I was talking recently with someone who was looking forward to becoming a father. He asked me, "Is it hard to learn how to be a good father? How did you deal with that change in your life?"

"One of the nice things about becoming a father," I said, "is that it happened one step at a time. First we got engaged, and then some time later we got married. During that time, talking about parenting helped prepare me mentally. A few months after our marriage, my wife became pregnant, and then we still had nine months before our child was actually born."

"Of course, having a new baby was a big change, but still there were many parenting tasks that came later. For example, discipline wasn't an issue for the first year, and it was two years before we had to help our son learn to get along with his new baby sister. Being a good father all at once would be impossible, but the Lord gives us a chance to learn slowly."

Most changes in our lives are gradual. An inch of growth may take a child half a year. It can take several years to learn to speak a new language or play a musical instrument. Two people can be married in a day, but the actual marriage of minds takes decades to accomplish.

Changes in our spiritual life are also gradual. They take place one step at a time, and spiritual growth will be easier if we know that it does not take place in a moment. It is an ongoing process. Jesus said,

"Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3)

Many passages in the Bible indicate that being born again spiritually will be just as much a step by step process as physical conception, gestation, birth, growth, and development. For example, Peter describes it in seven distinct steps:

"Add to your faith, virtue, and to virtue, knowledge, and to knowledge, self-control, and to self-control, perseverance, and to perseverance, godliness, to godliness, brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness, love." Only by completing this process can we be sure to enter the Kingdom of God. (2 Peter 1:5)

One reason why being born again must be a gradual process is that it involves a complete change of character. Paul describes it this way:

"If any one be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new." (2 Corinthians 5:5)

Rebirth involves new knowledge, new habits, new activities, new loves, and new awareness of the Lord.

New Knowledge

Rebirth does not take place through a blind leap of faith, but through gradual education, study and enlightenment. Jesus said,

"If you continue in My Word, ...the truth shall make you free." (John 15:3)

Truth is the tool of change, the means to a new life. Jesus said,

"Now you are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you." (John 15:3)

Instead of accepting dogmas without question we must make sense of the truth in order to be reborn. Being "childlike" does not mean being childish in our beliefs.

"In malice be children, but in understanding be adults." (1 Corinthians 14:20)

In one of His stories, Jesus describes a good person as one "who hears the Word, and understands it, and also bears fruit." (Matthew 12:23)

Most important of all is the understanding of God. If God's nature is a mystery to us, we can hardly say that we are born again, or that we are His sons. (Compare John 15:15.)

Knowing God goes hand in hand with being born from Him. (1 John 4:7)

"The pure in heart shall see God." (Matthew 5:8)

When we are born again, God "shines in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the Glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Corinthians 4:6)

New Habits

Anyone who is in the habit of doing or thinking evil things is living the "old" life, and is incapable of the genuine goodness of the person who has overcome them.

"Can the leopard change its spots? Then may you also do good who are accustomed to do evil." (Jeremiah 13:23)

"He who commits sin is the servant of sin." (John 8:34)

Receiving the new life requires fighting against the old habits.

"Cast away from you all the transgressions which you have committed, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. For why should you die? ...Turn and live!" (Ezekiel 18:21, 31-32.)

"Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, put away the evil of your doing from My eyes! Cease to do evil, learn to do good." (Isaiah 1:16.)

This kind of repentance cannot take place merely by praying for forgiveness. It requires a struggle, an ongoing battle to overcome the old ways of life. Paul called this a struggle between the "flesh" and the "spirit." (Galatians 4:29, Romans 8:7.)

It is a battle that requires our greatest effort -- "all your heart and all your soul and all your might." (Deuteronomy 6:4)

Eventually, through constant effort, God gives us such power over our habits that we no longer would think of doing something evil. When this time finally comes, we can be called "born again."

"Whoever is born of God does not commit sin.... He cannot sin, because he is born of God." (1 John 3:9)

"Whatever is born of God overcomes the world.... We know that whoever is born of God does not sin, but he who is born of God keeps himself and the wicked one does not touch him." (1 John 5:4, 18)

New Activities

Along with new habits come new activities. A person who neglects to be useful cannot be born again, and cannot go to heaven. Jesus indicated that some Christians would not be saved because they lacked good works.

