This is part of my year-long series exploring human-centered alternatives to the spiritual promises in Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Today’s entry, “Signs of the New Birth,” promises that believers who are “born again” will manifest “unconscious holiness” and receive “supernatural power to stop sinning,” claiming that the new birth provides “new power of vision” to discern God’s kingdom and results in actually stopping sin rather than merely trying to stop.
Here’s what being born again actually produced:
Pastor Stevens had been born again at age sixteen, and he could still remember the exact moment—July 23rd, 1985, during summer youth camp, when Jesus became real to him in a way that felt like seeing God with his own eyes. The supernatural transformation had been immediate and undeniable.
For thirty-eight years, Pastor Stevens had preached about the new birth with absolute conviction. “You don’t just try to stop sinning,” he’d tell his congregation every few months. “When you’re truly born of God, you receive supernatural power to actually stop. The Bible is clear: no one born of God continues to sin.”
The irony wasn’t lost on him now, sitting in his car outside the motel where he’d been meeting Rebecca, his administrative assistant, for the past six months.
Stevens had experienced everything Chambers described. The conscious repentance—check. The personal knowledge of Jesus—absolutely. The new power of vision to discern God’s kingdom—he’d built a career on it. The supernatural power to stop sinning—well, that’s where things got complicated.
Because Pastor Stevens hadn’t stopped sinning. He’d just gotten better at hiding it.
The pornography addiction that had started in seminary. The financial irregularities that had begun as “emergency borrowing” from church funds. The emotional affair that had become physical. The prescription pills that helped him sleep, then helped him preach, then helped him exist.
Each time, Stevens had explained it to himself through spiritual language. He was still learning to walk in his new nature. The old man was putting up a fight. He needed more accountability, more prayer, more surrender. Sometimes he’d have breakthrough moments where the supernatural power seemed real again—weeks or months of victory that convinced him the new birth was finally taking full effect.
But the sins always returned. Different forms sometimes, but the same underlying patterns of deception, compromise, and self-serving choices that had existed before his dramatic conversion experience.
The most disturbing part wasn’t the failure to live up to Chambers’ promises about the new birth. It was how normal this seemed to be among his born-again colleagues. Behind closed doors, every pastor Stevens knew struggled with the gap between the supernatural transformation they preached and the very ordinary human brokenness they lived with daily.
There was Mike, born again for twenty-two years, whose marriage was ending because of his gambling problem. Sarah, who’d had a powerful conversion at nineteen, now battling alcoholism at forty-five. Jim, who could preach about supernatural holiness but couldn’t control his rage at home.
All of them born again. All of them still very much broken.
Stevens thought about his congregation members who’d approached him over the years, confused and guilt-ridden because they weren’t experiencing the automatic holiness Chambers promised. “I thought being born again meant I’d stop struggling with these things,” they’d say. Stevens had always counseled them to seek deeper surrender, more complete rebirth, greater identification with Christ’s death and resurrection.
Now he wondered if he’d been giving them the wrong medicine for the right diagnosis. What if the problem wasn’t insufficient spiritual birth? What if the problem was that spiritual rebirth—whatever it actually was—didn’t work the way Chambers claimed it did?
What if being “born again” didn’t give supernatural power to stop sinning, but simply provided a different framework for understanding the same human struggle everyone faced—religious or not?
Stevens started his car and drove home to his wife, who deserved better than a man still waiting, after thirty-eight years, for his new birth to take full effect. Tomorrow he would begin the very non-supernatural work of confession, counseling, and rebuilding trust through consistent actions rather than spiritual transformation.
For the first time since 1985, that felt like honest progress.
Reflection Question: What would change if you stopped expecting spiritual rebirth to solve problems that require sustained human effort and accountability?
This story is part of my upcoming book “The Undevoted: Daily Departures from Divine Dependence,” which offers 365 human-centered alternatives to the spiritual certainties in Chambers’ devotional. Each day explores how reason, community, and human resilience can address life’s challenges without requiring divine intervention.
God or Delusion? 