You know, you don't have a choice to be born. Nor can you choose when, where you're born, nor who your father and mother are. That decision was completely out of your hands - you were conceived and you were coming out, like it or not. But you can choose whether to be born again or not. You can take a long look inside your sinful, filthy heart and say "ok, I'm fine with it" or you can ask God for a new heart "CREATE IN ME A CLEAN HEART, O GOD, AND RENEW A RIGHT SPIRIT WITHIN ME". Like your first birth, your second birth is the result of love - two people's intimacy and passion for one another resulted in you and the passion and love that the Father and Son share for you, when joined with the Holy Spirit in someone who cared enough to share the Gospel with you and, or pray for you, resulted in your second birth, the second you. Even if you were born out of wedlock, as I was, love gave birth to you because both the first time and the second time you are born, you are formed by God. What ethnicity you are, how tall, the color of your hair and who you are spiritually when you come to Christ are all loving choices made by your loving God.
Not only does love birth you but love takes care of you throughout your childhood and love will not let you down now Love will keep you until you return to the place you were first conceived - Heaven, where the Father's love never fails. This is the main reason why God insists on marriage before sex. He wants each of us to be born out of the right kind of love, that is to say, eternal love. He wants us each to have a mother and a father, for both male and female are expressions of His love for us, in different ways. Combined, they form a perfect picture of His love and care for us. He wants us to know love from the moment we exit the womb and He wants our hearts to know, especially our hearts, Love created you! Love cares for you, deeply and personally! Love will never stop caring for you. Love ushered you into this world and Love will usher you into the next. Love has made room for you in Heaven. LOVE NEVER FAILS. Love is kind. God is love. He wants our hearts to know love (Him) from our earliest moments. So when we're told "God is love", the deepest parts of us, our hearts, our own "Holy of Holies", the innermost and most sacred area of the "Temple" (we are now His Temple - "Know you not that you are the Temple of God?" "And that the Spirit of God dwells in you?" will respond and recognize this truth, that "God is love". We'll say "Ah, I see! I get it!" "I know what that means". Our parents are supposed to model for us the fact that someone greater than us became our servant so that we might live and live well!
We must realize "someone had compassion for me in my weakness (every baby is born weak for a reason, so that they must learn to depend on someone else to survive) and sacrificed themselves for me that i might live. Someone suffered pain, great pain, that i might be born and I am fed and sustained by the milk of her breast and as a Christian I am fed and sustained the same way for does not love keep us and care for us and does not love flow from the heart which is found in the breast? Love flows to me as a babe in Christ, on His love i survive and continue to live off, throughout my walk with Him. I will never stop needing Him. God is our mother as well as our Father. Turn your eyes from an earthly mother, suffering labor pains on your behalf and put them on the Cross and behold your God, suffering great pain that you might be born again. See that you could not birth yourself. You could not climb out of your mother's womb in your own strength but know that in our weakness, His strength is sufficient for us. With man it is impossible but with God all things are possible. Just as you were too weak to birth yourself, to feed and clothe yourself throughout your early childhood, just as we must depend of someone else's love to sustain us, to survive, so must we live as adult, born again children of God. We are still too weak to birth ourselves into the Kingdom of Heaven. When we pray a typical "sinner's prayer" we do so from a position of extreme weakness. We still need someone who loves us to "Give us this day our daily bread". We are still completely dependent on someone else to clothe us with "robes of righteousness" (thank you Jesus!) We are still too weak to live this eternal life He suffered to give us, we still need Him every single day as desperately as a baby needs their mother and father to survive. Just as loving parents protect their child from harm, so does our loving God. This is the only way to approach Him and it is the only way to remain and grow healthy in His kingdom and it is the path to greatness in His eyes - "Allow little children and forbid them not, to come to Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven".This is why the Apostle John called his brethren that he loved and cared for "my little children".

Part two coming soon....