"Not everyone who says to Me, Lord, Lord, ' shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in the heavens." (Matthew 7:21)

In one of His parables, Jesus told of some people who would go into everlasting punishment, not because they had lacked faith, but because they had failed to help people who were in need. (Matthew 25:41-46)

After death, the Lord "renders unto everyone according to his deeds." (Matthew 16:27)

A person who is born again is concerned for others, and orients his life around the work he can do to help others.

"Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead... A person is justified by works, and not by faith alone." (James 2:17, 24)

To be born again, you must "bring forth fruits worthy of repentance." (Luke 3:8) Service and usefulness are marks of the new life.

New Loves

Even more than faith and more than works, the power that causes a person to be born again is love. Peter tells us that we are reborn by means of loving and for the purpose of loving others.

"Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, being born again...by the word of God." (1 Peter 1:22, 23)

John also makes it very clear that only those who love others can receive the new life:

"We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brethren. He who does not love his brother abides in death." (1 John 3:14)

"Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love, does not know God, for God is love." (1 John 4:7-8)

New Awareness of the Lord

We must take it upon ourselves to have faith, to fight the evil impulses within ourselves, to serve others, and to love others if we wish to be born again. Yet in all these things we need also to realize that it is the Lord who is working within us.

"You have also done all our works in us." (Isaiah 26:12)

"There are many forms of work, but all of them, in all people, are the work of the same God." (1 Corinthians 12:6)

In the process of rebirth we come to realize that it is the Lord working within us that enables us to work, believe, struggle, and love. These abilities are His merciful gift. He says,

"I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you...and cause you to walk in my statutes." (Ezekiel 36:26-27)

Patience

In order to be reborn we must renew our knowledge, habits, actions, loves and relationship with the Lord. All this takes time, even a lifetime. Just as childbirth and growth require patience and endurance, so does being born again.

"In your patience you will possess your souls." (Luke 21:19)

"Whoever endures to the end shall be saved." (Matthew 10:22)

God will give eternal life to those who seek it "by patient continuance in doing good." (Romans 2:7)

We cannot expect to be born again in a single moment. Again and again, the Bible advises steadfastness and endurance if we wish to gain the promise of heaven.

"It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." (Lamentations 3:26, 27)

For although it takes time, if we do our part, the Lord will certainly make it happen.

"Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass." (Psalms 37:5, 7)

296. For a clear sense and grasp of the way divine providence works with evil people, I need to explain these statements in the order in which they are listed.

(a) There are countless elements in every evil. Every evil looks to us like a simple unit. That is how we see hatred and vengefulness, theft and fraud, adultery and promiscuity, pride and arrogance, and the like. We do not realize that there are countless elements in every evil, more than there are fibers and vessels in the human body. An evil person is a miniature form of hell, and hell is made up of millions of individuals, each one in a form that is human even though it is grotesque. All the fibers and all the vessels in that person are inverted. Essentially, a spirit is an evil that looks to itself like a single entity, but there are as many elements in it as there are compulsions that arise from it. We are all our own good or our own evil from our heads to the soles of our feet. So if evil people are like this, we can see that each one is an evil made up of countless different things that are distinct varieties of evil, things we refer to as the compulsions of that evil.

It then follows that if we are to be reformed, the Lord has to repair and turn around all these elements in the sequence in which they occur, and that this cannot be accomplished except by the Lord's divine providence working step by step from the beginning of our lives to the end.

[2] In hell, every compulsion to evil looks like a vicious animal when it is made visible, like a dragon, for example, or some kind of poisonous snake, or some kind of owl, and so on. This is what the compulsions of our own evil look like when angels see them. All these forms of compulsion have to be turned around one at a time. The task is to take people who in spirit look like gargoyles or devils and turn them around to look like beautiful angels, and each single compulsion has to be turned around so that it looks like a lamb, a sheep, a dove, or a turtledove. This is what the desires for good of angels in heaven look like when they are made visible. Changing a dragon into a lamb or a serpent into a sheep or an owl into a dove can only happen gradually, by uprooting the very seed of the evil and planting good seed in its place.

This has to be done in the way a scion is grafted onto a tree that is nothing but some roots and a trunk. Even so, the branch that has been grafted gets some sap from the old root and turns it into good, juicy fruit. The scion that is to be grafted has to be taken from the Lord, who is the tree of life. This is the intent of the Lord's words in John 15:1-7.

