(1 Peter - Part 3): Begotten Again Unto a Living Hope — A.W. Tozer

In the first book of Peter, Peter the first epistle, and the first chapter and third verse, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and we'll stop at that poem.

I spent nine days in what's called the American Keswick in New Jersey, one of the speakers, and while there I had very warm and personal and friendly fellowship with David Clifford, head of Matlock Bible Institute in England, only 40 miles I believe he said, or 70 was it, from Brother Ravenhill's home.

Preaching the Principles Behind the Text

Well, this man and I got along wonderfully together. He listened to me preach a while, and then he said, well, I've figured you out. He said, your method of preaching is not to preach words, but to find out the principles that lie back of the text and preach that.

And I said, I guess you hit it, that's what I try to do. Well, he said, at that rate you could preach endlessly on a book of the Bible. And I said, well, I just closed a year on the 17th of June. It can be done.

And in the book of 1 Peter, first chapter, third verse, I have already preached three sermons, or two sermons from it. The one called, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We dug around at the roots and tried to discover what he was saying about God when he said, blessed be God.

We found that the same word in the original is that which we use when we say eulogize. He was telling us to eulogize God. Eulogize dead men who probably, if when you know all the facts, will blush at your own eulogy.

If you want to eulogize God, you never can overstate the case. Then I went on to this one, which according to his abundant mercy, and I stopped there, and I talked about the abundant mercy of God. Today, through this part, God who hath begotten us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

The New Birth as a Major Miracle

Now, Paul, or Peter here, it is Peter, not Paul, who wrote this epistle at a major miracle of the New Testament. Now, I want to bear down and pause and walk around her bulwarks and behold her gates and walls thereof.

This major miracle we call begotten again. This, like a great many, almost all Bible teaching has fallen into cold hands. We feel as if we were in the morgue instead of in the church of the living God.

Instead of a man just having come fresh out of a tomb, we feel as if we were in the presence of a corpse brought fresh in from the street. Born again has become a word that means precious little. It is used as a hyphenated adjective among us.

We say, yes, he's a born again man. I'm born again. Yeah, he's born again, and I revolt from it. I don't mind telling you, frankly, that I revolt from it. I revolt from it, not because I don't believe it, but because I always shrink from hearing dead men talk about live subjects.

And there isn't anything I have said quite so chilling, and I think that a brother of mine said it not so long ago here, too. There isn't anything quite so chilling, quite so disheartening as a man without the Holy Spirit preaching about the Holy Spirit.

And there isn't anything any worse, I guess, than to hear the hyphenated adjective born again tossed around by people with manufactured smiles heading to the nearest restaurant. Now, Peter talked about a major miracle, that of being begotten again, born again.

It's a major miracle, and I don't mind telling you why this worthwhile in Christianity is a miracle. I don't mind telling you that the trappings and paraphernalia and outward dressings of Christianity, I can get along nicely without.

But there is a series of miracles that throb and beat within the true and within the hearts of those who believe truly. And that's all, about all there is to the Christian faith. Supernatural grace has been the teaching of the Church from Pentecost to the present hour.

Supernatural Grace in Conversion

I talked with a gentleman this week who came to see me, two brethren, two preachers, and one of them told me an amazing story. It was the story of being forced out of a certain missionary society. Forced out of all charges, not even any doctrinal charges, but from throwing an emphasis where they claimed it didn't belong.

And that emphasis was upon supernatural grace. They believed they were fundamentalists all right, but they believed the whole thing was a mental thing. You believe mentally, you receive Christ mentally, and all that you do is a mental thing.

And a certain brother began to preach the supernatural quality of grace, and said that if a sinner repents, it's supernatural. And that if he gets under conviction, it's supernatural. And if he's unable to believe in God, it's supernatural.

And he taught supernatural grace. He was a Baptist preacher. And the whole town, fundamentalist town, rolled against him, because he was preaching the supernatural quality of the acts of God. Now I don't mind telling you why I said to him that strange thing, because I've been preaching that ever since I can remember this church was founded on it.

