"Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God."Before I was born again, I had an inward predisposition characterized by severe skepticism concerning spiritual things. If you told me then that God loved me, I would have said, "whatever." Supposing that this God of love did exist, his love for me seemed to have made not one wit of difference in my life or the life of the world. So it seemed to me. All your efforts to talk me into believing in this God of yours, dear Christians, were manifestly fruitless. In short, I believed you were living in a fantasy world.
But when I was born again, God intruded on my skepticism, shattered it, and showed me his love. It took me by surprise, slapped me silly, and (here's the point) transformed my inward predisposition from one of severe skepticism to one of child-like faith.
The ramifications of this change are enormous, rippling outward to transform systems of thought in which I had invested much of my self-identity. But the point is, before I was born again, spiritual things were essentially human myths to me. Spiritual things like the love of God, for instance. I was blind to it. It had no reality for me. And if you had told me that I had to be born again in order to understand such things, which is what Jesus told Nicodemus, I would have said, "What? You expect me to crawl back into my mother's womb!"
Well, but God's wind blows where it will, and eventually it blew on me. I have discovered that it is better to know that God loves me than it is to go through life skeptical of that love. Better by far, because more in line with the way things really are. It is, in fact, relentlessly transformative.
[See all previous posts in this series here.]
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