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John Chapter 3:4-12
(4)Nicodemus said to Him, How is a man able to be generated, being old? He is not able to enter into his mother’s womb a second time and be born? (5) Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, If one is not generated out of water and Spirit, he is not able to enter into the kingdom of God. (6) That having been generated out of the flesh is flesh, and that having been generated out of the Spirit is spirit. (7) Do not wonder because I said to you, You must be generated from above. (8) The Spirit breathes where He desires, and you hear His voice; but you do not know from where He comes, and where He goes; so is everyone having been generated from the Spirit. (9) Nicodemus answered and said to Him, How are these things able to occur? (10) Jesus answered and said to him, You are the teacher of Israel, and you do not know these things? (11) Truly, truly, I say to you, That which we know, we speak; and that which we have seen, we testify. And you do not receive our testimony. (12) If I tell you earthly things, and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine 204 by Emanuel Swedenborg
This the Lord teaches in John:–
Except a man be begotten of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God (John 3:5).
“Water’ in the spiritual sense is the truth of faith from the Word; “the spirit” is a life according to that truth; and “to be begotten” is to be regenerated thereby.

Divine Providence 83 by Emanuel Swedenborg
The reason why no one can come into the kingdom of God unless he has been born again is, that man by inheritance from his parents is born into evils of every kind, with the faculty of becoming spiritual by the removal of these evils; and unless he becomes spiritual he cannot come into heaven. From being natural to become spiritual is to be born again or regenerated. But in order that it may be known how man is regenerated these three things must be considered: the nature of his first state, which is a state of condemnation; the nature of his second state, which is a state of reformation; and the nature of his third state, which is a state of regeneration.

We spoke last week of the need for a person to be born again or born from above to see the kingdom of God. This is a spiritual birth, a birth of the inner man or if you like, bringing forth of what is of the Lord within us into life. Nicodemus is our natural reason which can’t see spiritual realities and is perplexed by them. Such things only come into view for those who are being regenerated or born again, for it is these that are able to perceive what the kingdom of God truly is. That kingdom is an inner kingdom of the mind or spirit. The natural idea of a kingdom is an area that comes under the governance and rule of a monarch of some kind. Unlike natural kingdoms, the kingdom of God is not a place but a state of life, it’s a mind that has for its will the goods of love and for its understanding the truths of faith or religion or genuine spirituality. What is born of the Lord within us looks to the things of the spirit, also within us. This is why it says that unless a person is born again or born anew from above they cannot see, perceive or understand what this kingdom is, or what it means to be a citizen of it.

This kingdom is in the inner sense of the Word, but to see or perceive it there one must be born from above. Anyone with a natural eye can read the Word, but to understand it spiritually requires the inner eye of spiritual understanding. The natural man makes spiritual things complicated because it lacks understanding. So the phrase “you must be born again” is understood very clearly by the spiritual man who thinks in spiritual terms, but for the natural man the phrase suggests the impossible task of somehow having to enter back into the womb when old.

But it’s not that complicated, for while the Word instructs us that if we are to perceive the kingdom of God we must be born again, it doesn’t leave it there. The Lord goes on to explain how this is accomplished for us. We must be born of ‘water’ and of the ‘spirit’. And in this birth we have an important part to play. The Lord gifts us with all we need to bring this spiritual birth about within ourselves. He doesn’t leave us hanging – he gives us teaching as to what it is a person must do if they are to be born again and come into the reality of the kingdom of God.

But no one will do what this teaching says is needed to be born anew unless they can see why a new birth is necessary. We are all born into tendencies to evils of every kind, these tendencies are moderated by the Lord’s influence over the course of our lives through what the Heavenly Doctrines call remains, but they are only moderated and this stabilising influence of goodness that flows into the mind from deep within is not something that belongs to us. Further to this where a person has contact with religious or spiritual teachings they have in these a means of governing these tendencies and preventing them from breaking forth into destructive words and behaviours. These teachings become especially important as a person’s rational faculties develop, because it gives them something to think from as a basis for moral behaviour. Those who don’t have the influence of external religious or spiritual teaching have their evils or selfish tendencies governed by fears. In the main these take the form of a fear of consequences, whether from the law, or of a loss of reputation, or loss of wealth or loss of some other form of circumstances they enjoy and would hate to lose. All this works in an external way to keep evils in check and so the miracle is that in general society functions in a reasonably ordered way.

