Today we’re going to continue to look at 1 Peter 1:3-5. Here are those verses:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

I find this long sentence fascinating. We were talking about this in our men’s Bible study a couple weeks ago and we noticed that it is full of many prepositions. We joked about how we used to diagram sentences in high school. This one would be a fairly complicated sentence to diagram.

Let me break it up a little bit so that we can get at the meaning. There is a lot here. God has begotten us again. That has to do with the new birth that Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about. Look at the verse to see if you can determine the motivation for God giving us a new birth. He did that because of His abundant mercy. God is a God of tremendous mercy. Mercy is receiving something that we don’t deserve, and there is no question that we don’t deserve mercy. We are great sinners — not just before we were saved, but now as well. Sometimes we focus on a few major sins that we don’t commit very often and rate ourselves pretty highly on the obedience side. But just ask yourself, “How many times today have I failed to love God with my whole heart, soul, mind, and strength? Your whole heart. And then how many times today have you failed to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself? At least for me, the numbers are staggeringly high. All of those times we failed at this, we were not acting like God. It is ungodly not to love our neighbor as ourselves. That’s why we need a savior, isn’t it. It’s of the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed, Lamentations 3:22.

Let’s look at the next little phrase: to a living hope. The whole purpose of God’s giving us the new birth is so that we may have a living hope. There is real hope for the believer. My dad used to say, “It’s not hope-so hope.” Sometimes people ask if we are going to do something and we say, “I hope so.” That kind of hope is tentative and uncertain. This entire passage that we are studying over these weeks gives us rock solid hope, confidence that God is faithful to His promises and has guaranteed the outcome of our faith — the salvation of our souls (1 Peter 1:9).