Titus 3:3-7 – For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. 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.
No one ever realizes just how messed up humans are when left to their own devices. As Paul said, “we are without hope and without God” in need of divine intervention to sort out our lives. So we actually needed more than forgiveness or even a divine repair on our lives, what we needed was a whole new life. In today’s scripture passage Paul called it regeneration. We need to become a new creation not just a refurbished version of our former life. Paul himself was the prototype of this work. Even though he was a religious man his nature was permeated with hostility. We see him literally “breathing out profanity” against the Christians before his conversion. You couldn’t fix what was wrong with Paul, regeneration or new birth was the only answer. Here is how John Chrysostom describes this work of God.
“Strange, isn’t it, how we were so drowned in wickedness that we could not be purified? We needed a new birth! For this is implied by “regeneration”. For as when a house is in a ruinous state no one places props under it nor makes any addition to the old building, but pulls it down to its foundations and rebuilds it anew. So in our case, God has not repaired us but made us anew.”
This is the whole thrust of the Christian message, We are unfixable, part of a fallen race without the possibility to change. It would be like trying to change an apple into an orange or a fish into a monkey; it just isn’t going to happen. That is what regeneration is all about. It is a totally different type of being than what we used to be. We had a fallen nature, that is just who we were. The only solution was a new nature which only comes by regeneration. This is the beautiful work of our Savior.