What “born again” REALLY means (February 18, 2008)
Wow, I had to be careful there in the title to make sure I distanced myself from that group who has made such a bad name for themselves that I’m sure many of my readers would read no further: “born-again Christians.”
In their misguided, narrow view, what Jesus’s line “You must be born again” means is something like this: “You must undergo some type of dramatic conversion experience (like getting saved at a Baptist rally) and then dedicate your life to living in strict (and very visible) adherence to supposed principles of sexual and other morality, whichever tenets happen to be emphasized by whichever conservative church you choose to join.”
But what “You must be born again” REALLY means is exactly the same thing I’ve been talking about recently in this blog: if you want to experience the joy of the kingdom of heaven (which is the only way to be genuinely happy on earth), you must continually die to your natural life, to your human nature that puts yourself and your own wants, desires, & conveniences first, and instead continually realign your mind (i.e. be born again) with the God of Love, which leads you to routinely inconvenience yourself in order to serve others.
As an incisive Episcopal priest said in his sermon yesterday, you must be be born again and again and again, as you repeatedly die to the life you’ve built up out of your own selfish hopes & fears, and then continually be born again into the new life in Christ, where you drop all that self-absorbed baggage completely and become a radically new person—an unselfish, loving-others, deeply joyful person.
I don’t know about you, but I’m immensely thankful that we have this option of avoiding the restlessness and emptiness of life by allowing ourselves to be “born again” into the new life centered around the God of Love!
