Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread. My name is Brent Hackett, and I titled our reading, Born Again.

Born Again, what does that mean? asked the funeral director. I've never heard of that term before.

Grasping the opportunity,

the son of the deceased father explained what it meant through the words of John 3. It comes down to the fact that we are all born once into this world, he said. God doesn't

have a magic scale where he weighs our good deeds against the bad. God requires us to be

born of the spirit, he continued. That's why Jesus died in the cross. He paid for our sins and made

it possible for us to possess eternal life with him. We can't make it on our own. In John 3, Nicodemus

began to doubt if he truly had it all figured out.

A trained teacher in the scriptures, he recognized that Jesus was different,

and that his teaching had authority.

He wanted to find out for himself, so he approached Christ one night to get the matter settled.

Nicodemus must have accepted Jesus' statement,

You must be born again, and believed, because he helped prepare the Savior's body for

burial after he was crucified. The funeral director agreed to go home and read

the third chapter of John's Gospel. Like the son who talked with the director,

let's take Jesus' words to heart and share them with others as he helps us.

Today's Our Daily Bread Devotional Scripture reading is from John chapter 3, verses 1 to 9.

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus, who was a member of the Jewish ruling council.

He came to Jesus at night and said,

Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God,

for no one can perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.

Jesus replied, very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God

...