Hank Smith: 00:04 Hello, my friends. Welcome to another followHIM Favorites. My name is Hank Smith. I’m here with the amazing John Bytheway. Welcome, John.

John Bytheway: 00:11 Hi, Hank.

Hank Smith: 00:12 John, followHIM Favorites, this week we’re taking on John 2, 3, and 4, and the name of the lesson is Ye Must Be Born Again. So I came up with a question that I think a lot of people might be interested in, and that is what does it mean to be born again? So John, we’re going to hand it over to you first. What does it mean to be born again?

John Bytheway: 00:30 It’s a great question because so many verses say you must be born again, and that’s a strong word. We probably ought to figure out what that is. If we must be born again, we probably ought to figure that out. And I think it was Elder D. Todd Christofferson who talked about this. But being born again is a process. Now, being baptized is an event, and you can find your certificate and know the day that you were baptized. But being born again is more of a process, and we see that a lot in Alma chapter five when Alma goes to Zarahemla, people who are members of the church, and says, “My brethren in the church, have you been born of God?” And it makes you go, “Wait a minute. I thought if they’re in the church, they’ve already been baptized.” Which kind of just tells us being born again is a process, and that’s just staying on the covenant path.

  01:17 And if you get off, you get back on, and you keep striving, you keep coming back to the sacrament table and renewing that covenant. And over time, your heart changes. For some people, it’s so rapid, it got written up in the scriptures, to paraphrase Elder McConkie. But for most of us, it’s just a little slower and we start to treasure the things of God more. And instead of saying, “I can’t do this,” we get to a point where, “I really don’t want to do that.” And I think that’s kind of evidence that we’re being born again.

Hank Smith: 01:44 Absolutely. We’re changing over time. Brent Top, one of our friends, said this, he said, “Spiritual rebirth is a continuous process. There is the event of baptism, but the entire rebirth is a continuous process, the fruits of which are peaceful conscience, joy, desire to do good continually, and an increase of love and spiritual understanding.”

  02:08 Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You have to be born again in order to see the kingdom of God. You have to be born of water and of spirit to enter into the kingdom of God.”

  02:18 Nicodemus doesn’t seem to understand, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born? He’s like, “Mom, I don’t know how to tell you this.” So when Nicodemus hears this, he doesn’t quite understand what Jesus means, but the Book of Mormon gives us such a understanding of what it means to be born again. You’ve got King Benjamin talking about it. Alma the Younger talks about being born again and how it’s a mighty change of heart, change of nature. With the Book of Mormon, we can really understand what it means to be born again.

John Bytheway: 02:50 And I love the phrase “mighty change of heart.” I just hope we don’t think that means instant change of heart. Because for some people, it’s pretty rapid. There are the Pauls, like Paul that stopped on the road to Damascus, like Enos, like King Lamoni, King Lamoni’s father, but-

Hank Smith: 03:09 Dramatic, huge changes.

John Bytheway: 03:11 Yeah. Yeah. President Ezra Taft Benson says, “For the rest of us, there are hundreds and thousands who find the process of repentance much more slow and imperceptible.” We just keep going and being born again is a process. So be patient with yourself, but keep coming back to Christ and watch that process happen.

Hank Smith: 03:29 Absolutely. We want to thank you for joining us for followHIM Favorites. We hope you’ll join us on our full podcast, it’s called followHIM. You can look it up wherever you get your podcast, and then we hope you’ll join us next week for another followHIM Favorites.