Born Again

Jesus as always draws on the story of the Jews in the Hebrew Scriptures as the source of the message He was bringing to the Jews and through them to the world.The whole concept of being born again, or put another way, to have renewed hearts draws directly from the earlier scriptures.In 2nd Samuel 14:14 we can see that God does not desire death but desires that through whatever means that we will not be separated from Him.

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Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But God does not take away life; instead, he devises ways so that a banished person may not remain estranged from him.

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God is a God that desires redemption for all of us.In Jeremiah 31:33 the Israelites are told that the time will come when the law will not just be the Torah, but will actually be written on their hearts and become part of them.

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"But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days," declares the LORD, "I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people

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In Ezekiel, Chap 36:26-7 we are again told that we will have a new heart and a new spirit.

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26 "Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 "I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.

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I think that to be born again means that we have a heart that chooses unselfish love over selfish love. That isn’t to say that anyone does it perfectly or even comes close. God wants us to have a heart that rejoices at the good fortune of others and mourns the sorrow of others. He wants us to have hearts that want to respond in the way that Christ responded on the cross.Paul puts it this way in Galatians 5:24

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24 Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

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The idea being that we put to death the love of the self so that we are open to the role God wants for us in the world which is to be reflectors of His love into it. I believe that is what Jesus means when he says we are to be born againI know I’m late getting into this thread but that is my take on it.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

I see it as a process. It is an openness to having a change of mindset. We gain an awareness of how we automatically think of how events affect us and we are become aware that there is a more unselfish way to live. That awareness should, if we really have given our heart over to a loving God, continue to increase over time.I'd been a Christian for 25 years or so when some close friends ran into trouble with in him out of work and their teenage son on drugs making life miserable. One day it just hit me as to how much of the time I spent fretting about my comparatively miniscule problems and how little time I spent praying about or doing something concrete about my friends problems. It seems to be all about me but with God's help over time hopefully it will be less and less about me and more about others.As I've said in other thread being a Christian doesn't make me less selfish than my atheistic next door neighbour but it should be me less selfish than I had been before. It's a never ending process in my view that has to start at some point in time IMHO. Personally I don't think we even realize when that moment is but at some point we notice that there is something different about ourselves. I imagine it's different for everybody.This is how I see it anyway, rightly or wrongly.Edited by GDR, : Wanted to add something

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.