And now, little children, abide in Him, that when He appears, we may have confidence and not be ashamed before Him at His coming. 1 John 2:28 (NIV)
Dear John – Part 1
In his gospel, John called those he wrote to, “dear children.” If someone called me a “dear child,” I’d cringe! But John wasn’t being condescending. In Greek, dear children translates into “my born ones” and was a way of describing being “born again.” Its the same thing that Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about in John 3.
Rebirth.
Nicodemus asked, “How can anyone be born who has already been born and grown up? You can’t re-enter your mother’s womb and be born again. What are you saying with this ‘born-from-above’ talk?”
“You’re not listening,” Jesus said. “Let me say it again. Unless a person submits to this original creation — the ‘wind-hovering-over-the-water’ creation, the invisible moving the visible, a baptism into a new life—it’s not possible to enter God’s kingdom. When you look at a baby, it’s just that: a body you can look at and touch. But the person who takes shape within is formed by something you can’t see and touch—the Spirit—and becomes a living spirit.”
We’ve all been born. (captain obvious). Yet, we all experience different rebirths throughout our lives. Tragedy often births something within us. Success can birth something within us. An experience, traveling, love, hopes, opportunities… all these things can birth something new within our lives that changes us and the direction we live in.
I was born in Gosford Hospital, and my family has both Scottish and English heritage. Jesse (husband) was born in Melbourne hospital and has Italian and English heritage. We have a physical point of origin that influences who we are and how we live our lives.
But spiritually, my origins are found in the Divine. He is my country, my past and future, on a deep and unseen level. Before I had any physical form, I existed in his heart. The essence of who I would become was birthed deep in His imagination and became manifest the day I was conceived. However, this physical world and all that pertains to it sometimes causes us to forget where we came from. This forms a dissonant tension within us all. A homesickness for a land we’ve never seen. And it often makes us question if we truly belong.
CS Lewis said it best when he wrote,
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.“
And so we live out our days looking for meaning, searching for truth, but never really finding it until we become aware of who we really are. Our true origin. And at that moment, a reset takes place and we allow our heart and spirit to be reborn into faith. Awake, aware, new; Rebuilding the rest of our lives from this point of renewed (remembered) heritage.
We become the “the little children” John was talking about…
‘the born ones.’
Go to Part 2 – Christ at Home
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