John 3:6 “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

There are no natural born citizens of this Kingdom. The fact that your mother conceived you and gave birth to you gets you one thing: existence. Now you have life as a human being. That’s what we expect, right? Dogs have puppies. Cats have kittens. Humans have baby humans. If it ever worked differently, it would be all over the news. But it never works differently.

Humans don’t give birth to prepackaged children of God who naturally know and trust him, at least not since the fall into sin. Physical life cannot produce spiritual life. The human birth process does not fill a person with the Holy Spirit, does not create a heart beating with faith, does not create a soul that knows it’s true Maker, Savior, and King. I know of no stories of missionaries who have come upon some tribe previously cut off from all Christian contact and discovered that some were already believers in Jesus.

I do know examples of nominally Christian parents who for one reason or another never brought their children to church, never led them to Jesus, and predictably their children remained unbelievers, non-citizens of God’s kingdom. “Flesh gives birth to flesh,” period.

“But the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” God has a way. This new birth, this second birth, is not a do it yourself project, any more than your first birth was. Birth is something that happens to you. It’s a gift. Did any of you schedule your own birth? Could you have chosen to cancel it? Of course not. All you could do is show up when the time came.

God’s Spirit is your spiritual mother in this case. And Jesus hints strongly at where the Spirit shows up to give us birth into God’s kingdom: “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit.” The Spirit shows up at our baptisms, like he did at Jesus’ baptism, like Peter promised the 3000 baptized on Pentecost day he would, like he has at every baptism ever since. At the same time the Spirit shows up whenever God’s word is present, like Jesus says to his disciples in John 6, “The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and they are life,” like Peter wrote in his first letter, “You were born again of the living and enduring word of God.”

The need for a new birth is no surprise. It’s necessary, because it does what our natural birth can’t do: get us into the kingdom of God.