T. Austin-Sparks spent his life encouraging believers to keep on striving after spiritual fulness against the background of a weak and superficial Christianity. His concern was not so much the believers’ weaknesses and problems as the glory of the Lord. Knowing that it is God’s purpose to glorify His Son in and through “many sons” brought to glory, he sought to put his finger on the sore spots that caused this weakness and superficiality among the Christians of his day. One of those sore spots was a lack of awareness of what it means to be born again. It was not a new sore spot. Among the Corinthian believers in the days of the apostle Paul, wrong ideas about what it means to be spiritual prevailed. They were spiritual people in the sense that they had received the Holy Spirit, but their essential behaviour was the opposite. This is still a problem amongst us, Christians of the 21st century. Do we really know what it means to be born from above? This is the issue this series deals with.

August 2018,
On behalf of The Golden Candlestick team,
Hugo de Jong, Twello, the Netherlands