We believe it. We believe in the supernaturalness of the things that God does for people. And we believe that religion is a continuous perpetuation of a major miracle. And we do not believe in the mental quality of things.

Our being is here, and it's a part of us, and God redeems it too. But the new birth is a miracle, a major miracle. It is a vital and unique work of God in human nature. I believe that if this was taught, instead of glibly hyphenated and tossed around and blown again, I believe that if we'd stop and get underneath this, to the divine principles that lie there and realize that a truly born again man is a man who has undergone regenesis, supernatural regenesis.

As in the beginning, God generated the heaven and the earth. In the breast of a believing man, he generates again. It's regenesis. Just as surely as the work of God in calling the world out of nothing was a major miracle, so the work of God in calling a Christian out of a sinner, making a Christian out of a sinner, is a major miracle.

But in our day, we get them in any way you can get them in. And then after we get them in, we try to work on them. And we even have two works of grace because the first one was so apologetically meaningless and worthless that we try to have two.

Now I am not speaking against the two, but I am saying that what used to be done the first time a man met God, nowadays we're having to invent some second or third or fourth or fifth epoch down the hill, or up the hill, to get what used to get the first time they met God.

I believe in the anointing of the Holy Ghost, the new birth, in order to find a place so-called deeper life people that I wouldn't believe have begotten us again. Until living holy, a clean heart, a reason in yourself, in order to not be explained.

Psychologists can explain, experience, put them down and explain by the psychologist. We have a Church's pure Christian psychologist. He can only stand up, respect all the works of the Lord. The rest of the man was into that, I say.

Old Testament Hints of Regeneration

And then there are two passages in the Old Testament that I want to read that are hints of this. Come, saith the Lord, with the house of Israel. After those days, saith the Lord, and I will put a new spirit within your flesh, and will give them an high statute, and keep mine ordinances, and do them.

And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. Now that is a hint, and openly declared. Our Saviors shall be born from above, John 3. Who were born? All God have become new. You couldn't make it any stronger, the Word of God, which liveth and abideth forever.

James says in his first chapter, of his own will begat he us, that we might be a kind of first fruits of these creatures. Now that's as plainly as it can be stated. We are setting out to teach those very words to very emphatic.

You would use those words to express it. If you wanted to strip it down until it stood stark, unqualified before you, as a strong, vital teaching of the Word of God, you would use those words concerning it.

In other words, the Holy Spirit could not have said what he was setting out to say, and used any other words. These express it. The supernatural grace, and work which we may call a major miracle, is truly a work of God, as was the first creation.

It is the creating of another, where another may come, Christians, by any other of revival so much. The church would be a miraculous group in the midst of a hostile world, and she would be separated from the world, but she would not be of it.

She would be separated from amazing people in the world. A whole group of true Christians. There are several hundred people here listening to me now who had experienced, fully, the miracle of the Genesis.

It would be the most astonishing church in the city of Chicago. They would come from everywhere to look at us, and say, what are these people? But we have watered down the miracle of divine grace to a point where you actually have to have a name on the record to know if a fellow is a Christian or not.

There is a difference, and in that great and terrible day, there will be those white with shock when they find that they have depended upon a mental ascent to Christianity, instead of upon the miracle of the new birth.

Living Hope and the Christian's Future

Now he said, we're begotten again, and we're begotten again unto a lively hope. That word hope is one of the great words that Christ gave us. Have you noticed this about the New Testament? That our Lord Jesus Christ rarely introduced a word that wasn't known before.

Not even a word construction that wasn't known before to Bible readers. But that he almost invariably charged that word with a new and wonderful meaning. So that we go back to the Savior and say, he gave us that word.

Well actually he didn't. It was a word that was used in the Old Testament, perhaps in Greek literature. But it was a word which now receives a wonderful new meaning because the Savior took it into his mouth.

So that word hope is a word we may properly say Christ gave us, though it is used 140 times in the Bible. And better than that, better than counting the number of times that it was used, better than finding a text where it is used, is this.

