What is Born Again?!

Hello to all, we are going to continue as we I said we would last week, so here goes....

Topic Born Again

Prayer

Father God, I pray that all who look at this will be touched by your Spirit and you will use it for your Glory, Amen.

We're actually going back a little bit here, last week we covered John 3:16-18 and this week we're going to have a look at John 3:1-8. This is a bit of a longer passage but we're not going to look at each verse, we're just going to look at it as a whole. So the passage says:

Jesus Teaches Nicodemus

1Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. 2He came to Jesus at night and said, "Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him."

3In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."

4"How can a man be born when he is old?" Nicodemus asked. "Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born!"

5Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You must be born again.' 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

9"How can this be?" Nicodemus asked.

10"You are Israel's teacher," said Jesus, "and do you not understand these things? 11I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still you people do not accept our testimony. 12I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things? 13No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. 14Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

Passage Explanation

Now, first of all lets get a grip on who is in the passage, there are two people. There is Jesus and a man called Nicodemus. Jesus we talked about last week, so who is Nicodemus? Nicodemus was a member of the jewish ruling council and hence was a very powerful person, he was a jew and would have known the old testament scriptures extremely well. He would be considered an expert in the scriptures and so when he asked Jesus a question this was a powerful and knowledgable man asking him.

What we see is that Nicodemus calles Jesus a Rabbi (that is a teacher) and says that he knows Jesus has come from God and he says he knows this because of the miracles Jesus has done.

Jesus response is suprising, he says this:

3In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.

Now if you are thinking, what is Jesus talking about... then you're exactly the same as Nicodemus. He was completely confused by what Jesus meant, he actually thought that Jesus was suggesting people when they are older would have to go back into their mother and their mother would actually have to give birth to them again. Now, this has never happened, if Jesus means this neither you, nor I, nor Nicodemus are going to heaven. Understandably Nicodemus was concerned by this and Jesus explains further what he means with:

5Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit. 6Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit^[b] gives birth to spirit. 7You should not be surprised at my saying, 'You^[c] must be born again.' 8The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

Jesus tells us what born again means here, all of us are born of water, that is our physical birth but to be born again we also need to be 'born of the Spirit' so now we know what being born again is, it is to be born of the Spirit.... Ok, you're probably thinking, that's great... What is born of the Spirit?

Well if you remember I quickly mentioned last week about God having three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To be born of the Spirit is to be born of the Holy Spirit. That is for the Holy Spirit to work in you and to give you new birth. So being born again is a miraculous work, it is a work of God. God comes and gives you new life, that is what Jesus means when he says to be born of the Spirit. We will look, perhaps next week at Ephesians chapter 2 soon which we can relate to this. I will talk there on how this fits with being born again but if you look at it now you may see how the term born again fits in and why it is termed like this.

Conclusion

We have today looked at what Jesus means by being born again, it is a work of God and is a miracle. We will discuss exactly what effect this has on us when we look at Ephesians 2.

God Bless

Calv

It is all about Jesus!

First of all I am sorry that this article is a day later than it was supposed to be, I will be aiming to ensure all articles go up on or by saturday each week!

Topic: It is all about Jesus!

I was discussing with someone what I should do for the first real article on here and they gave me the advice of saying what I thought the one most important part of Christianity was. This is what I aim to cover here.

Prayer: Father God, I pray that the words here would be used for your glory, that all who read this would be touched by the Holy Spirit according to your will.

Bible passages:

First of all for this topic there are lots and lots of different Bible passages that can be selected. I am only going to look at one and that one is probably the most famous Bible passage of all and contains the most famous verse of all, at the bottom of this article is one other passage you can look at (actually my favourite) and can of course ask me about if you want me to explain any.

Bible Passage: John 3:16-18

16"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Note: The link on this site to Bible Gateway allows you to read the Bible online if you do not have one yourself.

Bible Passage Explanation:

This passage comes during Jesus talking to a man called Nicodemus, who was a ruler of the Jews at the time. In other words he was a powerful man. After a talk about something called being 'born again' (which we will look at next week). Jesus makes the above statement.

This is an example of what Christians call the Gospel, that is, the good news of Christianity, it is the explanation of how someone is saved. It is how someone gets to live forever with God after they die on Earth. Lets take a look at each verse:

16"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

This is the most famous Bible verse it tells us three things:

1) God loves the world, that is, God loves everybody in the world!
2) God gave his only Son, that is, God gave Jesus to the world, later to die in our place for our sins.
3) If we believe in Jesus we will have eternal life!

This is really, really exciting news and is what Christianity is all about! It says that God has done everything for us to rescue us from the bad things that we do.

God is perfect and so he cannot let bad things go unpunished. When we do bad we sin against God and the punishment that we deserve is to die BUT.... God did the amazing thing above, he sent Jesus so that all of our badness is taken away and paid for by his death on the cross!

So when Jesus died on the cross all the bad things we do, He was punished for and because of this our sins have been paid for!

Lets take a look at the two verses, which expand on verse 16:

17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Jesus tells us a little bit more of the Gospel here, he tells us that he was sent not to condemn (that is to judge the world bad and send everyone to hell) but that the world might be saved through him. Jesus here is telling us what his purpose is, namely to later die for us so that we can be with God thanks to him.

18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

Here we see Jesus gives us a little bit more information as to who He is, he tells us that believing in Him is absolutely necessary to be saved. If somebody does not believe in Jesus as the Son of God, they cannot be saved. We will look at why this more in later weeks.

Application:

The most important thing to take from this is that our focus should always be Jesus, Christianity, starts and ends with Jesus, all that we do should be focused on him. When we make a mistake it is due to him that we are forgiven, it is thanks to him that we can be with God the Father (God has three parts, God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), God the Holy Spirit, more on this in two weeks time!), it is thanks to Him that God can live in us. There is nothing at all more important than Jesus and our eyes should always be on him.

Closing:

I hope that you have found the first article interesting and useful, feel free to leave comments (questions, good points, what I can do better, what you'd like to be covered). May God bless you and I hope you will read the article next week!

Extra Bible Passages:

Romans 5

How to use this site and what is it for? (Please show to your parent or guardian)

What is this site for?

Hello to all! Welcome to this new site which I will be aiming to add a new article to once a week with each article about Christianity!

This site is designed to give some extra Christian input to any young people who want it and particularly for those whose sunday school leader I was! One thing however, this site and its contents cannot replace going to church and sunday school, it is useful in addition to church but not in place of church.

How to use this site

So what will I actually cover, generally each week I will provide a prayer, a Bible reading, an explanation of that Bible reading and some general advice on how you can apply it. The site allows you to leave comments after articles, feel free to do this (so long as it is ok with your parent) to either:

• Ask questions
• Tell me what you think (is the article confusing? was it helpful? useless?)
• Say hello and let me know how things are going (note however this is a public site so anyone can see whatever you say, you can contact me directly on my email address calvinthomas@gmail.com IF you have checked with your parent and they are OK with this)

A word of warning: Do not put any personal information on this site, i.e. do not say where you live, your email address, how old you are, telephone numbers, where you will be, or any photographs of you or people you know etc as they will be accessible to everyone and we obviously want to make sure you are all absolutely safe.

Notice on the left hand side of this page there are some links to other websites, these are websites that I find useful and think are good for you to see. I am not saying everything on them is good and if you have any questions about what they say, feel free to ask on here and I will try my best to find out and explain!

I hope you enjoy the site and there will definately be a Christian article up on or by Saturday 23/08/2008. Have a great week!

Calv