John 6:63
"It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life."
Could Jesus have been any clearer? New life is given to believers from the Spirit. There is nothing within our physical existence which can bring about the new life.
All of our moral living and good deeds are of no profit when it comes to the new birth in Christ. Our salvation comes to us as an unmerited and unearned gift of the Father, given through faith in Christ, by the Spirit's touch upon us.
While a simple teaching, Jesus laid it out when his disciples questioned one of the Lord's most difficult teachings, where preaches of eating his body and drinking his blood for eternal life. Like me, you rightly struggle at even the thought of this. Surely our Lord doesn't want us to physically eat and drink of his body!
Fortunately for us, Jesus takes the time to explain we're not to look to a physical interpretation, but to the spiritual. "The words that I speak to you are spirit". Without these added words, we find churches wrongly claiming beliefs that say we literally drink and eat of Christ during communion services, or that the bread and juice later become the body of Christ within us. But that's not what our Lord says we need. Our salvation is of the Spirit and his words to us were to be seen as spiritual.
At least for now, our salvation is spiritual, coming at the touch of the Spirit. Just as we need food and drink to sustain our physical lives, the Lord gives us spiritual food and drink, bought with the death of Christ, to give us spiritual life.
Our physical new life comes later, at the second coming of Christ, when we'll all be changed in the twinkling of an eye, given resurrected bodies of the new birth. But for now, we're born again within our spirits through the working of the Spirit in us. This is the guarantee of things to come.
LORD JESUS
Lord, I thank you for your life-giving Spirit living within me and the promise of an eternity with you in a transformed body to come. Amen.
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