the Holy Spirit," and it will be on its way. It's a hardback book. You will add it gladly to the other two volumes in this series, which is *The God You May Not Know* and *The Jesus You May Not Know*. And now you'll have the Trinity set and you'll be ready to answer questions people may ask you going forward and to do research yourself.

We're so grateful for the opportunity to make these resources available, but we can't make them available if you don't do your part. So, thank you for your investment and thank you for your prayers. Thank you for being a part of what we're doing around the world through Turning Point. Here is part one of "Born of the Spirit."

Birthdays have a way of sneaking up on us. I hate to say that because it's so true. But none are quite like the birthday that happened at three o'clock in the morning in a McDonald's parking lot. On August 11, 2025, Alice and Kevin Rotunda were racing to the hospital in Kalamazoo when their fourth child decided she was not waiting for a doctor.

Alice had been sent home the day before and told it was not time yet, but that night, contractions kicked into overdrive. Kevin pressed the accelerator and hit close to 100 miles an hour on an empty Michigan highway. But halfway there, Alice knew the baby was coming now. They pulled into a McDonald's in the small town of Schoolcraft. No epidural, no nurse, no sterile delivery room—just a minivan, a cell phone, and a husband who usually faints at the sight of blood.

Alice cried out, "You need to catch her right now!" What a night that was for that little family. The birth of a child at 2:57 in the morning. Matilda entered the world healthy, crying, and instantly unforgettable. One of the most ordinary places imaginable had become the stage for one of life's greatest miracles.

Birthdays remind us that life has a starting point. You may not remember your first one—the day you were born—but you know it happened. In the same way, Jesus said we all need a second birthday. He called it being born of the Spirit or being born again. It's the logical place to begin any discussion about the Holy Spirit. That is the first time we have any knowledge of the Spirit's working in our hearts.

Before we talk about being filled with the Spirit or walking in the Spirit or the baptism of the Spirit, it only makes sense to talk about being born of the Spirit. After all, you have to be born before you can walk, before you can talk, or feed yourself. Our Lord himself introduces the subject in the first eight verses of the third chapter of the Gospel according to John.

Under the cover of darkness, Jesus was having a conversation with one of Israel's foremost teachers, a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Most likely Nicodemus came at night because he didn't want to be observed speaking to this young rabbi from Nazareth. And yet there was something about him that drew this Jewish leader, something about his words that touched Nicodemus' heart.

I imagine this teacher to have been middle-aged to older when this conversation took place. I can close my eyes and see him stroking his beard in great perplexity. He had come to discuss the points of theology, but all Jesus seemed to want to talk about was birthdays.

In John 3:1-8, we read, "There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, 'Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.' Jesus answered and said to him, 'Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' Nicodemus said to him, 'How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?'

And Jesus answered, 'Most assuredly, I say to you, Nicodemus, unless one is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.'"

Now, Nicodemus was undoubtedly a very bright man. He was a respected scholar who had studied the Scriptures for almost all of his life. But in this conversation, he was lost. Born again? Born of the Spirit? What in the world is this young teacher talking about? According to Jesus, everybody needs to have two birthdays. I mean, we all get one, right? When we're young, we like everybody to remember it, but then when we get older, we're hoping everybody forgets it. Funny how that works.

But the truth is, the second birthday is just as important as the first. The first is for time; the second is for eternity. But as it happens, this second birthday is one most people know very little about. You may be here today and you never heard of being born the second time. But it's right here in the Scripture and we're going to unpack it and understand it.

It's a birthday that is frequently confused with religion or good works or 12 steps or self-improvement plans. But if you read the Scripture carefully, you will discover that the new birth is nothing less than a miracle. It's an extremely important supernatural work that takes place within the heart of a person when he or she comes into a relationship with God. The Bible calls that being born anew, being born again.

And some are going to say, "Pastor Jeremiah, I go to church all the time. I've worked hard. I mean, I've given my money, I've done lots of good things." Yes, but in this discussion, I'm not talking about the outside of your life—what you do. I'm talking about the inside of life—what you are.

