Our Second Birth

Many Christians today are not interested in what others describe as a second birth.  But Jesus gives a graphic picture to Nicodemus about the spiritual birth that needs to happen before one can enjoy full relationship with God.

Nicodemus kept thinking in terms of something physical and Jesus kept talking about being born of the Spirit.  Birth is the essential word because as our anger and guilt and shame are washed away, our new original Self is born in us.  We are not the same as we were before.

Both kinds of birthing include labor—and pain.  Our spiritual birth includes the tears and anguish of remorse of all that we have committed and omitted in our attempts to make ourselves into what we thought we ought to be.  There has to be some rearranging of our personality—which has a similar trauma to the pain of parturition.

But just as a mother will declare, as she dotes on the infant she has born, that all the labor pains are worth the result, so one who has experienced spiritual rebirth will declare those labor pains produced something invaluable.

Your second birth awaits your cooperation.

Ann Glover O’Dell

5 August 2018

God Within Us

The ability of God to plant himself within the flesh of humankind was an attribute of God from the beginning, so in a very real sense we were with God from the beginning. The soul that resides in each of us is none other than the essence of God which is and was and shall be, having no beginning and no end.

The God-in-us that was alive from the beginning, and has been alive in us since our birth, needs a second birth—a birth into our conscious awareness. This spiritual birth, much like our physical parturition, involves risk and suffering. Just as the fetus must make the journey through the narrow birth canal, leaving the warm womb and risking asphyxiation in the passage, so our spiritual birth involves the decision to leave the present protective power of consciousness, trusting something within and beyond us to get us through the confines of this second birth canal.

God is not satisfied until his essence is part of our conscious awareness. Only then can He reveal himself to us in ways that give us the fullness of life He has for us. Only then can He infuse us with his kind of creative energy, so that our work and play become intertwined, transforming us into beings whose greatest joy is simply being.

27 December 2009