You must be born again to be saved?

[DominicBaptiste]

I have been a Christian all my life but now people have been saying you need to be born again to be saved.

I don't think you have to be born again to be saved, but it might improve your experience as a Christian. I grew up in a Methodist Church. We started going there when I was about five years old; I was baptized then, and then I was confirmed in the church in the 6th grade. I also went with extended family members at the same time to baptist churches, and I was "saved" in a Southern Baptist Church when I was around nine years old. I kind of believe that you are saved once you start moving in the direction of Jesus, which for me probably started at my Methodist baptism, if I had to guess. Only God really knows. But anyway, some people have this experience of realizing that the Holy Spirit/Holy Ghost is with them, and that's what they call being "born again." If you read the Gospel, it happens in the story when the Apostles are gathered on Pentecost, and they are feeling lost because Jesus, their leader, has been killed, but all of a sudden he comes back from heaven in the form of the Holy Spirit. People who are born again have a keen sense of Jesus being with them in that way, and that's what people are talking about when they say "their walk with Jesus" or something similar. As I said already, I think you are saved as soon as you start moving in the direction of God and Jesus, but only Gods knows. Good luck! ;^) By the way, I've been on a Catholic prayer kick for the past several years, but I was never received into that church, just FYI.

 

[1stcenturylady]

I don't think you have to be born again to be saved, but it might improve your experience as a Christian. I grew up in a Methodist Church. We started going there when I was about five years old; I was baptized then, and then I was confirmed in the church in the 6th grade. I also went with extended family members at the same time to baptist churches, and I was "saved" in a Southern Baptist Church when I was around nine years old. I kind of believe that you are saved once you start moving in the direction of Jesus, which for me probably started at my Methodist baptism, if I had to guess. Only God really knows. But anyway, some people have this experience of realizing that the Holy Spirit/Holy Ghost is with them, and that's what they called being "born again." If you read the Gospel, it happens in the story when the Apostles are gathered on Pentecost, and they are feeling lost because Jesus, their leader, has been killed, but all of a sudden he comes back from heaven in the form of the Holy Spirit. People who are born again have a keen sense of Jesus being with them in that way, and that's what people are talking about when they say "their walk with Jesus" or something similar. As I said already, I think you are saved as soon as you start moving in the direction of God and Jesus, but only Gods knows. Good luck! ;^) By the way, I've been on a Catholic prayer kick for the past several years, but I was never received into that church, just FYI.

Much of what you have posted is the "drawing" of the Holy Spirit towards Christ. That doesn't mean they are saved yet. You must be born again of the Spirit. He must be inside you, and that only happens when you truly repent of sin, and yield your whole being to God. I don't know anyone who has experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit that can't give you a time and date; it is that powerful.

 

[DominicBaptiste]

Much of what you have posted is the "drawing" of the Holy Spirit towards Christ. That doesn't mean they are saved yet. You must be born again of the Spirit. He must be inside you, and that only happens when you truly repent of sin, and yield your whole being to God. I don't know anyone who has experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit that can't give you a time and date; it is that powerful.

I think you are a religious extremist. The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have not been born again in the way you are talking about. I gave a very reasonable explanation of what it means, and you are part of the reason people turn from Christianity by saying it "must be this way." I'm glad I have the strength as a person to not believe you! BE GONE!

 

[Hillsage]

I have been a Christian all my life but now people have been saying you need to be born again to be saved.

If you have been a Christian all your life, then you have been deceived all your life. No one has ever been 'a Christian' all their life.

 

[1stcenturylady]

I think you are a religious extremist. The vast majority of Christians throughout the ages have not been born again in the way you are talking about. I gave a very reasonable explanation of what it means, and you are part of the reason people turn from Christianity by saying it "must be this way." I'm glad I have the strength as a person to not believe you! BE GONE!

3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, 4 and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.

 

[Hillsage]

If you have been christian your entire life that means you were born again many many years ago. Those who say you need to be born again even though you have been christian forever were secularists and atheists and drug addicts who all of a sudden "found God". If you have been a christian your entire life you never lost Him.