It takes a level of honesty on the part of any individual to see that their external goodness is just that, external. But it’s true for until we engage in personal spiritual work we remain oblivious to the evils that lie beneath the superficial niceness we often project as our face to the world. This is why we need to be born again, without this birth we can’t even see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus was a Pharisee and would have been meticulous in his keeping of the laws and traditions of his community. But all his efforts would be of no avail unless he is born again. External compliance with religious teachings and traditions doesn’t make a person spiritual, they must be born again. So how has the Lord made provision for this to happen? Well He has given us the Word and the Heavenly Doctrines as the means by which we can understand the Word in a way that addresses this very question.

Both the giving of the Word and the Heavenly Doctrines constitute two dimensions to the Lord’s advent into the world. Some weeks ago we dealt with the idea of the Lord’s incarnation as teaching concerning how it is that the Word becomes flesh. The Word is the Divine Truth and when truth is lived it produces and becomes good and so the whole story of the Word becoming flesh describes how the Lord glorified His human, a process that involves the Divine Truth or Word becoming Divine Good or flesh.

Now a similar process must occur in us if we are to enter the kingdom of God, but with us the process is not one of glorification, as it was with the Lord, but one of regeneration or rebirth. Both glorification and regeneration centres around the Word, and in the case of our regeneration, our responses to the demands the Word or Divine Truth makes on our life. Nicodemus was in the dark, remember he is described as coming to the Lord at night, and so he represents a mind that lacks the means to understand the Lord’s words. We can be fairly sure that as a Pharisee he would have known the Scriptures but it’s clear from his responses to the Living Word Himself that this knowledge was not a saving knowledge – in fact, while he knew the Scriptures he clearly had no understanding of them in relation to spiritual work and eternal life.

Nicodemus however doesn’t just represent an individual’s blindness in relation to understanding the Word spiritually; he also represents a recurring state of ignorance that returns when the church for a particular age declines due to a lack of love. Nicodemus couldn’t see because the church of that age, which was the Jewish church, had lost touch with the essentials of religion and become self absorbed in traditions and practices that had nothing to do with the Word and eternal life. In this sense Nicodemus represented the blindness of the age in which he lived, a blindness that arises from the loss of a true idea of God. In such times the Lord has to make His entry into the spiritual affairs of the human race and re-present the essentials of spiritual life to human consciousness so that those who have a desire for spiritual things can be led into them. This is what Divine revelation is, and this is what is meant by the Lord’s advent into the world. Every advent involves the restoration to human consciousness the idea of a loving and merciful God. When this idea is lost the human race falls into a state of spiritual darkness.

So having knowledge of the Scriptures is only of value when we are able to take that knowledge and apply it with understanding in support of living a spiritual life. Nicodemus had the knowledge but he didn’t have the means to make sense of it as a matter of life. As a teacher of Israel he represented the state of the church of his day, a church rich in the Scriptures but lacking the keys by which they could be opened up and the Lord’s salvation realised.

Such a state existed in the Christian Church just prior to the revelation of the Heavenly Doctrines being given to human kind. The Christian Church had the Scriptures but was bound up in literalism and like the Jewish church before it lacked the keys to understanding it. People were, at that time, spiritually in the dark, a kind of Nicodemus state overshadowed the minds of all who were in the Church at that time. The idea of God in the church had deviated so far from the image of God that the Lord presented to the human race, when in the world, that unless the Lord intervened the human race would have spiritually perished. The image of a loving, merciful and compassionate God had been virtually lost, resulting in a fragmented idea of God in which the whole focus of religious thought centred on a divided God who became three persons, where one person came into the world to satisfy the justice demands of the other.

God was seen as a being that got angry or jealous or became envious, he became one who punished and these ideas were used to promote fear in the people. With the loss of a true idea of God the spiritual conditions were right for the Lord to make his advent into the world once again, to re-present to human consciousness the true face of the Divine Human. Only this time it wasn’t to be a coming limited to a person but a universal revelation of Himself that the whole of human kind could have access to. Thus this coming would be an opening of the Word and drawing forth from it genuine teachings of Divine and spiritual matters that would enable people to connect with the Lord as the living Word. The Lord came into the world of human consciousness, and presented Himself as a new understanding of the Word as to its spiritual meaning. It is this new understanding that forms the foundation for a new church grounded in a new body of teaching centred on understanding everything in the Word in relation to the two principle commandments of love to the Lord and love towards our neighbour.

