New birth, Barna, and the Bible
Jesus’s declaration that we must be born again (John 3.7) is either deluded or devastating to the one who would be captain of his soul.
Not many biblical realities are better designed by God to reveal our helplessness in sin. ‘The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit’ (John 3.8). It is the Wind, not we, who finally rules the soul.
But not everyone today is jealous to esteem this miracle for the wonder that it is. If you go to research groups online, you can read things like this: ‘Born Again Christians Just As Likely to Divorce As Are Non-Christians’. The same kind of statistics are given by Ron Sider in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? and by Mark Regnerus in his book Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers.
