The first reason has to do with what happened when we
first turned to Christ.

When we became Christians.

Or you might say if you just take a look
backwards it will prove how committed God is to your future good.

Peter writes,

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a
living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

You can maybe just underline in your minds the
words living hope.

He is going to help us think about how we came
to have this living hope.

Hope having to do with the future.

Here
I don’t think being
an attitude about the future, given the context, specifically the phrases in
the next two verses which are basically synonymous with this one, inheritance
and salvation ready to be revealed, hope here is actually something that we are
going to receive in the future.

In other words, not I hope so, an attitude but this is my hope, something substantial, the
thing I am hoping in.

Peter is talking about something we are going to
receive in the future and the adjective he uses to describe it here is living.

Meaning
real.

Alive as opposed to dead.

True as opposed to false.

Actual as opposed to empty.

As someone has put it, “a hope that stands in contrast to the empty,
frustrating, deceptive, false hopes of the world.”

Certain.

And Peter is going to show us that one of the reasons
we can look forward to this hope God is going to give us in the future is
because of what God has done for us in the past.

Our past salvation is connected to our future
salvation.

In other words when we are suffering and we are
starting to wonder whether God is really concerned about our future good, we
have to go back and look at our initial salvation and think about why we have anything to look
forward to in the first place.

Just stop and think about what actually happened
when you became a Christian.

Peter gives us a couple phrases in the text that
help us understand it and each of these terms emphasizes just how all God our
salvation is. 

The first is born again.

We have this hope because we have been born again.

In verses 1 and 2 Peter shows us that we are who
we are because God chose us. 

In verse 3 because according to His mercy He
caused us to be born again.

Which I think is a way of Peter reminding us that
it wasn’t just that we started really, really wanting to go to heaven.

Salvation is not that small for Him.

When Peter uses this term born again to describe what it means
to become a Christian he is making it clear that becoming a Christian is
something much bigger than simply believing a new set of facts, which is the
way a lot of people think of it, I just believed, no it is so much bigger than
just you do something in fact that it can only be described in terms of a miracle. 

Being born again is a miracle.

I mean if this happened physically, it would
definitely be a miracle.  If you
were living, living, living, growing older, older, older and were somehow
enabled to start all over again as a newborn baby; that would be a shocking
miracle.  I was asking the girls
the other day to imagine waking up one day to find that Granddad had suddenly
become a newborn baby again. 
That’s shocking. And Peter in describing what happens when you become a
Christian uses that very image to describe it.

When you become a Christian God places you in an
entirely new position spiritually than you were before.  That’s what it means to be born
again.  God literally gives you new
spiritual life.  This is a
supernatural event.

I want you to understand that.

One of the reasons we may have a hard time
believing God is really concerned about our good as we are suffering is because
we have too small a view of what God has done in our salvation.

Salvation is not just you doing something.

It is God doing something in you.  It is a miracle God accomplished in
you. The less God-centered your view of your salvation in the past the more you
struggle with hopelessness in the present.

Now the language Peter uses here is all
specifically designed to express just how all God this new birth really is.

Take this phrase. 

Look again at the text.

The New American Standard translates it, He has
caused you to be born again.

And they do that for a reason.

The emphasis is on God’s work in your life.

You didn’t cause yourself to be born again. 

He’s the one who accomplished this.

You wonder why Peter is worshiping?  He looks back on his salvation what it
was, and he sees that it was a miracle, accomplished by God.   And he looks back on why God
performed this miracle, and he sees it is all God as well.

There’s a second term in the text that helps us
see how God-centered our salvation is.

The source of the new birth is God.

The reason for the new birth is His mercy.

He writes, 
“according to His great mercy He has caused us to be born again.”

Why do we have hope? Because we have been born again.

But why have we been born again?  That’s the question.  Because of God’s mercy.

Which tells us something about what we were like
before God saved us.

This is where a lot of our problems start when we
start complaining and wondering whether God is really for us.  We fail to appreciate how good He’s
already been to us. 

I mean you and I were in a pathetic situation.

That’s the emphasis in the word mercy.  Mercy generally focuses on someone who
is in a miserable condition.  When
the Bible talks about grace, it is usually someone who is guilty and shown
grace.  When the Bible talks about
mercy, it is usually someone who is in a pathetic kind of situation and given
help.

When we think about what God’s done for us in
salvation, we have to realize that he has totally rescued us from the worst
position any one can be from.  The
worst possible situation to be in isn’t to be poor, to live on the streets, to
be sick, the worst possible situation is to be an enemy of God, under His wrath
and unable to do anything about it.  

If we are going to worship we have to look back on
where we came from spiritually and remember how much mercy God has already
shown us. 

As one writer explains,

“Apart from His mercy we had no hope for a new
relationship to God. No one can simply grasp, claim, or seize the new birth of
faith, hope, and love. They are gifts of the Spirit which until given, the
unawakened sinner cannot manipulate into conception, birth, or growth. The new
birth comes on God’s own initiative and because of God’s mercy alone.”

 “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again.”

 And listen, in case you were wondering, it wasn’t
a result of your accomplishments either.

There’s a third phrase that makes that clear.

The source of the new birth is God, He caused us
to be born again.  The reason for
the new birth is God’s mercy and the basis of the new birth is the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The new birth here is
actually based on a historical event. 

It is “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ
from the dead.” 

 He doesn’t say we were born again
through the message about the resurrection, though he does get to that later
but here his emphasis is on a historical reality.  Something happened when Jesus Christ rose from the
dead.  Something real.

When Jesus arose, he actually, literally secured
“our salvation.  When God gave life
to Christ, God gave life to all those who would be united to Him.”

Which is all very assuring.

I look back at when I became a Christian and I see
that the fact that I am a Christian is because of something God did, He caused
me to be born again, and the fact that I am born again is because of his mercy,
and the fact that I am born again because of the work of Jesus Christ, this is
all confidence producing.

Because listen, if our hope as believers was based
simply on something we wanted, like we really started wanting to God to like us
or if it was based on something we did, like we had a couple great months
spiritually where we were doing everything right and God started liking us, or
if it was based on our own efforts, like going to church or being a success
than that hope would not be something unshakeable. 

When suffering came into our lives we couldn’t be
sure that God was really seeking our good because our whole relationship with
Him would basically be based on who we were and stuff we did. 

But when we look back on what happened to us when
we became a Christian we remember that it is not based on any of those
things.  We have hope because of
the new birth, and we have the new birth because of the mercy of God and the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.  We
trust God for the future because of what He has done for us in the past which
leads us worship Him in the present.