Born Again, Not Patched Up: The Radical Reality of New Birth
Rev. Aniekan "Mbomboyo" Okokon ·
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. — John 3:3
Nicodemus was not a sinner in the obvious sense. He was a teacher of Israel, a Pharisee, a man who had given his life to the law. If anyone could be improved into the kingdom, it was him. And Jesus told him that improvement was not on offer. He needed to be born again.
That word is more radical than we usually let it be. Birth is not repair. A child is not a corrected version of something that existed before; a child is new. When Jesus says born again, He means that the kingdom of God is entered by people who did not exist until God made them.
Why patching would not do
The religious instinct is to mend. Add prayer, subtract vice, tighten discipline, and the old life will eventually pass inspection. Jesus does not argue with the instinct; He simply says it cannot see the kingdom. Flesh gives birth to flesh. However well the old nature is patched, it remains the old nature, and the old nature cannot inherit what belongs to the new.
So God did something else. Peter says we were born again "not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God" (1 Peter 1:23). The seed is the Word. The life that comes from it is God's own life, imperishable, and it is that life - not your repaired old one - that the kingdom receives.
What new birth means about you
- You have a new nature, not a reformed one. The desires that pull toward God are not effort; they are family resemblance.
- You have a new Father. Birth makes a child; God's birth makes you His.
- Your beginning is behind you. You do not have to keep being born. You have to grow.
- Failure does not un-birth you. A child who falls is still a child.
The mystery Nicodemus missed
Jesus compared the Spirit to the wind: you hear it, you see what it does, you cannot trace it. New birth is like that. You may not be able to say the hour it happened. But you can see what it did - the hunger for the Word, the ache at sin, the love for people you used to ignore, the name "Father" on your lips. Those are the sounds of the wind. You were not patched up. You were born.