WWUTT 311 Imperishable Seed?

The New Birth by an Imperishable Seed

You were born by a perishable seed, and your body is decaying and it's going to die. We have been born again by an imperishable seed, and it's by that seed that we will never die when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, studying God's Word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We continue our study of 1 Peter today. We're going to be looking at 1 Peter chapter 1, starting in verse 22, and we're going to go through chapter 2, verse 10, and I'll explain to you why that section here in just a moment.

Living as the New People of God

So let's begin reading here in chapter 1, verse 22. Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love. Love one another earnestly from a pure heart, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable through the living and abiding Word of God.

For all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of the grass. The grass withers and the flower falls, but the Word of the Lord remains forever. And this Word is the good news that was preached to you.

So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up into salvation. If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men, but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

For it stands in Scripture, behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame. So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.

They stumble because they disobey the Word as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Now I don't know how it is that the ESV translators have come about the sections that they have titled through the ESV Bible.

Do you know what I'm talking about? If you have the Bible in front of you, then perhaps, perhaps you know what it is that I am referencing too. So 1 Peter 1 verses 1 through 2 are titled greeting. That's kind of the subheading there that's over chapter 1.

Then beginning in verse 3, it says born again to a living hope, because that's what Peter is talking about from verses 3 through verse 12. And then the next section that starts in verse 13 is called to be holy, which is what we were talking about last week.

This call to holiness, just as Paul says to the Romans in Romans 12, 1 and 2 to present yourselves as living and pleasing sacrifices unto the Lord. And this is your spiritual act of worship. So Peter says roughly the same thing here in this section, verse 13, therefore preparing your minds for action and being sober minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ as obedient children do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance.

So this call to holiness in Christ Jesus that every believer is called to. But then the next section doesn't start until the beginning of chapter 2, where it says a living stone and a holy people. I'm not really sure why they do that, because the next context actually starts in verse 22, where we have began with having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart.

And this goes all the way through chapter 2, verse 10. And specifically what we're talking about here is living as the new people of God. So in verse 13, chapter 1, verse 13, we are called to be holy.

And then the effect of that calling is that we are living as the new people of God. We have purified our souls by our obedience to the truth. So now we must love one another earnestly from a pure heart.

This goes with chapter 2, verse 1, put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander. Because if we're living in that way, then we are not living in the brotherly love that we have been called to.

So this is the context that we're looking at here this week, today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll be studying chapter 1, verse 22 through chapter 2, verse 10, because this is how we are to be as the new people of God.

As Paul said to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, if you are in Christ, you are a new creation. The old is gone and the new has come. So this new creation is what we're talking about here. This is Peter's version, encouraging his readers in this concept of new creation.

Our souls have been purified by an obedience to the truth. Not that we did anything to bring about this purification. The purification was still given to us by God. It was the declaration of his word.

We repented and believed and followed it by the power of God working in our lives. So this purification has happened by the word of God. Just as salvation happened by the word of God, God declared it, we heard it and believed.

Just as God brought all things into existence by the power of his spoken word, let there be light and there was. So saving faith has come into our lives the exact same way. Romans 10, 17, faith comes through hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.

We have come into this faith because we heard the word of God proclaimed. We repented of our sins and we have believed. Our souls have been purified by the declared word of God and that we obeyed this truth.

Remember back to chapter one, verse three, blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

He has caused us to be born again. So therefore we are to love one another earnestly from a pure heart. These hearts that have been purified by the word of God and our obedience to that word. Titus 3, 5, he saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our savior, so that being justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

We have been purified by the Holy Spirit. And who is it that gives us the word of God? It is the Holy Spirit. These words that have been divinely inspired by the spirit working through the apostles of Jesus Christ to write these things down.

And so we have heard the word of Christ. We have repented of our sins and obeying this word. Our souls have been purified and are being purified as we are continuing to grow in this process of sanctification and holiness.

Since you have been born again, now verse 23, since you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable. Now that's a significant metaphor because all of us were born the first time by perishable seed when you came to life, when you were born from your mother's womb, when you were conceived in your mother's womb, it was by perishable seed.

It was the seed of your father, the seed that was corrupted by sin for all who are descendants of Adam are willing participants in Adam's sin. We are all born into this sinfulness. So we were born by perishable seed.

All of this earth that has been subjected to futility, all those who are descendant from Adam who are part of that futility, we have inherited the curse from Adam. We do not seek after God. We do not do anything good.

There is no one righteous, no, not one because of sin. That's the reason why. So that's the perishable seed through which we were conceived and came to life in the first place. But we have been given new life.

