Regeneration, or Rebirth

Our spiritual life changes gradually. Not all at once. Are we heading in the right direction? How can we be spiritually reborn? It's a process. (See 2 Peter 1:5, and many other places in the Word.)

For anyone who believes in heaven, one question stands above all the others: How can I get there? How can I be saved?

To change, we must be willing to undergo the temptations described in the Book of Daniel, chapter four, but for this to happen, we need to judge our behavior. This is represented by the feast, where actions are judged and those incompatible with conscience are cast out.

Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the ground, representing the thoughts of our minds. These are indeed from the Lord, for He created them. But they represent only the intellectual part of man; they do not represent the heart. Cain's love was not offered with his gift. There is a lesson here for us.

Repentance doesn’t just mean confessing our sins, being forgiven, and then forgetting about it and going right back to what we were doing before. In order to truly repent, we need to change our ways.

Here's a summary of the key New Christian teachings about regeneration.

Freedom -- what is it really? As far as we can tell, our level of freedom is pretty new, at least in this neck of the cosmos.

Covenant, Reciprocation, and Conjunction are three parts of the process of our spiritual rebirth.

"Faith is an internal recognition of truth." That's how Swedenborg begins his book about Faith. Here's a place to start exploring this deeply human topic.

I remember an older friend of mine saying... indeed, pointing out the obvious... that in about hundred years from now everyone alive today will be dead. It wasn't said as some kind of doomsday forecast or in any morbid way. It is a fact. We are all going to die. And it's useful and healthy to talk calmly about it. But while the body dies and is discarded, the mind or spirit within, which is the essential person we are, goes on living.

Two things make us human: our spiritual minds, and our spiritual freedom.

In Hamlet, William Shakespeare said that “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” We can see this all around us.

In New Christian theology, there's a very core concept that the Divine Love and Divine Wisdom cooperate, and are "married;" working together to form all of creation. Neither one can operate without the other. "Female and male" together correspond to this celestial marriage.

Swedenborg describes temptation as an assault or an attack on what we spiritually have come to love.

Here are some excerpts from the Bible about forgiveness.

What do you do in situations like these? Can you forgive them? Should you forgive?

Sometime the Bible mentions devils, or Satan. What can we glean from the Bible, and what's the New Christian teaching about them?

We need to marry a desire for good to a true understanding of how to be good. The search for this union is the basis of spiritual rebirth.

In the Bible, there are quite a few stories about angels. Angels visit Abraham and Lot. An angel blocks Balaam's path. The angel Gabriel visits Mary and Joseph. There are other stories, too. So, what about angels? What does the New Christian Church teach about them?

Could there be reasons for the humble, vulnerable beginnings of Jesus’s life? Let's explore how the Divine design may have been at play from the very beginning of Christ's life.

Understanding prayer isn't all that easy. The insights in this article can help!