I'm not talking about those external things that might give someone reason to believe you're a good person. What I am saying in this is we need to make very, very certain we understand these words Jesus spoke to Nicodemus that night some 2,000 years ago. Why? Because our eternal salvation is tied to these words.

Let me talk with you for a few moments about the experience of the new birth. The Bible is very clear about this. How does one become born again? Well, someone might reply, "You've got to try, you've got to work hard." Really? How hard did you work when you were being born the first time? I mean, I don't think you worked very hard at all. It was your mother who did all the work. You were just along for the ride.

You can't be born again through your own effort. Listen to Ephesians 2: "Even when we were dead in trespasses, who made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) and raised up together, and we've been made to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." New birth has to happen to you from a force outside of yourself. God has to do this in you; you can't do it yourself.

There's no such thing in the universe as a do-it-yourself salvation. It's not there. In fact, you'll find the phrase "born of God" seven times in the first letter of John. That is what the second birth is: it's to be born of God. The new birth is God-birth. It is you being born of God through his Spirit filling the vacuum that exists in every heart outside of Christ.

God never intended for his creatures to be one-dimensional. God never intended men and women to be just flesh. God wanted his prize creation, humankind, to be fully dimensional. And that includes the spiritual dimension. So he put within us this vacuum that can only be filled by himself. And what do we do? Well, we spend our whole lives trying to stuff everything we can into that vacuum until at last, out of frustration, we finally come to realize the only thing that fits in that vacuum is God himself.

And when we invite Christ to come into our life, we become a fully dimensional creature of God. Perhaps you have experienced that yourself recently. You can talk with vivid color about the difference that Christ has made in your life. The new birth is something that can only take place through the agency of almighty God. You can't of your own volition, of your own strength, of your own efforts, bring about the new birth.

It doesn't matter what church you attend. You might be Baptist, Presbyterian, Charismatic, Pentecostal, Catholic, or whatever you call yourself. But if that is all you've got, you're still one-dimensional. Until the Holy Spirit comes to live within you because you have invited Christ to be your Savior, you haven't been born again.

The good news about being born again is something I've reveled in often as I've thought about it. I'm going to give it to you. It's a little formula. It goes like this: if you are born twice, you only have to die once. But if you've only been born once, you've got to die twice.

You see, it works like this: if you've been born physically and spiritually, the only death you have to worry about is physical death. And you might even beat that rap if the rapture happens. But if you've only had one birthday, if you haven't been born again into the family of God, you not only have to die physically, but after you die physically, you will face the second death, which means eternal separation from God. That's spiritual death. That's what Scripture calls the second death.

Physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. Spiritual death is the separation of the soul from God forever. You don't want to mess with the second death, I promise you. And the way you escape the second death is get born twice.

The experience of the new birth—what are the effects of it? How does it happen? How can it be? That's the question Nicodemus had. He was trying to put it all together in physical terms and it wasn't working for him. He said, "Can a man get back into his mother's womb and be born a second time?" Let's hope not for everyone's sake. Jesus in essence told Nicodemus that the new birth was a mystery.

As I've pictured these two men talking on a flat-top roof out under the stars, it's easy to visualize a night breeze rustling the leaves of a nearby tree as Jesus spoke. And then Jesus said, "Nicodemus, it's just like the wind," and he gestured to the trees. "The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit."

And there's a little play on words here because the word wind and the word Spirit are the same Greek word, the word *pneuma*. We get the word pneumatic brakes from that word. What did Jesus mean when he said that the work of the Holy Spirit in the new birth is like the wind? Well, first of all, like the wind, the new birth is unseeable. You can't see the new birth.

You cannot see the wind, and all you can see is what it does. Trees bend, leaves swirl, branches break. The Holy Spirit works in the same way. You cannot see him enter a heart, but you sure can see the results as guilt is replaced with joy, and bitterness with forgiveness, and fear with faith. It's like planting a seed. You cannot see the life inside, but soon green shoots are appearing. The new birth is invisible, yet it always shows up later on in the effects of it in the life of the person who experiences it.

