Following message was given at Grace Community Church in Menden, Nevada.

Brother, if I can have you, go ahead and come on, come on up.

So our speaker this morning is Paul Washer.

Paul Washer is served as a missionary in Peru. He heads up, Heart Cry,

missionary society, and I cannot express how much I appreciate and love this brother, and we are absolutely thrilled that he's with us today.

Thank you, brother.

I have been asked to speak about the doctrine of regeneration, especially as it pertains to conversion.

Some of the things that I wanted to share are kind of long, so I'm going to have to try to condense several things. When we talk about

the doctrine of regeneration, we need to be very, very clear of its uniqueness and its power.

My grandfather wrote a track back in the 1950s that was entitled Born Againism, in which he was reacting against this idea that the doctrine of regeneration had simply been turned into a human decision.

Have you made your decision for Christ? What we need to understand is that in the

doctrine of regeneration, we could possibly say that it is the greatest manifestation of the

power of God in all his activities. When God created the world, he created the world ex nihilo. That means out of nothing.

There was nothing there. And even the concept of nothing is hard to grapple with. But in the

salvation of a human being, he is not creating out of nothing, but he's taking a mass of corrupt humanity and turning it in to something quite different, a child of God, someone that is fit for the new creation.

Now, I want us to, we're going to look at some texts before we get to our primary text because a lot of times we'll look at different passages of Scripture

and not realize that in reality they're speaking about the same thing,

or at least they're uniquely and intimately connected with one another.

And so I want us to go first of all to 2 Corinthians, chapter 5 to a verse

to a verse that you're all familiar with.

2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 17, therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things pass away.

Behold, new things have come. Literally, therefore, if anyone in Christ, new creation.

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