This sermon emphasizes the importance of coming into the light and being honest with God about our sins, acknowledging our need for repentance and faith in Jesus Christ for a new birth. It highlights the inseparable nature of repentance and faith in the process of being born again, drawing parallels to physical birth and the necessity of both elements for spiritual rebirth.

There's those who want to hide something. If you've got nothing to hide, you'll come out in the light. And so the one who practices the truth comes to the light, verse 21. So the whole thing holds together. If you want to be born again, you've got to come out of the darkness first. That means don't try to hide anything in your life. I don't mean hide it from me. You can hide it from me because I don't want to know your past life. But don't hide it from God. Come to God and be open with him about everything. You can't remember everything wrong you did in your life. None of us can. But whatever you remember, tell him and acknowledge that you're a sinner. That means coming into the light means being honest and not hiding anything. That's one of the first steps. And when you first come to Christ, naturally, you will not know everything about sin. Because sin is a very big area and you may be just seeing a small part of it. It's like you can live in India and see only a small part of India. India is a very big country. Sin is like that. You may see a little bit of it. But if you're willing to turn from what you see, that indicates that you want to turn from all sin. Because you cannot give up what you don't know. So coming into the light, we come there first and then the Bible speaks about walking in the light. That is like living in a small part of India and then walking through the whole land of India and seeing the whole country. Little by little by little. So sin is something like that where you come and see a little bit in the beginning and you cleanse that and then you little by little by little you go or use another illustration. You're going into a house, which has got many dirty rooms here. A thousand dirty rooms and you're going to live in it. Or you want Jesus to live in it. But he says I got to cleanse you before. You got to cleanse the room before I live. You won't let Jesus come and live in a dirty room. So you start with one room and you cleanse it. Cleanse it thoroughly. That's not enough because the whole house is dirty. Little by little the house gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. That is how we progress from being born again to growing up into Christ. So we're not talking about that growing up part. We talk about that often in the church, but we want to talk about how to lay a foundation and how to be born again. I want to read a verse in Acts chapter 20. The Apostle Paul was a man whom God chose to preach the gospel widely in the first century. And he says, Acts chapter 20, he was speaking to the elders and he told them that wherever he went. Let's read verse 20. Acts 20 verse 20. I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable for you. I taught you publicly and from house to house. And what did I preach everywhere? I spoke to Jews and to Greeks. See the Jews in those days, probably even today, divided the world into two parts. Jews, non-Jews. It's like in our country, we have Brahmins dividing the country into two parts, Brahmins and non-Brahmins. So the expression he uses here is speaking to people who are a Jewish background. He said you divided the world into Jews and non-Jews. Well, the whole world, to everybody, Jews and Greeks, I preached the same message. That is repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. So those are the two things that everybody needs to hear if they want to lay a foundation, if they want to be born again. These are two things that God has joined together. Repent and believe. Now man has always tried to separate what God has joined together. You see all the divorces and marriages nowadays. When God is joined together, man is separating. Here also in the message of the gospel, God has joined repentance and faith together, but preachers have separated it and generally speaking, it's only faith left now. Now if you have only faith, you can't be born again. It's like saying a woman alone, all by herself, can't have a child. No matter how hard she tries. A man alone can't have a child. Repentance alone can't bring salvation. It's a man and woman together that bring a child to birth and it's when repentance and faith come together, a new birth takes place in our spirit and this is as real as physical birth. Just as real and it happens in a moment. It's not gradual. There may be a preparation for it, over 20 years or two days or two minutes or half an hour. There may be a preparation for it like a baby in a mother's womb being there for nine months, but the birth is like that in a moment. I mean babies don't get born over a period of days. They come out of the womb in a day, in a moment, they are out and the new birth is also like that. But it is possible, particularly for those who have lived fairly decent good lives, that they may not know the exact moment when they were born again. I don't know, for example, exactly when that transition took place. That's something like if I'm traveling from, by train, from or even more difficult, by plane from Kerala to from Cochin to Bangalore. I may not know the exact moment when I crossed the border. It's not important. The important thing is I came to Bangalore. I crossed the border. You can't come to Bangalore from Cochin without crossing the Karnataka-Kerala border, but you may not know the exact moment. But you can't come here without crossing the border. In the same way, you may not know the exact moment when that took place, but it's something that happens in a moment. Or like a person who doesn't know his birthday. A person may not know his birthday, but he may be alive. He may be more alive than the fellow who knows his birthday and who's sick and about to die. So knowing a date is not the important thing. The important thing is that you crossed the border, that you are born again and that you are sure of it. So many people are not sure because they don't believe what God's Word says. Or maybe they haven't really repented. So I want to try and make this very clear so that before you leave this meeting at least you'll understand what it means to be born again and saved even if you're not actually and you hope you will be. The foundation, the Christian faith, many people say don't all religions lead to one God. The answer is no. People tell me, why are you so narrow-minded? Why are you so Christian so narrow-minded to say that Jesus is the only way? Why can't you accept other religions also as all good people trying to go to God? Well, I say let's be honest. I say to such a person, you don't know anything about God. I don't know anything about God. We are human beings born into the world.