Born Again — Of Water and of the Spirit

The verse that gives the doctrine its name contains two births, joined by the word and. The modern usage keeps one and quietly drops the other — and the chapter it comes from ends with Jesus baptizing.

Are You Born Again?

“Are you born again?” gets asked with real concern most of the time, and it deserves a real answer rather than a debating point tossed back over the fence. Behind that question stands a conviction worth respecting: that Christianity is not inherited, not cultural, and not a matter of attendance, and that a person must be changed at the root, personally, and know that he has been.

Is any of that wrong? Every word of it is true, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ teaches it with considerably more force than the question implies. Latter-day Saints do not answer no.

The disagreement is narrower and more specific: whether the new birth is a private event between a man and God alone, or whether the Lord attached it to something He told us to do. And on that, He was explicit.

Read the Whole Sentence

John 3:3–5

“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God… Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”

Verse 3 states the requirement, and verse 5 defines it. Nicodemus asked what being born again could possibly mean, and how did the Lord answer him? With two elements and a conjunction.

Notice that the phrase everyone quotes is from verse 3 and the explanation everyone skips is in verse 5. The doctrine takes its NAME from the first and its content from the second — and the second is the one that gets left in the margin.

What “Born of Water” Is Made to Mean

Verse 5 is inconvenient, so three readings get offered to move it out of the way. State them at full strength first, and then test each one.

The Three Alternatives

Water means physical birth — the waters of the womb. So verse 5 means “born once naturally, then once spiritually.”

Water means the word of God — citing Ephesians 5:26, “the washing of water by the word.”

Water and Spirit are one thing — a single spiritual cleansing described twice for emphasis.

The first reading has a problem in the very next verse. Jesus continues: “that which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Does He have a term for physical birth? He does, and the term is flesh, and He uses it one sentence later. So if verse 5 meant natural birth, then He changed vocabulary for no reason at all and then changed straight back again.

The reading is also pointless in context. Nicodemus had just asked whether a man must “enter the second time into his mother’s womb,” so on this reading the Lord answers a confused man by telling him yes, you must be physically born — which Nicodemus had already managed some sixty years earlier, and which explains precisely nothing to anybody.

The second and third readings run into the same wall, and it is standing at the end of the chapter. Twenty verses later: “After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized” (John 3:22). John records a conversation about being born of water, and then he records the Lord going straight out and putting people into water. Is that a coincidence of arrangement? It is the same chapter.

The Apostles Administered Two Births, Separately

If the new birth were a single inward event, what would the book of Acts show? One thing happening. It shows two instead, and it shows them coming apart from each other, which is the strongest evidence anybody could ask for that they are distinct.

Water, Then Spirit, in the Apostolic Church

Acts 2:38 — “Repent, and be baptized… and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” Both, in order, in the first sermon.

Acts 8:14–17 — the Samaritans were baptized, “only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus,” and the Holy Ghost had “fallen upon none of them” until Peter and John came and laid hands on them. Two events, days apart, requiring two authorities.

Acts 19:1–6 — disciples at Ephesus who had not so much as heard of the Holy Ghost were baptized again, and then hands were laid on them.

Titus 3:5 — saved “by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.” Paul names both, in one verse, and puts washing first.

Romans 6:3–4 — baptism is burial and rising “that… even so we also should walk in newness of life.” The new-birth language is attached to the ordinance.

Acts 8 is the passage to sit with. Those Samaritans believed the preaching, rejoiced in it, and were baptized by a man with authority to baptize them — and after all of that the record still says flatly that the Holy Ghost had fallen upon none of them. So something remained to be given, and it took apostles to give it. Whatever the new birth is, did the New Testament church treat it as finished at the moment of belief? It plainly did not.

And It Is Not a Moment You Can Coast On

Scripture also refuses to let the new birth become a date on a card. It describes an actual transformation of what a person wants.

Alma 5:14

“Have ye spiritually been born of God? Have ye received his image in your countenances? Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?”

Those are the questions of a preacher who assumes his hearers were baptized already, and who asks them anyway. Is Alma satisfied by the ordinance alone? He is not, and neither is the Lord. The water without the change is a wet man. That is why the second birth is of the SPIRIT, and why it is described as receiving a new heart rather than a new label.

King Benjamin’s people described the result themselves: the Spirit “has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually” (Mosiah 5:2). Not a decision remembered. A disposition altered — and altered by their consent rather than over it. They had cried out for it first (Mosiah 4:2), and God answered what they asked for. He did not overwrite them.

What the Gospel of Jesus Christ Actually Teaches

So the answer to the question is yes — and here is the whole of it, in the order the Lord gave it. Faith in Jesus Christ. Repentance. Baptism by immersion, by one holding authority, for the remission of sins — the birth of water. The laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost — the birth of the Spirit. And then a life of enduring, in which the change deepens rather than fades.

Nothing in that is a substitute for grace, and none of it is a work that earns anything. A man cannot baptize himself, and no man can confer the Holy Ghost on his own head. Every step is something RECEIVED. That is why the Lord chose the image of birth in the first place — nobody has ever been born by his own effort. But neither is any man born again against his will. God does not force a new heart on someone who will not have one; the door has to be opened from the inside. Every step is received, and every step is CHOSEN, and it is the choosing that makes the receiving possible.

And there is the quiet strength of the doctrine. A new birth that rests on the intensity of an experience will leave a man wondering for the rest of his life whether his own was ever intense enough to count. But a new birth with an ordinance in it can be answered plainly, because there is a date, there is a name, and there is a promise that was spoken out loud over him by someone with the authority to speak it. The feeling may rise and fall. The covenant does not.

The Verdict

The doctrine is named for John 3:3 and defined by John 3:5, and the definition has two halves.

What did Jesus say? Born of water AND of the Spirit. What did He do twenty verses later? Went into Judaea and baptized. Peter preached the same two things in the first sermon of the Church: repent, be baptized, receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Philip could not finish it alone — the Samaritans were baptized and apostles still had to come. Paul called it the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, and Alma demanded of people already baptized that they show him a mighty change in their hearts. And what does none of it happen without? A man’s own agency, exercised. God gives the new heart — to those who choose to ask Him for it.

Reject this and you have not rejected Joseph Smith. You have rejected the word and in the verse your own doctrine is named after. Latter-day Saints are born again — of water and of the Spirit, exactly as He said, with both births intact.