YOU were lost at birth. You inherited that loss from Adam along with every human being ever to draw breath. Your spirit needs to be regenerated/born again to be saved. Your soul needs to be sanctified progressively to work out it's salvation. A life long process as we 'walk in obedience' having our soul/mind "transformed" to the mind of Christ. And your body is as lost to sin, as every other 'body of sinful flesh' that has lived and died because of sin. Something that has happened ever since man was kicked out of the Garden.

 

[JoeP222w]

I have been a Christian all my life but now people have been saying you need to be born again to be saved.

Jesus said in John Chapter 3 that you must be born again to have eternal life.

Moreover, no one is a Christian all their life. This is a false understanding. Granted you may have been converted at a very young age. But no one, not one, is a Christian from birth.

 

[2tim_215]

deleted

 

[Francis Drake]

This is hilarious. I've lost track of how many different arguments I've read here about how to get to heaven.
No matter which way is argued, they all demand obedience to their own pet theological interpretation, or God will definitely bar the pearly gates to them.

Woe betide the simple and foolish who doesn't reach that 10/10 marks for correct theology. Woe betide the child whose mind isn't adult enough for heaven.

Matt18v2And having summoned a child, He set it in their midst, 3and said, “Truly I say to you, if you are not converted and become as the little children, you shall never enter into the kingdom of the heavens.
Don't be daft Jesus, every Christian knows we've got to convert these children into intelligent adults otherwise they'll never understand about God and heaven.

4Therefore whoever will humble himself as this little child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of the heavens.
That's stooopid Jesus. Childish minds are way below the intellect level needed to grasp all this God stuff.

I'm really glad that Christians didn't get hold of me before God did.
My parents were not Christian, nevertheless I met the Holy Spirit as a child alone in my bedroom. The presence of God was heavy in the room and I got on my knees and simply asked him to not forget me. He never did.

Somewhere between 11 and 15, again the Lord spoke to me, this time in the street.
He told me that He didn't live in the church across the road, but he lived in my heart. He also told me that all men are bad, but that He had made the way to heaven.
I never spoke to anyone about my spiritual experiences, and I knew nothing of who or what Jesus was.

I was 25 years old before I heard the message of the cross from the "God Squad" at college. Initially I was not interested in what they were saying because God had already told me that He lived in my heart, and I had no intention of joining a church. Gradually I realised they were talking about the One I already knew. I just didn't know his name.

Looking back, I know with a certainty that I was born again as a child, long before I ever taught about the cross. With no encouragement and lots of other interests, I had not grown in the Lord.
Interestingly, before I made that "commitment to Christ" one of the evangelists had been praying and the Lord told her that I had been born again as a child!

I know this is going to wind a lot of folk up!

 

[Darrel Slugoski]

"Born again" just means you need to accept the Lord as your Savior.

Where does it say that in scripture

 

[Darrel Slugoski]

Much of what you have posted is the "drawing" of the Holy Spirit towards Christ. That doesn't mean they are saved yet. You must be born again of the Spirit. He must be inside you, and that only happens when you truly repent of sin, and yield your whole being to God. I don't know anyone who has experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit that can't give you a time and date; it is that powerful.

You must be " born again of water and spirit" which refers to Baptism .When Jesus came out of the water the Holy Spirit descended on him while being Baptized by John the Baptist. Cant get any more scriptural then that . Protestants always for get the water part .

 

[JacksBratt]

I don't think you have to be born again to be saved,

That is like saying you don't have to get wet when you go swimming.

Being saved is being born again.

When we say that we are saved, it just means that we have accepted Christ's gift of salvation. We have accepted that He was the Christ, the messiah and that His death and resurrection give Him the ability to give us sinners, eternal life.
We have accepted, also, that we are sinners and are in need of redemption. We have admitted to being sinners and we confess them to Christ, ask for forgiveness and salvation through Him. We then strive to walk the walk as close to the example that He gave us.

Saying that we are "born again" is just another term used to describe what happens when you accept Christ. You become a new creature, in Him. You are "born" again into a new life, a new attitude, a new heart, a new direction....

