January 15 Daily Devotional

Scripture for Day 15—James 1:18

¹⁸ Of his own will he brought us forth…

Devotional:

Towering among the evidences of God's goodness to his people is the grace of regeneration, the new birth. "Unless one is born again," Jesus declared to Nicodemus, "he cannot see the Kingdom of God" (John 3:3).

The cause of this new birth is God's sovereign grace ("Of his own will he brought us forth…"). There is nothing or no one above or behind God that compels him to grant this gift; there is nothing outside of God that makes him regenerate sinners; he does so "of his own will."

When Jesus says, "you must be born again" (John 3:7), therefore, he is by no means saying, "You must bear yourself again." Being born again is not your decision; it's God's. "Of his own will he brought us forth…" We come into this world dead in trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1). We are utterly helpless to even want salvation, let alone to save ourselves. We are entirely dependent on God's sheer grace if we are to be saved at all.

And yet, it seems to be part of fallen human nature that we flatter ourselves and feel as if God owes us salvation. But God doesn't owe sinners anything except what is due us—"the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23). God has to want to save you, or else you won't be saved. It's a matter of mercifully granting you something when in fact you deserve the exact opposite.

Do you sense how utterly dependent you are on God's supernatural intervention to rescue you? Are you daily grateful to God that he has been so gracious and merciful that he reached down into the muck to pluck you out? Do you ever wonder where you might be if God had not mercifully regenerated you?

Do you sense how utterly dependent we are on God's supernatural intervention to rescue any sinners? Do you daily pray that he will sovereignly use the church's outreach in order effectually to call sinners out of darkness into light?

How sweet and awful is the place
with Christ within the doors,
while everlasting love displays
the choicest of her stores.

While all our hearts and all our songs
join to admire the feast,
each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
"Lord, why was I a guest?

"Why was I made to hear thy voice,
and enter while there's room,
when thousands make a wretched choice,
and rather starve than come?"

‘Twas the same love that spread the feast
that sweetly drew us in;
else we had still refused to taste,
and perished in our sin.

Pity the nations, O our God,
constrain the earth to come;
send thy victorious Word abroad,
and bring the strangers home.

We long to see thy churches full,
that all the chosen race
may, with one voice and heart and soul,
sing thy redeeming grace. (Isaac Watts)^†

^† Click here for the full hymn and tune.

Click here for background on the author of Are You For Real?: Meditations in the Epistle of James for Secret or Family Worship.