Do you know what it really means to be born again? A major clue is in the words born again. To put it simply, it means that your first birth does not count. You are no longer the person who was born the first time.
If you are in Christ, you have no relation to Adam. If you were to trace your old person’s genealogy back through generations and generations, it would eventually lead you back to Adam. And we know, when Adam fell, he brought sin and death into the world, and sin and death spread to all people. But when you became a Christian, that old person was crucified on the cross with Christ—along with all of the passions and desires it inherited (see The Old Self Is Dead). The life of that person ended with Jesus on the cross. And when you received Jesus, you were reborn as a new person into a new family lineage. Now your genealogy goes back one generation—to the Father.
In the same way that Jesus was born apart from human interaction and conceived by the Spirit of God, when you were reborn, you too were conceived by the Spirit of God (see Born of the Spirit, Not the Flesh). So when you say things like, “I’m just a sinner,” “I have a sinful nature,” or “I’m always going to sin because I’m a fallen human,” what you are really saying is that you have not been saved and you have not been born again. Because those things belong to the old self—and those are the very things that Jesus saved us from.
As far as Jesus not being born into sin? I have good news for you: if you are a Christian, you were not born into sin either. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says that anyone who is in Christ has become a new creature (see What the New Creation Is). If you dive into the Greek of that verse, you’ll find out that the creature there is not refurbished, not repaired, not the Adam creature cleaned up. It is a brand new creature that hadn’t existed before the moment it was created. The implications are enormous.
You are not born of sin. You are not a sinner trying to live holy. You are a son, born of the Spirit.
John 1:12–13 gives a beautiful explanation of how the new creature is born: “But to as many as did receive Him and welcome Him, He gave the authority, the power, the privilege to become children of God—to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.”
It is the same way Jesus was born. He was not conceived by the will of Joseph and Mary. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. It is why He was able to be born into a fleshly body and yet have no sinful nature. He did not inherit the fallen nature of Adam, because He was not the product of Adam’s seed, but of the seed of the Spirit of God. And you, when you received Him, the old Adam self died, and you were conceived and reborn directly by the Holy Spirit—born of God—bypassing the sinful nature passed down through Adam.
Now, although you live in a fleshly body, you are no longer in the realm of the flesh, but in the realm of the Spirit (Romans 8:9) (see Union, Not Separation). Though you live on earth, you are simultaneously seated with Christ in heavenly places. You are not born of sin. You are not a sinner trying to live holy. You are a son, born of the Spirit.