So it is that the Heavenly Doctrines made their way into the world as a body of teaching drawn from the Scriptures by means of a man who could write them down and published them making them available to all who seek to live a life of charity. That man was Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to be a servant of the Lord and testified that what he wrote down as the teachings for this new church was unfolded to him as he read the Word. These teachings then are drawn from the Word itself and so if applied should lead every person back to the Word as their source. As such they open the way to being born again because they present the Word as the Lord and show us how it is to be understood if we are to draw from it what’s needed for a genuine spiritual life.

To enter the kingdom of God we have to be born of ‘water’ and of the ‘spirit’. Our doctrines provide us with the ability to clearly understand what this means and what needs to take place for it to become a reality in our own life. From the heavenly doctrines we learn that the water needed to assists a person to be born again is not natural water but spiritual water. So where Natural forms of Christianity places the emphasis on the need for a person to be baptised with natural water to secure their salvation, Spiritual Christianity teaches that water doesn’t mean natural water for this can only cleanse the body and satisfy physical thirst, rather what is needed is spiritual water that can cleanse the mind and quench our spiritual thirst for truths.

To be born of water means to have our understanding filled with truths from the Word that can fill the mind with spiritual light to guide and direct our life. These truths and principles are found in the Word when it is understood in the light of the Heavenly Doctrines. To be born of this water is to think in new ways, particularly in regard to the Word. It’s to have spiritual ideas and concepts govern our view of the Lord, others and ourselves and to have old patterns of thought that are based in the loves of self and the world cast out onto the outskirts of our life.

To be born of the spirit is to apply these truths to life so that we are living in the good things that come from love. To be born of water and of the spirit is to be born again from above because it is to have a new understanding and will, for a person is nothing else than their understanding and will, so to have an understanding filled with the Lord’s truths and a will filled with the Lord’s love is to be born anew. This is truly a new birth, because when these things fill our life we have a new sense of self, a heavenly proprium through which we are joined with heaven and so the Lord. The old is left behind, with its destructive patterns of thought and feeling based on self interest and fear. This doesn’t mean that the old no longer affects us, its there and may still be active at times and will continue to be so while we live in this world, but what has changed is that our sense of ourself is no longer bound to what is self centred and of our ego we have something higher to which we can now respond and be joined to. When this higher level of truths and affections is built up our sense of our selves has been reborn and finds itself attached to a higher, spiritual life, a life amidst the truths of faith and the goods of love from the Lord’s Word.

None of this is vague or overly mystical. In fact it’s very practical and accessible. To be born again all we need to do is acknowledge the Lord as the Word – take hold of the doctrines drawn from the Word – learn of them and use them to read and understand the Word and then apply our insights to the activity of our affections, thoughts and behaviours. Anyone can do this if they want to. This is what makes a person spiritual, nothing else. This possibility has been made available to us through the Lord’s second coming as the spiritual sense of the Word. On the level of our regeneration the Lord first comes to us as truth – He comes to our understanding as our understanding of truth. This is His first coming on a personal level and is what it means to be born of water. He then asks us to be responsible for that truth, to use it to live a spiritual life by removing our evils and it is as we do this he comes in power and glory, he manifests as love which on a personal level is his second coming or what it means to be born of the spirit.

The event in a historical context took place on the 19th of June 1770, that event coinciding with the completion of the work True Christian Religion – whose teaching has the power to disperse every false idea about the Lord and spiritual life and set the mind on a sure foundation as to who the Lord is and how the Word is to be understood, and so create the conditions in a person for the power of this coming to be experienced in their own life. In TCR 774…

“It is the Lord’s perpetual presence which gives a person the faculty of reason and the ability to become spiritual. This is brought about by the light which comes from the Lord as the sun of the spiritual world, which a person can receive in his understanding. That light is the truth which gives him the power of reasoning. The Lord’s coming, however, takes place with the person who combines heat with that light, that is, combines love with truth. For the heat radiated from that same sun is love for God and towards the neighbour. The Lord’s presence by itself, and the enlightenment it brings to the understanding, can be compared with the presence of sunlight in the world; unless it is combined with heat, everything upon earth is desolate. But the coming of the Lord can be compared with the coming of heat, which happens in springtime. Since then heat is combined with light, the earth is softened up, seeds sprout and bear fruit. Such is the parallel between the spiritual environment of a person’s spirit and the natural environment of his body.”

It is this potential, made available to all through the second advent of the Lord God Jesus Christ as a new understanding of the Word given in the Heavenly Doctrines for the New Church, that we celebrate as New Church day…

Amen.