"Faith...is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God (John 1:13). It kills the old Adam and makes altogether different men of us in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Spirit."
Philipp Jakob Spener wrote in 1675 of his concern for the faith of his fellow Christians. He saw their pursuits more vested in being able to engage in ultimately meaningless debates and in lives which were more interested in superficial obeisance to God's laws and the welfare of others. What message did he say would bring true change and give rise to true faith in its hearers? It was not a message of laws and morals which the "ethics of the heathen can also accomplish." It was rather about the fundamental change, or rebirth, in the Christian. Spener wrote, "Our whole Christian religion consists of the inner man or the new man, whose soul is faith and whose expressions are the fruits of life, and all sermons should be aimed at this ... the precious benefactions of God, which are directed toward this inner man, should be present in such a way that faith, and hence the inner man, may ever be strengthened more and more." From Pia Desideria, 1675.
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