[3] (b) Evil people are constantly and intentionally leading themselves deeper into their evils. We say they are doing this intentionally because everything evil comes from us. We turn the goodness that comes from the Lord into evil, as already noted [294]. The basic reason evil people lead themselves deeper into evil is that they are making their way farther and farther into hellish communities, getting in deeper and deeper as they intend and do what is evil. This increases their pleasure in evil as well, and it takes possession of their thoughts to the point that nothing feels more gratifying. Furthermore, when we have made our way farther and deeper into hellish communities, we are wrapped up in chains, so to speak, though as long as we are living in this world, we do not feel them as chains. They feel like soft linen or slender threads of silk that we like because they caress us. After death, though, the softness of the chains turns hard, and the caresses start to chafe.

[4] If we consider theft, robbery, plunder, vengeance, domineering, profiteering, and the like, we can recognize this growth of the pleasure we find in evil. Do not the people who are committing these evils feel surges of pleasure as things go well and as obstacles to their efforts vanish? It is well known that thieves get such pleasure from theft that they cannot stop stealing; and strange as it sounds, they love one stolen coin more than ten coins freely given. It would be the same for adulterers if things were not so arranged that the power to commit this evil decreases as it is abused. Still, though, for many people the pleasure of thinking and talking about it is still there, and if nothing else, there is the insistent urge to touch.

[5] What people do not realize is that this is happening because they are making their way farther and farther, deeper and deeper, into hellish communities as they commit these evils intentionally and consciously. If the evils occur in our thoughts only and not in our volition, we are not with the evil in some hellish community yet. We enter such a community when the evils are in our volition as well. If at that time we are also conscious that this evil is against the laws of the Ten Commandments, and if we regard these laws as divine, and still deliberately do it, this sends us down so deep that the only way we can be rescued is by active repentance.

[6] We need to realize that all of us, in spirit, are in some community in the spiritual world, in a hellish one if we are evil, and a heavenly one if we are good. Sometimes we are even visible there when we are deep in meditation. Further, just as sound and speech spread through the air in the physical world, desire and thought spread out in the communities in the spiritual world. There is a correspondential relationship here because desire answers to sound and thought to speech.

[7] (c) For evil people, divine providence is a constant permission of evil with the ultimate goal of constantly leading them out. The reason divine providence is a constant permission for evil people is that nothing can come out of their life except evil. Whether we are devoted to good or evil, we cannot be devoted to both at the same time, or even alternately, unless we are lukewarm. It is not the Lord who lets evil living into our volition and from there into our thought, it is we ourselves; and this is called permission.

[8] Now since everything evil people intend and think is a matter of permission, the question arises as to what divine providence is in this situation, the providence that we say is at work in the smallest details within all of us, evil and good alike. Divine providence consists of the fact that it is constantly allowing things to happen for a purpose and is permitting only things that serve that purpose, nothing else. It is constantly examining the evils that are allowed to emerge, separating them, purifying them, banishing the ones that do not suit its purpose, and lifting them away in ways we cannot see. This is going on primarily in our deeper volition and secondarily in our deeper thought. Divine providence is also constantly at work to see that we do not welcome back into our volition the things that have been banished and lifted from us, because everything we accept into our volition becomes part of us. Things we have accepted in thought but not in volition, though, are separated and sent away.

This is the constant effort of the Lord's providence for evil people--as just noted, a constant permission with a view to constant rescue.

[9] We know very little about this because we do not feel it. The main reason we do not feel it is that our evils are inherent in the cravings of our life's love, and we do not feel these as evil but as pleasant. No one pays them any heed. Do we pay any attention to the pleasures of our love? Our thoughts drift along in them like a little boat in the current of a river. We sense them like a breath of fragrant air that we breathe in deeply. All we can do is sense a little of them in our outer thought, but we still take no notice of them there unless we have a clear knowledge of what evil is. There will be more on this later, though [298].

[10] (d) The Lord does this leading out of evil in a thousand ways, some of them quite mysterious. I have been shown only a few of these, and only some of the commonest ones at that. What happens is that pleasures of our compulsions, of which we are utterly unaware, are emitted in close-knit groups into the inner thought processes of our spirit and from there into its outer thought processes. There they take on the guise of a kind of feeling that something is gratifying or pleasing or desirable. These inner pleasures mingle there with our lower and sensory pleasures. In this arena there are means of separation and purification and routes of dismissal and relief. The means are primarily the pleasure we find in contemplation, thought, and reflection for various purposes that are constructive; and there are as many purposes that are constructive as there are elements and details of our various jobs and offices. There are also just as many constructive purposes as there are attractive thoughts about how we can seem to be civic-minded and moral individuals and spiritual individuals--as well as some unattractive ones that intrude themselves. Because these pleasures are effects of our love in our outer self, they serve as means by which the pleasures of the compulsions to evil of our inner self can be separated, purified, excreted, and withdrawn.

