A New Birth Primer
You Must Be Born Again, Jonathan Master. Phillipsburg: P & R Publishing, 2024. Hardcover, 75 pages.
Way back when we were expecting our first child, my wife and I read a few books on pregnancy and childbirth. Books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting helped prepare us for the hitherto unknown, telling us what we needed to know. This little book by Jonathan Master similarly gives Christians what they need to know about the Bible’s teaching on regeneration, also known as being born again. Because of the book’s size (75 pages), it’s helpful to think of it as a primer – a basic introduction to a subject.
The author is currently president of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in South Carolina. He’s also pastored several Presbyterian (PCA) congregations. He’s taught theology extensively and written several books. While he is an accomplished academic, You Must Be Born Again is written at a simple level.
The book is about why we desperately need the new birth and how it completely changes our lives both in this age and in the age to come. Master effectively explains the character of regeneration and how it happens. All of this is supported with biblical references and within the context of confessionally Reformed theology.
Master helpfully pre-empts several questions from readers. One of those has to with an apparent conflict in how the Bible presents the way regeneration happens. Is it through the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit or is it through the instrument of the Word of God? Chapter 3 has the answer.
There are some questions the author doesn’t address. They might be important to us in our context, but were either not important to the author or he chose not to address them because of his desire to write just a short book. Let me just briefly address one of those questions. The author rightly describes regeneration or being born again as an event that takes place before someone comes to faith in Jesus Christ. You can’t believe unless you’ve been born again. But sometimes we’ll hear that we have to be born again every day, or something similar. This confuses regeneration with sanctification. The first is a completed event (“worked in us without us” as the Canons say in 3-4, art.12) and the second is a process in which we are active participants with the Holy Spirit. You can refer to passages like 1 Peter 1:23 which says of believers, “you have been born again.” There the perfect tense is used in Greek, which indicates a completed action with effects into the present. We find the same thing in 1 John 3:9, 4:7, 5:1 and 5:18, except in those passages the Holy Spirit speaks of being born of God. Think about it: when Christ told Nicodemus (a Pharisee) that he needed to be born again, was he telling him that he needed to be more sanctified day to day? Or that he needed the wholesale change of heart involved with the new birth?
I can highly recommend You Must Be Born Again particularly for Bible study groups. It consists of five short chapters – enough perhaps to fill out a gap in the study season somewhere. Because the author doesn’t touch on everything, there will be plenty of scope for discussion. But if you need some help to get things going, every chapter concludes with some questions for reflection and discussion.
Originally published in Clarion 74.10 (July 25, 2025)