We have been born again, not by a perishable seed, but by an imperishable seed. So this new birth that we have received is a birth that that has no death. We won't die in this new birth. We will die in our first birth because our bodies have been subjected to futility again because of sin.

Why is it when we become Christians that we don't just live forever in these bodies? Because we live in a body of death, a corruptible body, a body that has been subjected to futility because of the sin in this world that was part of the curse that God subjected all things to decay and death curse because of sin.

That was the curse because of sin. For the wages of sin is death, as it says in Romans 6, 23. But the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So there in that verse, you have the perishable seed for the wages of sin is death and then the imperishable seed.

But the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So this new birth that we have been given can't ever be taken away from us. That's the beautiful hope, the glory that is being shown here by the mercy and grace of God in what Peter is stating.

Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable through the living and abiding word of God. So there we have Peter in his own way saying that faith comes through hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.

You have been born again through the living and abiding word of God. You came to this new birth because you heard the gospel proclaimed and you repented of your sins and you believed in it. All of these things coming about by the declaration of the word of God for all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of the grass, the grass withers and the flower falls.

But the word of the Lord remains forever. And of course, this quote is coming from Isaiah chapter 40 verses six and eight. It is the word of the Lord remains forever. So since you have been born again by the word of God, you heard the word of God, proclaimed repented of your sins and believed in it.

And now you have received the eternal life of Jesus Christ. You will never have that taken away from you. And this is a new birth that has come by imperishable seed because the word of the Lord remains forever.

All of that makes sense. It's gorgeous, gorgeous the way that Peter has worded this. What a beautiful metaphor. So let's recap all of this again because I've kind of thrown what's really a simple explanation around in like 500 words here.

So we have been born by a perishable seed, the seed that by which you were conceived in your mother's womb was a perishable seed. You were born into sinfulness because of that seed. But you are born again into the holiness and righteousness of Christ by an imperishable seed, the planted seed of the word of God that was declared to you.

You turn from your sinfulness because of the perishable perishable body in which you lived and you were given a new heart and a new mind in Christ Jesus eternal life that can never be taken away from you because the word of the Lord remains forever.

The word that you heard and believed in is forever. So therefore this new birth is forever and you can't ever lose it. It can't ever be taken away. So then what Peter is charging us with is because this new birth has happened, because this has been given to us in Christ, then we need to show that we are Christ's and not the world.

Okay. We don't belong to the world. We are born into the world, but we don't belong in this world. We are born again in Christ. So then Peter is going to tell us what the, he's going to give us the orthopraxy basically.

Here's the orthodoxy, the sound teaching. Now he's going to give us the orthopraxy, what this should look like in practice. This word is the good news that was preached to you, Peter says. So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, because that was the way that we lived when we were living according to our perishable seed.

But now that we have been born again in an imperishable seed, we can't live in the ways of our earthly ignorance, our willful disobedience that we were in. So we must put all of that away since we are no longer a slave to the flesh, no longer a slave to sin, but we are slaves to Christ.

So put away all malice, all deceit, all hypocrisy, all envy, and all slander. Not speaking ill of our brothers, but instead we need to have a sincere brotherly love, loving one another earnestly from a pure heart.

All of these sins that Peter is listed here in chapter two, verse one is what happens when we are not loving one another. We have malice and hate toward others. We are deceitful, we'll manipulate others, we'll say things that are untrue in order to get what we want.

We are hypocrites. We will put on one face, but then we will act a completely different way. And we do this because we're self-righteous. We think, hey, I can be a good person by myself. I don't need God.

I don't need anybody else. I don't need, you know, some sort of moral code. I'm good just like I am, which is what makes us hypocrites. Because we say one thing and we do something else since we're not capable of being good on our own.

It simply is impossible. So this is who we were when we were in the flesh, declaring our own goodness instead of the goodness of God. And envy. So once again, we desire what other people have because we're worldly, we're in the flesh.

We do not have brotherly love. We are seeking our own selfish desires. So we'll want what somebody else has, thinking, I need that thing in order to be happy or be satisfied. And it could be anything.

It could be a material possession someone has. It could be their spouse. That's really at the heart of the Ten Commandments, where it says, do not covet your neighbor's wife, thinking that, hey, if I had their spouse, boy, I would I would sure be a lot happier than I am, which is entirely wicked.

It is completely wicked to desire such a thing in your heart. It could be a talent that another person has. It could be an opportunity that they have. Boy, if I had that opportunity, I would do so much better at it than that person is doing.

Or I definitely wouldn't be in the situation that I am in right now. Maybe you envy someone else's body. Boy, if I had that body, oh, goodness, I certainly I certainly wouldn't be in the pain that I'm in right now.

