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A Personal Devotional by Debbie Hall
America’s Greatest Need
In an election year politicians will argue over what America’s greatest need is. They will talk about the problems working families are facing, the problem schools are facing, the problems law enforcement is facing, and the problem the military is facing. And then they will produce resolutions about how they will deal with these problems.
The problem with almost all of these resolutions are that they face the symptoms of America’s disease, but not the core issue! America is like the lady who, dying of a treatable disease on the inside, doesn’t get treatment but instead spends thousands of dollars on the outside of her body in plastic surgery. She looks better, but is still dying.
America refuses to acknowledge that she is in rebellion against God and continually chooses sinful indulgences over knowing and doing the will of God. America’s greatest need is not resolutions, but regeneration. Regeneration is the new birth, which the Bible describes as sinners giving up all hope that their own good but misguided deeds will save them and trust instead in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.
Jesus said in Matthew 9:17, "nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." For sinners to receive regeneration, the new birth, they have to have new hearts.
Many of America’s churches have lost this clear Biblical teaching, and do a churchy version of plastic surgery, giving people churchified change on the outside without new life on the inside. The result is like when the new wine bursts the old wineskins; the full change the Christ life can make is unable to be held by the unregenerate heart. People go to church a while, try and fail to obey the Bible, and then drop away.
There is hope, though, and it is by being captured by grace, the way that major figures from church history were!
For Catholics it is finding what Augustine found, when he said, "you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in you." He went from being someone who dabbled in the cults and lived with someone outside of marriage to being born again, and helping untold thousands make peace with God.
For Lutherans it is finding what Martin Luther found, when he finally turned away from trusting in his own good deeds for salvation, to realizing that "the just shall live by faith," and being transformed because he was relying on Christ alone for salvation.
For Methodists it is being like John Wesley, who himself had been very busy with churchianity but had a fear of death, until he heard Luther’s Preface to Romans read and turned away from his own strength to Christ’s and felt his heart "strangely warmed," and went on to passionately help the lower classes of England clean up the messes sinful indulgences had brought.
For Baptists it is being like John Bunyan, the simple working man who heard the gospel and trusted Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit was a hearer and doer of the word, helping millions of Christian pilgrim’s make progress in their faith!
For us all it is fully grasping what is our own, and America’s, and the world’s greatest need: regeneration!
"But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by his grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life" Titus 3:4-7
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