HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 27, 2024 – When I was born-again from atheism, I believed before I realized I believed. I didn’t listen to arguments either for or against the existence of God or the messiahship of Jesus and then make a conscious decision to believe. I died and came back to life: I died not believing and came back to life believing.

How is this possible?

Belief is only possible through the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit. There is no other way to genuinely believe than through God’s Spirit. You can say you believe, but unless you’re genuinely born-again, your “belief” is premised on your adopted, adapted, absorbed, and accumulated knowledge, not on belief – that is, your false sense of belief is premised on what you’ve learned, not on what you are.

Genuine spiritual rebirth engenders belief as a (what philosophers call) first principle. Wherever God’s Holy Spirit dwells, there is belief unshakeable because it’s sourced in the presence of God’s Spirit rather than in accumulated human knowledge.

I, as a born-again believer, believe not because I’ve chosen to believe or want to believe or learned to believe, but because I cannot not believe. It is impossible for me, with the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in me (which is the very definition of being born-again), not to believe because I am perceiving my life through the lens of God’s Holy Spirit, and God’s Holy Spirit has no doubt.

Before I believed, that is, before I was born-again, the spirits of the world lived in me and reigned over me, and I perceived my life through their crooked and dirty lenses. At that time, I doubted. In fact, all I did was doubt. I believed in nothing because the spirits of the world are not premised on belief: they’re premised on anti-belief. They cannot believe because they do not and will never (in the truest sense of the word) have the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in them. Without God’s Spirit in them, they cannot believe; they can only doubt. This is why the world, which is full of these doubting spirits, is constantly roiled in chaos.

I write this for born-again believers. You know that your belief is sourced not in your own accumulated knowledge or in a decision of your will but in God’s Holy Spirit indwelling you. You know this spiritual fact more than you know your name, your sex, or your nationality. Your belief is unshakeable because it’s not built on the shifting sands of accumulated knowledge but is an expression of the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in you. This cannot be understood by those who are not born-again because they are not perceiving life through the lens of God’s Spirit; they are perceiving it through the spirits of the world, which by very definition dwell in doubt and cannot believe.

So when Jesus says that you need to believe in him to be saved, he is in fact saying that you need to be born-again to be saved, as there is no genuine belief without genuine rebirth. The genuineness of a rebirth is evidenced by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in a soul, turning a doubter into a believer.

I believe not because of anything I did or wanted but because of what God did within me.