The Necessity of New Birth

Today's Old Testament daily lectionary reading is Numbers 13:27-31:
This was their report to Moses: “We entered the land you sent us to explore, and it is indeed a bountiful country—a land flowing with milk and honey. Here is the kind of fruit it produces. But the people living there are powerful, and their towns are large and fortified. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak!
. . . But Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses. “Let’s go at once to take the land,” he said. “We can certainly conquer it!” But the other men who had explored the land with him disagreed. “We can’t go up against them! They are stronger than we are!”

See also. . . 
Matthew 19:11 - “Not everyone can accept this statement,” Jesus said. “Only those whom God helps."

RM:  This Old Testament verse is interestingly coupled with Matthew 19:11 on the Daily Lectionary, where Jesus points out that Spiritual realities (such as this crazy idea of simply embracing a confident certainty and trust which would say something like, .... "of course God will supernaturally take care of all of our impossible obstacles and dangers for us! Of course!! ...easily!" ) simply can't be understood, nor lived out, by people who don't have the holy Spirit giving them the ability to come awake to and see and think like people whom God makes spiritually awake, which would then naturally give them the eyes to see and therefore have the motivation and courage to live a God trusting kind of life.

That's why natural humans do not have the ability to accept God's things and ideas (as the people in this passage couldn't fathom going into a land with giants). Unless God helps us by supernaturally opening the heart and eyes, we CANNOT accept it because we haven't yet seen God's revealed reality for ourselves. That's why Caleb, Joshua, and Moses we're voting, yes, to going into the land, and everybody else was voting, no.

Whoever you are, today, right now, stop what you're doing and talk to God.  Humble your heart, even if you've been a Christian for years, and ask God to give you "eyes to see him" and ears to hear and a heart to understand.  Only then can we have the supernatural motivation to do the impossible, to walk on water, to see his reality so certainly that it would motivate us to live what others would call radical, but God calls normal.  I believe he wants to give us his Holy Spirit like this, but we must ask. Let's all ask today. Amen.

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