What Does Being Born Again Mean?

It is not being baptized with water.
It is not being made a temperance man.
It is not becoming religious, or “making a new start.”
It is not “turning over a new leaf,” or joining a society.
None of these things, or all of them put together, is being “born again.”
Some people think, when they get “reformed,” that it’s all the same as being “born again”; but that’s a great mistake. A young man once told us he was “quite sure he would be in heaven, because he didn’t drink now.” “Very good, sir; glad to hear it; but when were you born again’? “He knew nothing about that. He was reformed, but not regenerated; he was as unfit for heaven as he ever had been.
A minister of the gospel once told us that he preached seven years to others before he was “born again” himself. Terrible work! It’s time that some other religious men and women were asking themselves solemnly this question: “AM I BORN AGAIN? or do I just ‘go to church’ ‘and keep up a profession’ because it is a fashionable and respectable thing?”
Reader, have you been “born again”? Consider. Mind that nothing else will do instead, and that nothing but this will fit you for being in heaven.