The new birth is also unpredictable. The wind is unpredictable. I know meteorologists can study radar and satellites, but how many of you have been in storms that were never predicted or places where storms were not predicted? We used to have a joke where I grew up where they would say, "I just shoveled four inches of partly cloudy off of my driveway." You know, that's kind of how it is.

We think we know how the weather works, but we don't know how the weather works. Meteorologists can study, but storms shift without warning. And the Spirit works in the same surprising way. I wish I could tell you all the different ways that I have observed people coming to Christ in the 50 or so years that I've been doing this.

A woman pressing play on an old cassette tape, a driver driving a truck hearing a gospel broadcast, a teenager overhearing some friends talk. None of that comes from a textbook. But the Spirit is not limited by our methods. He moves where he wills. He reaches hearts we might never expect.

The wind blows where it wishes and the Spirit works in ways that continually surprise us. And if I had all your stories here and how you came to Christ, there would be almost as many stories as there are people. God is not stereotyped. He works in all of us in a different way. He gets into our lives. He causes things to happen to us that make us stop and think.

Maybe the things that have happened this week have brought you to church today. You never know. We read in the life of Joseph that sometimes people mean things for evil, but God means them for good. And maybe you're here because of the anguish in your soul over all the events of this past week. Listen to me: God will use anything to bring you to himself, and his methods are unpredictable.

The new birth is unseeable, it's unpredictable, it's unstoppable. Try holding up your hand and telling the wind to stop. It will not listen. You cannot stop it. In the same way, no one can stop the Holy Spirit. A person may say they want nothing to do with God, but one day they begin asking questions and feeling a pull toward Christ.

And of course, that is the Spirit at work. He has been called the Hound of Heaven because his love never gives up and his pursuit never ends. Maybe you've been praying for someone in your family for a long time and you think there's no use to continue. Don't stop. The Hound of Heaven may be on his trail and you will find out about it later.

So the new birth is unseeable, it's unpredictable, it's unstoppable, and then it's undeniable. Laws can guide people, schools can teach knowledge, and families can set rules, but none of these can change a heart. Only the Holy Spirit can take away sin and remove guilt and make someone new.

That is why in prisons today you can find men and women who once lived violent and broken lives who are now reading Scripture and singing hymns and sharing Christ with others. The world looks on in disbelief and asks, "How can such change be possible?" And the answer is clear: the Holy Spirit's been at work, and his power to transform lives is undeniable.

So the experience of the new birth and the effects of it, what about the explanation of it? Jesus didn't try to explain the action of the Spirit much beyond that. So how would I explain him? Yet at the same time, I think there are some things we need to know about this new birth—truths that are important.

This new birth is the result of two agents acting together. Listen to what Jesus said. He said, "Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Just as in physical birth it takes a man and a woman to have a child, in spiritual birth it takes what the Scripture calls water and the Spirit.

Now, we know what the Holy Spirit is—that's the second agency on this list. As far as the second part of that verse, we don't have any doubt. The Bible says, "Listen to this: you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his."

I want to take just a moment of parenthesis right here to correct a doctrine that keeps floating around all the time, and that is that you become a Christian when you accept Christ, but you have to wait for the second blessing to get the Holy Spirit. So I've had people come up and ask me, "Do you have the Spirit?" Well, let me give you the answer.

The Bible says right here: if you don't have the Spirit, you're none of his. You cannot be a Christian and not have the Holy Spirit. When Jesus comes to live within your heart, the Holy Spirit comes to live within your heart. You're baptized by the Spirit into the body of Christ.

So don't let anybody tell you you need something more. You have everything that you need. It's not that you need something more; the something more needs more of you. And it's not that you need the Holy Spirit because you're a Christian and haven't received him yet, because that is not possible. The Bible says if you do not have the Spirit, you are not his. Everybody get that?

You may not need it now, but someday somebody's going to come to you and stick their finger in your face and tell you you're a second-class person because you don't have the Spirit. Don't forget where this verse is. Take it out and read it to them. It's pretty plain. It's not hard to understand. It isn't open for debate. It's what the Word of God says. You can't get saved without the Holy Spirit. You may think you're getting to Christ without the Holy Spirit, but even if you don't know what he's doing, he's working in your heart.

