I just reread the conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus. There it is – Jesus telling the Pharisee that he needs to be born again. As a young person I associated that term – rightly or wrongly – with people who tossed it around as an explanation for their faith. Now, envisioning this encounter again, I realized how much my thinking has changed. 

Even as a 15-year-old, I knew as I read the ‘70’s’ best seller, I’m OK - You’re OK for a class assignment that I wasn’t OK. I also had doubts about my ability to fix what was wrong. Yet when I read Romans 7:15, “what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” I thought someone was looking into my teenage head! Someone knew me. Someone who like the children’s song – “loves me much too much to let me stay that way.” I started to see the miraculous truth of being ‘born again’.

Born again - not an adjustment or touch-up. A transformation. What if everyone – myself included – in any church, ministry, or job on earth lived with that mindset? “I (not they) need a fundamental change. I need to be a new creature.”

A student once wrote me from her university in Canada that she had found a Savior. Like the people who had heard the Samaritan woman, she now believed for herself that He was the savior of the world.

Savior. I don’t know about in your Christian circles but I don’t hear that name for Jesus very often.  But transformation and Savior go together. Who can transform me? If my need is called being born again then it would take a SAVIOR to do it. Not a wise man or talented facilitator or a patient listener. 

I once shared an office in China with a friendly middle-aged professor from the US. He claimed to be part Protestant, part Catholic, with a little Bahai thrown in. One day early in the term he turned to me and asked, “Are you one of those born-again people?”

Oh, yes. Thankfully.