What the Heck Does Born Again Even Mean?

I first heard it in New York.  People, people in my church, talked about them like this, like they were a totally different tribe.    They saw it this way.  There were folks like them.  And then there were the “born agains”.   They literally said that in describing someone.  “Oh, he’s a born again.”  “You know.  She, she’s a born again.” 

After a while, I got it.  They meant.  These folks went to a certain type of church.  They had certain behaviors that, in their mind at least, made them distinct, a bit different from them.   And I get it.  

Now for the church folks I knew in New York, this name didn’t come with any ill will.  Yes, they saw them as different.  But different didn’t mean bad.   But others didn’t, and still don’t feel that way.   I’ve even put a few of their quotes in the bulletin.  For example, the legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen wrote this.   The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are a bigger pain the second time around.

Is Herb fair?  No, but I get his point.   Who hasn’t run into a Christian who seems a bit too full of himself, and not all that full of Jesus?   But no matter what you might think of the term, born again.  Here’s the truth.  You can’t be a Christian without it.   In fact, until you get those words, words Jesus himself used, you’ve missed the whole point. 

But when you get them, more, when you experience them, it opens you to a life richer and deeper than you could ever have imagined.    It means no matter how dark your life becomes a light will always shine within.   But how does it happen?   How does sometime get to be born again.  In these words, Jesus points the way.   Let’s hear what Jesus has to say.

John 1:6-13

You hear the words thrown around.  But what the heck do they mean?   Born again.  Does that mean you have to have a dramatic turn around story?   I was a drug dealing maniac.  Then I found Jesus!   Now, you do have those stories.  And they’re great stories.  But that’s not what born again means.  You can be born again, and not have any sort of turn around story at all.   No, in the end, God is telling you this.   Born again means you realize two things.   You’ve arrived someplace profoundly different.  And you know.  No way did you get yourself there.

That’s why God uses words like born and birth.   After all, when your mother brought you into the world, what did you have to do with it?    For you to be born lots of things had to happen.  And you did none of them.   First of all, your parents came together and out of love got the whole thing started.  Then your mother through the wondrous workings of her body nourished you and grew you in her womb.   And then when the time came for you to come out, you had nothing to do with that either.   No baby hangs out in the womb and thinks.  Hmmm, today seems like a good day to come out, see the world.  Let’s see what I can do to make that happen.  

When you were born, you had nothing to do with it.  In reality, no one ultimately controls that whole birth process.   No one, not even the doctors know exactly how and when those mommy and baby hormones come together to get the whole getting born thing begun.  It’s a mystery.  

And in these words here, God is saying that when it comes to your transformation into God’s child, you don’t control that either.   Yet here’s the problem, people want to control it.   They think if I do the right things, get involved in a church, stuff like that, that makes me a child of a God.  But it doesn’t.   Nothing you do makes you a child of God.   Just like getting born, you don’t do anything.  And more importantly, you don’t need to do anything.

When it comes to being born again, all you need is nothing.  And yet as one preacher put it, so many folks can’t bring that.   They feel they need to bring something.  But until you realize you have nothing to bring, only then does the transformation happen. 

But when it does, you know.   Now some may remember the exact moment.  But other won’t.  After all, who here remembers getting born?  But you do know this, like any new born baby does.  Something has radically changed.

I love the way, the writer, C.S. Lewis put it.   Say you are on a train going from Paris to Berlin.   Some folks might be awake when the train crosses from France into Germany.   Other folks might be asleep.    What makes the difference isn’t that you remember the border crossing.  What makes the difference is you know.   You are no longer in Paris.  Now, you are in Berlin. 

And how do you know?   That goes back to that famous word, John the Baptist used, that Jesus did as well.    Repent.   Too often, folks think repent means you feel bad about something or decide to change the way you act.   But the word doesn’t mean that.   The actual word, metanoia, simply means that your mind is changed.   You start to think differently about everything.  You start to even see everything and everyone differently.   The poet William Blake once said.    The foolish man doesn’t see the same tree the wise man sees.   And when God turns you into God’s child, that is the change of mind, the change of heart that begins to happen.    It means you get weaned away from your possessions towards being forever possessed by the love of God.  It means you become less interested in getting personal blessing and more interested in blessing others.  It means you get more thankful and less self-righteous.  It means you get less preoccupied with your privileges and prerogatives and more conscious and connected to the fact that everyone needs the same mercy from God.   And it means that even on your darkest of days, you still find hope and peace and even joy. 

Why?  You know how God’s love brought you into the world, how God’s love gave you this new birth, how God’s love made you his child.   In Jesus, out of love, God gave his life for you.   On that cross, on that darkest of days, your new life began.   On that day when all hope seemed lost, a new hope was being born, one that even defeats death.  And when you know that, how God’s love brought you life, brought this whole world life on that most evil of days, then you know. Nothing can defeat that love ever.

And you know that love has delivered you.  That love has brought you home.   That love has given you new birth.   And you had nothing to do with it.  For by grace, you have been saved, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God.