II

The Gateway Into the Kingdom

“Except a man be born again he cannot enter the kingdom of God.”

There is no portion of the Word of God, perhaps, with which we are more familiar than this passage. I suppose if I were to ask those in any audience if they believed that Jesus Christ taught the doctrine of the New Birth, nine tenths of them would say: “Yes, I believe He did.”

Now if the words of this text are true they embody one of the most solemn questions that can come before us. We can afford to be deceived about many things rather than about this one thing. Christ makes it very plain. He says, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God”⁠—much less inherit it. This doctrine of the New Birth is therefore the foundation of all our hopes for the world to come. It is really the A B C of the Christian religion. My experience has been this⁠—that if a man is unsound on this doctrine he will be unsound on almost every other fundamental doctrine in the Bible. A true understanding of this subject will help a man to solve a thousand difficulties that he may meet with in the Word of God. Things that before seemed very dark and mysterious will become very plain.

The doctrine of the New Birth upsets all false religion⁠—all false views about the Bible and about God. A friend of mine once told me that in one of his after-meetings, a man came to him with a long list of questions written out for him to answer. He said: “If you can answer these questions satisfactorily, I have made up my mind to be a Christian.” “Do you not think,” said my friend, “that you had better come to Christ first? Then you can look into these questions.” The man thought that perhaps