The two... being "saved" and being "born again" are the same. Just different terms for the same conscious action of accepting Christ as your savior.

 

[Goatee]

Aknowledge Jesus as your saviour. Do the will of God.

 

[Apologetic_Warrior]

I have been a Christian all my life but now people have been saying you need to be born again to be saved.

So sorry to hear nobody spoke sooner. It is interesting is it not, even in this day and age of instant information, how the world labors to hide truth, if not hidden, squash it, twist it.

 

[JacksBratt]

BE GONE!

What is the purpose of this?

 

[JacksBratt]

Where does it say that in scripture

I believe that when people "believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ" then, in our terms, they have accepted Him as their savior.

Some terms have been coined by the Christian church and everybody knows what they mean. I have heard it called "Christianeze".

You will hear this lingo all the time in any Christian Church... Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, whatever. The dialect may differ a bit but they all come from some scriptural concept being put into another form of phrase.

 

[DominicBaptiste]

That is like saying you don't have to get wet when you go swimming.

When we say that we are saved, it just means that we have accepted Christ's gift of salvation. We have accepted that He was the Christ, the messiah and that His death and resurrection give Him the ability to give us sinners, eternal life.
We have accepted, also, that we are sinners and are in need of redemption. We have admitted to being sinners and we confess them to Christ, ask for forgiveness and salvation through Him. We then strive to walk the walk as close to the example that He gave us.

Saying that we are "born again" is just another term used to describe what happens when you accept Christ. You become a new creature, in Him. You are "born" again into a new life, a new attitude, a new heart, a new direction....

The two... being "saved" and being "born again" are the same. Just different terms for the same conscious action of accepting Christ as your savior.

There are some church traditions that don't think of it that way. Some churches teach the message of the Gospel, and it's more of a gradual conversion, not an instant decision. The people who only believe in being instantaneously born again reject that, but I don't. I was brought up in a mainline and Evangelical church at the same time, so I feel like I see and understand different ways to God and Jesus that others who only are 'Evangelical' don't. I'm not looking to change my beliefs, I'm just explaining it to people who may have only been to one kind of church.

 

[DominicBaptiste]

What is the purpose of this?

When a person types in red letters and says you 'must' do something to be saved or to be Christian, that is very aggressive to me and needs to be addressed with the appropriate amount of emphasis. My family decided many generations ago not to become Pentecostal or charasmatic, and I still reject that movement because it is extreme and coersive. My family is historically Baptist, since colonial times, and once we get saved in church, we don't let people from this movement come back and demand some extra step to be saved. If I was a pastor in a church and you told me to get saved again, I would have thrown you out, literally.

 

[JacksBratt]

There are some church traditions that don't think of it that way. Some churches teach the message of the Gospel, and it's more of a gradual conversion, not an instant decision. The people who only believe in being instantaneously born again reject that, but I don't. I was brought up in a mainline and Evangelical church at the same time, so I feel like I see and understand different ways to God and Jesus that others who only are 'Evangelical' don't. I'm not looking to change my beliefs, I'm just explaining it to people who may have only been to one kind of church.

So, you are saying that being saved is a journey?

So, you could be almost saved, half saved, 1/3 saved?

Any evangelical church that I have ever attended, heard on TV or the radio, sees the day of your salvation as being as pointed as the day you were married, the day you got your first job, the day you got your driver license, the day you did anything for the first time in your life..

If you cannot say "I was saved on this date" I would be questioning your salvation.... IMO.

 

[DominicBaptiste]

So, you are saying that being saved is a journey?

So, you could be almost saved, half saved, 1/3 saved?

Any evangelical church that I have ever attended, heard on TV or the radio, sees the day of your salvation as being as pointed as the day you were married, the day you got your first job, the day you got your driver license, the day you did anything for the first time in your life..

If you cannot say "I was saved on this date" I would be questioning your salvation.... IMO.

I was explaining the difference between Baptist and Methodist, which isn't something I just made up. For some people in some church traditions, faith is a journey.