[11] For example, take dishonest judges, who see money or cronyism as the goals or functions of their office. Inwardly, they are constantly focused on these goals, but this comes out in an effort to act competently and fairly. They find a constant pleasure in pondering, thinking, reflecting, and intending ways to bend, turn, adapt, and finagle the legal system so that their decisions seem to conform to the laws and to mimic justice. They are not aware that this inner pleasure is made up of plots, pretences, deceit, undercover theft, and much more of the same kind, and that a pleasure comprising all these pleasures of obsessions with evil is the controlling element in everything that goes on in their outward thinking where they find pleasure in seeming to be fair and honest.

The inner pleasures are allowed to come down into the outer ones and mingle there the way food is churned in the stomach. That is where they are separated, purified, and withdrawn. This applies, though, only to the more serious pleasures of our compulsions to evil.

[12] For evil people, only this separation, purification, and withdrawal of the more serious pleasures from the less serious ones is possible. For good people, however, there can be a separation, purification, and withdrawal of the less serious evils as well as the more serious ones. This is accomplished by means of the pleasures of our attraction to what is good and true, what is fair and honest, pleasures that we experience to the extent that we see our evils as sins and therefore abstain from them and turn away from them, and even more if we actively fight against them. These are the means the Lord uses to purify everyone who is being saved. He also purifies our evils by outward means that have to do with our reputation and respect and sometimes our finances. Even so, the Lord is planting in these means the pleasures of desires for what is good and true that guide and adapt them so that they become pleasures of a love for our neighbor.

[13] If we were to see the pleasures of our compulsions to evil in some kind of visible form or feel them clearly with any other sense, we would see and sense that there are so many that they cannot be delimited. Hell in its totality is nothing but a form of all our compulsions to evil; and in hell there is no single compulsion to evil that is exactly like any other. There cannot be one exactly like another to eternity. We know almost nothing about these countless elements, let alone how they are connected; and yet in his divine providence the Lord is constantly letting them come forth so that they can be withdrawn, doing this in a perfect pattern and sequence. An evil person is a miniature hell, and a good person is a miniature heaven.

[14] There is no better way to see and be assured that the Lord accomplishes this withdrawal from evils in a thousand ways, some most mysterious, than to look at the mysterious workings of the soul in the body. Here are some that we know about.

We know that when we are going to eat something we look at it, smell it, want it, taste it, break it up with our teeth, and use our tongues to send it down the esophagus into the stomach. However, there are mysterious workings of the soul of which we are totally unaware because we do not feel them. The stomach churns the food it has received, breaks it down and sorts it out with its secretions--that is, digests it--and assigns the elements to the appropriate open pores and veins that take them in, carrying some elements off into the blood, some into the lymphatic vessels, and some into the lacteal vessels of the mesentery, while some are sent down into the intestines. Then the chyle that comes from its reservoir in the mesentery is brought down through the thoracic duct into the vena cava and from there into the heart, and from the heart into the lungs. From there it passes through the left ventricle of the heart into the aorta, and from there through the whole branching system into the organs of the whole body. Material is also brought to the kidneys, in both of which there take place separation, purification, and withdrawal from the blood of elements that are not suitable. Allow me to leave out how the heart sends the blood that has been purified in the lungs up to the brain, which it does through the carotid arteries, and how the brain sends energized blood back into the vena cava just above the place where the thoracic duct injects the chyle, and from there back to the heart.

[15] These are some of the mysterious workings of the soul in the body, and there are many others. Most people are unaware of them, and people who are not trained in anatomy know nothing about them. Yet things like this are going on in the deeper reaches of our own minds, since nothing can happen in the body unless it comes from the mind. The mind is our spirit, and the spirit is just as much a person as we are. The only difference is that the things that happen in the body happen on the physical level and the things that happen in the mind happen on the spiritual level. There is a perfect parallelism.

We can see from this that divine providence works in a thousand ways, some most mysterious, in each of us, and that its constant effort is to purify us. This is because it is focused on the goal of saving us; and all that is required of us is that we set aside the evils in our outer self. The Lord takes care of the rest, if we ask.