You are born again when you decide based on long-term expected benefit, not present feelings

By nature, you make choices based on what feels good right now rather than what benefits the most long-term. This shortcoming affects every choice you make across every domain, distorting the true value of the options of choice available to you, subconsciously filtering out options, and ensuring that the choices that you make will lead to less than the greatest long-term happiness possible.

God’s preference is for what yields the greatest long-term benefit.¹ To think, feel, and act based on the long-term net benefit of the options available to you is the same as governing your life based on your understanding of how Jesus would live in your place.² Optimizing for long-term value is the only path to the greatest happiness.

Spiritual rebirth occurs when you choose to desire maximizing long-term benefit instead of the default aim of maximizing present pleasure.³ This shift occurs when you abandon⁴ a guidance system based primarily on the emotional direction of carnal impulses and present pleasure-seeking in favor of the rational direction of choosing to think, feel, and act based on the long-term net benefit of the options available to you.

While the natural way of deciding can be practiced without much thought, optimizing for long-term value is always intentional. It requires actively choosing to be governed by reason instead of feelings. Reason gives us the ability to subject our emotions to objective reality, choosing what we expect will be best long-term instead of what feels good right now.⁵

Reason is meant to reveal the course of action that transcends your emotional impulses—to guide you in how you should feel and act based on how things really are over time, not based merely on how you feel right now. The shift from emotional to rational direction is so fundamental that it is like becoming a new person, because you become aware of and begin developing a completely new way of interacting with the world.

To become born again is to intentionally reason instead of emotionally react. Reason is the guidance system of the spirit, and by submitting to it,⁶ you become a child of God.⁷ As you rationally consider the cost and benefit of options before you, you can identify what option carries the greatest net benefit and, in so doing, decide what God would do in your place.