When we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.
Romans 5:10

I was always told to be good. You might tell a slave to be free, but that would not make him free. Christ not only tells us to be free, but He frees us. In the third chapter of Genesis we read how man lost life. In the third chapter of John we find how to get it back again.

It is astonishing how the devil blinds us and makes us think we are so naturally good. Suppose that our sins could all be stamped on our forehead; do you not think there would be a stampede? Suppose a photographer could take a photograph of the heart; do you think he could find anyone willing to have such a photograph taken? We are naturally bad, the whole of us (Romans 3:9-19). The first man born of a woman was a murderer. Sin leaped into the world full-grown, and the whole race has been bad all the way down.

I have heard of reform, reform, but it is regeneration — a new life and a new nature — by the power of the Holy Spirit, that we need. It is not that men have just come a little short of the glory of God, and if they apply a little whitewash they will be all right. A man was told the water in his well was bad. "Well," said he, "I'll see to it," and he painted the pump. What you want instead is to go to the source. Make the fountain good and the stream will be good. Let the heart be right and the life will be right. What man needs is a new birth, a new creation (John 3:3-7).

Good resolutions are not new birth. Turning over a new leaf, making promises, or making vows, that isn't new birth at all. Perhaps some of you ask, "What is it?" Well, listen: "Christ came unto His own, and His own received Him not; but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on Name; which were born ... of God" (John 1:11-13).

Life from God comes by receiving the word of God into my heart. Christ says, "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life" (John 6:63). You take the word of God into your heart, and there is the germ, there is the life. If I should take my watch and plant it, I wouldn't get any little watches, would I? The germ of life isn't there. But let me get seed-corn, and out of this seed-corn will come new life and fruit.

Culture is all right in its place, but to talk about culture before a man is born of God, before he has received this incorruptible seed into his heart, is madness. Suppose I commence the first day of May and plow an acre of ground, every day, all though May and June and July. After I have been cultivating for months, you come along and say, "What are you going to put in?" "Well, I am not going to put anything in it, but I believe in a high state of culture." You would say I was a first-class lunatic! But that is what is going on all the while in spiritual things.

Yet, to become truly a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) is the greatest blessing that can come to anyone. Old things pass away: a new life dawns, and that is the greatest blessing that can ever come this side of heaven (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). John 3:16 clearly reveals how this new life from God is given: "God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

If you are not sure that you have thus become a partaker of the divine nature, don't eat, drink, or sleep until you are. And when you get that new nature it is easy to serve God: His yoke is easy, His burden is light (Matthew 11:29).

Excerpted from a sermon of D.L. Moody