Victor was the most disciplined man anyone at his firm had ever met. He woke at 4:45 every morning without an alarm. By 5:00 he was journalling. By 5:30 he had done fifty press-ups and read twenty pages of a book on leadership, productivity or personal finance. He tracked everything on an app: water intake, sleep, steps, books read, money saved. At thirty-four he was managing projects worth billions of naira, and the younger staff spoke about him with a mixture of admiration and fear.
When Victor recommitted his life to Christ after a friend’s wedding, he did what he did with everything else. He added it to the system. Bible reading went into the tracker at 5:10. Prayer was scheduled from 5:15 to 5:30. He bought a study Bible and three commentaries. He joined a men’s fellowship and was soon running its WhatsApp group with impressive efficiency.
Eighteen months later he sat in his mother’s sitting room in Surulere on a Saturday afternoon and admitted, for the first time out loud, that something was wrong. He was still irritable. He still despised people who were slower than him. The secret habits he had promised God he would break were still there, managed and hidden but not gone. He had improved almost everything about himself, and underneath it all he felt exactly the same.
His mother listened. Then she pointed to the corner of the room, where a vase of bright plastic flowers had stood on a side table for as long as Victor could remember. “I have dusted those flowers every Saturday for twenty-two years,” she said. “I wash them. I rearrange them. Your aunty says they are the best-looking flowers in Surulere.” Then she pointed to the window ledge, where a small pepper plant was growing in a paint tin. A neighbour’s child had planted it from a seed. It was scruffy, and one of its leaves had a hole in it, and three small green peppers were hanging from it.
“Those plastic flowers have never grown one centimetre,” she said. “That thing in the paint tin is alive.”
PunchlineVictor told me later that he did not sleep much that night.
A teacher who needed to be born
Victor’s problem is an old one. John’s Gospel introduces us to “a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews” (John 3:1). He was learned, respected and morally serious. He belonged to the strictest religious party in Israel and sat on its highest council. He came to Jesus by night and opened politely: “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God” (John 3:2).
Jesus did not respond to the compliment. He went straight beneath it:
Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
Nicodemus came to discuss teaching. Jesus spoke about birth. Nicodemus could make room for a teacher whose insight exceeded his own. He could add new ideas to an already impressive religious life. But Jesus said that what he needed was not addition. It was a beginning.
The Greek word translated again in “born again” can also mean from above. John seems to enjoy that double meaning. The new birth is a second birth, and it is a birth whose source is above, in God. Nicodemus heard only the first sense and asked whether an old man could enter his mother’s womb a second time. His confusion is understandable. You cannot cause your own birth. Nobody has ever decided to be born, worked hard at being born, or improved himself into existence.
That is exactly the point. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” Human nature, however educated and disciplined, can only reproduce human nature. Flesh trained by flesh is still flesh. It may be very well-behaved flesh. It may be flesh that reads twenty pages a day and drinks three litres of water. But it cannot produce the life of God.
Sincere believers have understood “born of water and of the Spirit” in different ways. Some take the water to mean natural birth, some take it to mean baptism, and many see in it the cleansing God had promised through the prophets, when He said He would sprinkle clean water on His people and put His Spirit within them. That last reading helps explain Jesus’ surprise a few verses later: “Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things?” (John 3:10). A teacher of Israel should have recognised the promise of a new heart and a new spirit. Whatever view we take of the water, the central truth is clear. Entrance into God’s kingdom requires a birth that only the Spirit can give.
Why improvement cannot reach the root
There is nothing wrong with discipline. Good habits, education, wise counsel and self-control can help a life greatly. Scripture commends diligence and warns against laziness. The problem with self-improvement is not that it does too much. It is that it cannot reach far enough.
Jeremiah asked a famous question: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil” (Jeremiah 13:23). A leopard can be trained, fed and groomed. It can be taught to sit in a circus ring. It cannot decide to stop being a leopard. Jeremiah’s point is that sin is a condition of the heart, far deeper than any surface habit. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
Paul goes further still. He says that before Christ we “were dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Dead people do not need improvement. They need life. You can dress a corpse in a beautiful agbada, comb its hair and lay it in a polished casket. It will look much better. It will be just as dead.
Jesus Himself made a similar point in a homely picture: “No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse” (Matthew 9:16). Any tailor at the market will tell you the same. Stitch strong new fabric onto a worn-out shirt and the first wash will tear it further. The new life of the kingdom cannot simply be patched onto the old life. It needs a new garment.
And Jesus said plainly, “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63). Nothing. Not little. Nothing, when it comes to producing spiritual life.
This explains Victor’s frustration. He had treated the gospel as the most important item on his self-improvement plan. He had added Christ to the system. But Jesus did not die to become one more input into your personal development. He died to make you new.
NuggetJesus did not die to become the best item on your self-improvement plan. He died and rose to give you a life you could never have produced.