It isn't difficult to understand that Jesus is talking here about the Holy Spirit. But then he says you have to be born of water. And some people say that means you have to be baptized, but that's not what this means. There's no evidence in the Scripture whatsoever that baptism is a requirement for salvation. It's an act of obedience for those who have already been saved.

So what does the word water mean? Let me help you with that. Psalm 119:9: "How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your word." Ephesians 5:25: "Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word."

Now having read those two verses, what do you think the water is? It's the Word of God. The Bible says that in order to become a Christian, two agencies are involved: the Holy Spirit and the Word. Now how does that usually work? Someone has given you a Scripture or you've heard a Scripture in church, and the Spirit of God begins to work on you and he takes the Scripture that you've heard and he drills it into your heart. And you become convicted of your need and you become a Christian. The things that bring a person to Christ are the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.

So according to John, we were brought into existence spiritually by the Word of God. The water is the Word. So what Jesus said to Nicodemus was, "Nicodemus, you can't be born unless you're born of the Spirit and of the Word." And it works like this: the Word of God is preached or read or heard, and the Spirit of God takes the Word of God and strikes fire in the heart of a person and they become a Christian.

Somebody asked me once, "Why do you keep on preaching the Bible, Jeremiah? Don't you know any other book? Don't you get tired of preaching the same old book?" Here's my answer: I'm hoping to live to be about 150, but even if I do, I'll only be just beginning in the Word of God. I'm continually awed and amazed at how God takes his Word and uses it to bring people to faith in Jesus Christ.

Someone said, "What's your evangelism program at your church?" Well, we try to encourage people, teach people, reach people, but we have a continual stream of people coming to Christ, and there's only one explanation for it: we have a steady diet of the Word of God. It is the Word of God that is continually bringing men and women to faith in Jesus Christ.

If you don't use the Word of God to communicate spiritual truth, you take the Holy Spirit out of his environment. The only way the Holy Spirit can work in the heart of a person is if the Word of God is present. If you take the Holy Spirit out of his arena, then you've got nothing. But when the Word of God is preached and the Spirit of God uses that Word to bring about conversion, he does so in the hearts of those who listen.

I just keep preaching the Word of God. I'm never going to quit preaching the Word of God. In Nashville, Tennessee, a man came up to me and said, "I'm a long-haul trucker, and I got saved listening to you on the radio. I started listening to you once when I was flipping the dial around, and then I started listening every day and one day it just all made sense to me. And I pulled my rig at the rest stop and gave my heart to Jesus Christ." We get countless testimonies like that from all over the country.

And maybe you're a testimony just waiting to be shared. If Christ has changed your life through Turning Point, we'd love to hear about it. And if you're considering making that decision to put Jesus Christ on the throne of your heart, don't delay any further. Do it now. Make him the Lord of your life. You will never regret it. He will take you places you never dreamed you'd ever be able to go because his direction for your life is so much better than anything you could conceive of yourself. Make him Lord of your life. Walk with him every day. The Bible says for that to happen, you have to be born of the Spirit.

As we close our program today, just want to remind you again that Turning Point produces a magazine that comes to your home every month. If you're not getting that magazine, we'd love to put you on the list and make sure you get it. You'll never want to be without it. Ask for it when you write to us or call us or go to the internet. We'll be happy to make your name a part of the list that gets the next issue. And we'll be sure to see you here tomorrow for the next edition of Turning Point.

Guest (Male): For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's new series, *The Holy Spirit You May Not Know*, visit our website where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, *Turning Points*, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at DavidJeremiah.org/radio. That's DavidJeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993.

Ask for your copy of David's new book, *The Holy Spirit You May Not Know*, a valuable resource that's yours for a gift of any amount. You can also purchase the *Jeremiah Study Bible* in the English Standard, New International, and New King James versions, complete with notes and articles from Dr. Jeremiah's decades of study. Get all the details when you visit our website, DavidJeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue *The Holy Spirit You May Not Know* on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.