Maybe you desire somebody else's healthy body instead of the body that you have, which really has been a lot more subject to illness and decay than most people probably go through. But this is something that God has given to you to rejoice in, to rejoice through, to depend more upon the Lord instead on your own health for your happiness and your joy to be complete.

For more about that, read Second Corinthians, chapter one today, if I could encourage you in that. So, again, there are all kinds of things we can envy about another person. And it's because of our selfishness, because of our self-centeredness and our self-motivation that we would envy what another person has, thinking that if we could have that or be in their position, then we would certainly be happier than we are or would be able to do better than that other person.

And then the last one that's mentioned here is slander, putting other people down to make us feel better about ourselves, speaking ill of other people. So we will feel more important than we probably feel.

This is not the way that we are supposed to behave toward one another. Even if you are not directly slandering somebody, like you're not looking at someone in their face and putting them down, calling them names and making them feel bad about themselves.

Instead, you are saying kind things to them. But then you turn around to your friend over here and you start speaking bad about that person behind their back, which is also hypocrisy and deceit. That's still slander.

That's still tearing down another person who has been made in the image of God so that you can feel better about yourself. And it's something that we do that is a passion of the flesh. It doesn't come from the spirit of God.

It comes from the spirit that is at work in the sons of disobedience. As Paul talks about in Ephesians chapter two, and we were all once that we all lived exactly like that. Let me let me read that. In fact, Ephesians chapter two, verse one, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

But God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace, you have been saved. Here you have Paul talking about the perishable seed and the imperishable seed.

We were all born in the perishable seed. We were all sons of disobedience. We were all by nature children of wrath. But the imperishable seed, which was given to us by Christ, has brought us from death to life.

He has made us alive together with Christ by grace. You have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Jesus Christ.

For by grace, you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Now as we wrap this up today, let's consider that phrase, for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you, the most common way that this verse is used is to say that you're a masterpiece.

You're a work of art in God's canvas and all of his creation. In fact, you're the best of his creation. This is from one particular teacher, very popular Christian teacher. In fact, he says the following.

I was getting a haircut one day when the guy cutting my hair suddenly stopped and said, look at that. I looked over my shoulder and there was one of the most stunning sunsets I had ever seen. Several people got up out of their chairs and walked outside to take a look.

It was such an incredible sunset that people stood there in awe. By the way, I've never had a haircut go that way, but whatever. Of course, it is a reminder that the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.

Psalm 19, 1. God is a great artist. There is no question about it. But God's greatest masterpiece isn't some of the sunsets that you may have the privilege of seeing or the Alps as spectacular as they are or the islands of Hawaii and Tahiti as gorgeous and beautiful as they can be.

God's greatest masterpiece of creation is you. And it is me. We are God's greatest masterpieces. In fact, we read in Ephesians 2 .10 that we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

That word workmanship could be translated. We are his work of art. We are his poem. Or as another translation puts it, we are God's masterpiece. Without question, man is God's greatest creation. Man is his crowning achievement.

Now that's all well and good, but that's not what Ephesians 2 .10 is saying. We can read in other passages to find out that we are indeed created in the image of God. Genesis 1 .27. God made man in his own image.

In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. So there we have it stated. In the first chapter of the whole Bible, we were created in the image of God. But that's not what Ephesians 2 .10 is talking about.

Because remember, we were dead in our sins and our trespasses. We were just like the rest of mankind, but God made us alive together with Christ. So then when we get to verse 10, for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, we're specifically talking about Christians.

Not every man, woman, and child, but everyone who is born again in Christ. We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus. As we read in Romans 8 .29, for those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son.

And that's exactly what we're talking about there in Ephesians 2 .10. That we are born again and are being shaped into the image of Christ. We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works.

Whose good works? Not ours, because we can't do any good works. According to Romans 3, it's the good work of Christ. And if we have been born again in Christ, then we are to do the work that Christ did.

And that's what we're talking about here in 1 Peter 1 into chapter 2 and what we will continue to talk about again tomorrow. Let's conclude with prayer. Our great God, we thank you so much for the mercy and grace that you have shown us.

Though we were once dead in our sins and our trespasses, you have rescued us out of darkness into your marvelous light and have given us new life, unimperishable life in Christ Jesus. So that we would do the works that Jesus did, showing that we have been rescued from death into his life.

May we no longer be walking in the deadness that we were once in, but we are instead in this newness of life in Christ Jesus. Thank you for the patience and the love that you have shown us and continue to show us.

In Jesus name we pray.

Amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. We hope you are a part of a church family committed to gospel teaching. We thank you for including us in your Bible learning.

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