THE NEW BIRTH

We are born into a fallen world effected by Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden. As we grow up in this fallen world, we learn the attitudes and ways of it and perform the deeds the world does. Other people also display worldly attitudes toward us and do worldly things to us as well.

When we repent of our sins, we die to ourselves. We no longer do what we want to do-something we've been taught by the world, but we now do what God wants us to do. What do you do with a dead person then? You bury them. We are buried through baptism and we come up out of the water new creatures. At this point, we are, spiritually speaking, like newborn babies, just out of the womb.

We may have had good parents, but our parents, however great they might have been, weren't perfect because they, too, grew up in the fallen world. We now have a Heavenly Father. Also, in the same way older siblings help take care of their younger siblings, we now have a family of older brother and sister Christians who will help take care of us, feeding us milk and later solid food (the basic stuff about God, then the deeper stuff) as well as doing things like being an example of how children of God are supposed to act and comforting and soothing us when the hurts of life come.

Throughout our lives as Christians, then, we are growing up in Christ, learning His ways, attitudes and deeds. At the same time, we are also unlearning the wrong thoughts, attitudes and deeds we were taught growing up in the world before we were spiritually reborn.

As we grow older in Christ, we will help nurture new babes in Christ, just as we were nurtured (and are still being nurtured) by our older brothers and sisters as, at the same time, we ourselves are still being taught by our Heavenly Father, and so it continues.