23 God gave you new life. It’s not like the life you got from your mother and father. That life will end. But when you listened properly to God’s message, he gave you new life, like you got born again. Your new life will not end, because God’s word will never finish up. It lives for ever.
23 You have been regenerated (born again), not from a mortal origin (seed, sperm), but from one that is immortal by the ever living and lasting Word of God.
23 Do this because you have been given new birth—not from the type of seed that decays but from seed that doesn’t. This seed is God’s life-giving and enduring word.
23 For you have been born again, not from corruptible seed, but from what is incorruptible, from the Word of God, living and remaining for all eternity.
God is very good to us. We went wrong, but he feels sorry for us, and he is good to us. Now he puts new life in us, like we get born all over again. Jesus died, but God brought him back to life. From that we know that God will save us too. So let us thank God, the father of our leader, Jesus, and say that he is really good.
Yes, those people are in God’s family, but they were not born into it the way kids are born into human families. And they did not come from what a human mother or father wanted. God himself gave them new life and made them his kids.
It is God’s spirit that makes people alive. People can’t do that by themselves. And those words that I said to you now, they are from God’s spirit, and if people believe those words, they will live with God for ever.
He wanted us to be in his own family, so he sent his true word to us. And when we believed that word it was like we were born all over again. That’s how he made us his really special people.
Jesus said, “Listen, I am telling you straight, if anyone wants to be in God’s family, they have to get born again God’s way. God has to make them clean, and he has to put his spirit in them.
They didn’t respect the wonderful God that never dies, but instead they made models of things that do die. They made things that look like people, or birds, or animals, or snakes, or those sorts of things, and they respected those things. They didn’t respect God.