Born of God
John’s Gospel announces the new birth before Nicodemus ever appears. In the prologue, John writes:
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
Look at the three things John rules out. “Not of blood.” You are not born into God’s family by ancestry. Your father’s faith does not make you a child of God, and neither does your grandmother’s long membership of the women’s fellowship. “Nor of the will of the flesh.” You are not born of God by human effort, by desire or determination. “Nor of the will of man.” No pastor, parent or prophet can decide it for you or impart it by his own authority. You are born “of God.”
That is why the new birth is a gift received, not an achievement. “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.” The word power there means authority or right. Those who receive Christ, who believe on His name, are given the right to become God’s children. The life comes from Him. Faith receives it.
James puts it beautifully: “Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth” (James 1:18). Peter says that believers are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (1 Peter 1:23). The Word of God is the seed. The Spirit of God gives the life. And the will of God is the source.
This changes the way we think about our own beginning. Many believers remember the day they made a decision for Christ, and that memory is precious. But the decision was your response to something God was doing. Behind your choosing was His begetting. Your new life does not rest on the strength of your decision. It rests on the will of the God who chose to give you life.
A new heart, as God promised
None of this was a new idea. Centuries before Jesus spoke to Nicodemus, God had spoken through the prophet Ezekiel to a nation in exile, a people whose long history of trying to keep the law had ended in disaster:
And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh: That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
Read the verbs. I will give. I will put. I will take. I will give. God does not say, “You must work harder at softening your stony heart.” He says He will remove it and replace it. A stone cannot be improved into flesh. You can polish a stone until it shines. You can carve it into a beautiful shape. It is still stone. God’s answer was a heart transplant.
And look at the purpose: “That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them.” The new heart becomes the source of obedience. Ezekiel would repeat and expand this promise later in his book, adding the specific promise of God’s own Spirit placed within His people. In an earlier teaching we saw how that promise means grace changed the source from which God’s standard is met, without lowering the standard itself. Here we notice something underneath that: the source is new because the heart is new.
That is what Victor’s mother saw in her paint tin. The pepper plant was producing peppers because it was a pepper plant. It was not straining to become one. Its fruit came from its nature. The plastic flowers could be arranged into any shape, but they could never bear fruit, because there was no life in them to bear it.
Partakers of the divine nature
Peter makes one of the boldest statements in the New Testament about what God has done for believers:
According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.
“That by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.” We need to be careful with that phrase. Peter is not saying that believers become God, or that the difference between Creator and creature disappears. That idea has led some people into serious error. He is saying that God has given us a real share in His own life. The word partakers means sharers, those who have fellowship in something. Through Christ we have been brought into a participation in the very life and character of God, so that His holiness, love and goodness begin to be expressed through us.
Notice the order in these verses. First, “his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness.” Given. Past tense. Then come the promises, through which we share His nature and escape the corruption that is in the world through lust. And only then, in the very next verse, Peter says, “And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge” (2 Peter 1:5), and he continues through self-control, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness and love.
Diligence follows divine life. Peter is addressing people who already share God’s nature, and telling them to cultivate what that nature produces. Nobody adds virtues in order to become alive. The diligence is real and the effort is serious, but it is the effort of a gardener tending a living plant, not of a craftsman gluing plastic petals onto a wire stem.
This is where many sincere believers go wrong. They hear the call to add virtue and knowledge and self-control, and they set about it with the same methods they used before they knew Christ: resolutions, willpower, pressure and tracking. Some progress comes, which makes it worse, because they begin to believe the progress is their own. The difference between the two is not always visible from the outside. It is visible in what happens when you fail. The self-improver either despairs or tries harder. The new creation returns to the source of his life.
The washing of regeneration
Paul gives Titus a short summary of the whole matter:
For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another. But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; Which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour; That being justified by his grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Paul begins with an honest picture of what we were: foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to lusts, “living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another.” People like that need far more than a little polishing. They need rescuing.
Then the turn: “But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared.” The initiative is God’s. “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.” Then Paul names how: “by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”
The word translated regeneration is palingenesia. It means a new genesis, a new beginning, a second coming into being. Jesus used the same word for the renewal of all things at the end of the age (Matthew 19:28). What God will one day do for the whole creation, He has already begun in every person who believes. Each believer is a small, early instance of the new creation that is coming.
And it is “renewing of the Holy Ghost, Which he shed on us abundantly.” Not a trickle. Abundantly. God did not give us just enough of His Spirit to scrape through. He poured Him out.
The new man is being renewed
Paul writes to the Colossians about how this new creation shows itself in ordinary relationships:
Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man , which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.
“Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man.” Notice the reasoning. Paul does not say, “Stop lying so that you can become a new man.” He says, “Stop lying, because you have already put off the old man and put on the new.” The change of identity has happened. The change of behaviour follows from it.
Then he adds that the new man “is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.” That phrase takes us back to Genesis, where God made humanity in His own image. Sin defaced that image. The new creation is God restoring it, and He is doing so by renewal, which is an ongoing process. The new man has been put on, and the new man is being renewed. Both are true. Paul elsewhere says that God’s purpose is for us “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).
So new creation does not mean that every learned habit vanishes at conversion. You still know your name. You may still speak the same language, work in the same trade and carry some of the same scars. A painful memory may need care. A destructive habit may need a sustained response, perhaps with the help of a mature believer or a professional. Those realities do not prove that nothing happened when you believed. They are the ground on which the renewal is now taking place.
Look also at verse 11: “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.” The new creation reorders how we see one another. The labels that once defined people, their tribe, their status, their religious background, their past, are no longer the deepest truth about them. A brother who used to be a thief is not “the thief” in the church. A sister who was once known for her sharp tongue is not “that woman.” In the new creation, Christ is all. That does not erase responsibilities. A person who has stolen may be forgiven and made new while still needing to return what was taken. But the new life gives a better basis for that honesty. It frees him to take responsibility without believing that the past must remain the final definition of his future.
Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision
Paul ends his letter to the Galatians with a sentence that sums up his whole argument:
But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.
The Galatian churches were being told that faith in Christ was a good start, but that to be truly complete they needed to add circumcision and the observance of the law. It was, in a sense, a religious self-improvement programme. Paul’s response throughout the letter is fierce, and here at the end he puts it in a single line: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”
Notice that Paul dismisses both sides. Circumcision, the religious achievement, counts for nothing. But uncircumcision, the absence of religion, counts for nothing either. Being outwardly religious does not make you new. Being outwardly irreligious does not make you free. The only thing that matters is new creation. Paul says the same in his second letter to the Corinthians: “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Everything else is decoration on a plastic flower.
He asks the Galatians a piercing question earlier in the letter: “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3). That is the question for every believer who has started with grace and slid back into self-improvement. You began by receiving life you could not produce. Why would you now try to finish by producing what can only be received?
This changes how we disciple people. We can tell new believers what is true of them in Christ and then help them understand the conduct that belongs to that life. We need not keep announcing that they are hopelessly bound to their old identity in order to make obedience seem serious. We water what God has planted. We pull out weeds. We give it light. But we do not pretend that our methods make it alive.
Victor did not throw away his planner. He still wakes early, and he still likes his app. But over the following year something shifted. He stopped treating his time with God as a slot to be ticked and started treating it as the place where he received life for the day. He began by reading John 3 every morning for a month, slowly, until the words ye must be born again stopped sounding like a doctrine and started sounding like an invitation.
The changes came slowly, and they surprised him. A junior colleague made a serious mistake on a project, and Victor, to his own astonishment, found himself sitting with the young man and helping him fix it instead of humiliating him in the meeting. The secret habit took longer, and he needed help from an older brother in his fellowship, but its hold weakened in a way that no amount of tracking had ever achieved. He told me it felt less like building something and more like noticing that something was growing.
The last time he visited his mother, the pepper plant had outgrown its paint tin, and she had moved it into a bigger pot outside the kitchen door. It was covered in red peppers. The plastic flowers were still in the corner, still bright, still dusted every Saturday, still exactly the same size.
PunchlineVictor laughed when he saw them. Then he went outside and picked a pepper.
Jesus did not die to improve you. He died and rose again to make you new. If you have been dusting plastic flowers, stop. Come to Him as Nicodemus did, honestly, even if it has to be by night. Receive the life only the Spirit can give. Then tend it, water it, and watch it grow.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- In what ways have you treated the Christian life as a self-improvement project? Where has that left you frustrated?
- Why do you think Jesus answered Nicodemus’s compliment by speaking about birth instead of teaching?
- John 1:13 rules out blood, the will of the flesh and the will of man. Which of those have you been tempted to rely on?
- How does 2 Peter 1:3-5 help you hold together divine life and human diligence?
- Is there a label from your past, or from someone else’s, that you need to stop using now that Christ is all?
This Week
Read John 3:1-21 every morning this week. On the first day, write down honestly the areas of your life where you have been “dusting plastic flowers,” improving the outside while the inside stays the same. Each morning after reading, pray one sentence: “Lord, I cannot make myself alive. Give me Your life for today.” Then choose one place in your day where you will rely on that life instead of willpower: a difficult conversation, a familiar temptation, a person you find hard to love. At the end of the week, notice what grew.
A Prayer
Father, I confess that I have often tried to improve myself into the person You want me to be. I have added You to my plans and my systems, and underneath it all I have stayed the same. Thank You that Jesus died to make me new, and not merely to improve me. Thank You for the new birth by Your Spirit, for the new heart You promised, and for the share You have given me in Your own life. Renew me after the image of Your Son. Teach me to tend the life You have planted, to work hard from that life and not toward it, and to see others as people You are making new. I receive Your life today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.