That it is the drift and direction of the whole Bible. Hope is the direction the whole Bible takes. It is the music of the whole Bible. It is the heartbeat, the pulse, the atmosphere of the whole Bible.

That word hope. And it means a desirable expectation. It means a pleasurable anticipation. Pleasurable anticipation. How many of us there are who pleasurably anticipate that which we'll never, never receive.

Tennyson, in his wonderful memorial, paints a picture so poignantly, sharply pathetic, that it's almost unbearable when you read it. He paints a picture in that smooth musical English which he was a master, of a bride, waiting for, or soon to be bride, waiting for her loved one to return.

He had been somewhere in a far city across the water and he was coming home. Tennyson tells with that sympathy and human understanding that makes him the great poet that he was. Made him the great poet he was.

Tells him how this young woman, flush with anticipation, stood before the mirror and made herself disclose human sympathy as we see this young lady prepare herself. Did reunion face up. She doesn't know that the ship where he was returning has gone down with all of its crew and that he stares tonight at the stars with sightless eyes.

She doesn't know. Pleasurable anticipation sometimes blows up in our faces. Cooler way disappoints us. There's a picture of pleasurable, flushed anticipation turning to bleak, pale, cheap sorrow in a moment.

It is said here that he has begotten us again unto a lively hope, but the old English word lively, 340 years ago that word lively meant what the word living means now. Now lively means hopping around like a boy, little boy, real fast and full of ginger.

But in those days it meant living. And here is a word which comes from God himself. It is the strongest word in the Bible for life. The strongest in the New Testament. It is a word used of God himself when it says he is the living God.

So that God takes a Christian's hope and touches it with himself and imparts his own livingness to the hope of the believer. Once more I repeat that Christians are living too much in the present now. Pleasurable anticipation of better things to come has almost died out of the Church of Christ because now we don't need any tomorrow's heaven.

We're too well situated now. We don't need to hope we have it now. That's the emphasis in our day. And I think it is a wretched emphasis. And when we do talk about the future we talk about eschatology instead of heaven.

But the true Christian is one who's kind of sick of this world. If I find anybody that settled down too snugly into this world I'm made to doubt his spiritual regenesis. Whether he's ever truly been born again.

He can live here and work here and serve here. But if I find he sits down into the world like it's pinned into an old and familiar glove, I worry a little bit about the man. Because all the Christians I meet that are amounting to anything are Christians that are very much out of key with their age.

Very, very much out of tune with their generation. Jesus called it a wicked and adulterous generation. And that generation has not improved any. We're still the same wicked and adulterous generation that were in the days of Jesus.

And if you can live in it true comfortably, I am being made to wonder whether the miracle has ever been wrought within your life or not. When God works the miracle within the human breast, heaven becomes the Christian home immediately.

And he is drawn to it as a bird is drawn in the springtime to fly to the north. There's a migratory instinct within the breast of the bird. And without knowing why, along about March, he suddenly begins to look at himself and look around and feel dissatisfied, and flap his wings a bit, and finally takes to the air, fans the cool breezes long and far, till he goes back to what is his summer homeland.

And the Christian has a homeland, and the fact that we're not anticipating it, nor looking forward to it with any pleasure, is a sure mark of something that's wrong with us. But that isn't what Peter had in mind particularly when he talked about the Christian hope, though that's part of it.

A Valid Hope Versus Vague Religious Expectation

And he says that the hope of the Christian is something that's alive the way God is alive. I read someplace, I don't recall where, maybe Time magazine, maybe a newspaper, but I read that there had been one of these posters going about, like Roper and Gallup's posters.

And they had gone to the man on the street, the man and woman on the street, and they had taken a cross-section of the American public, and asked them whether they believe in God and whether they expected to go to heaven.

I think it was 82 percent of the American people believe in God and expect to go to heaven. I don't like to deal in percentages, my ears, but I should like boldly and bluntly to say that I should guess that about 75 percent of that 82 percent are indulging in an invalid hope.

A hope that can do nothing but dash them when it's too late, and cruelly disillusion them when it's too late to do anything about it. I believe as the old college preacher said, if you're going to go to heaven you better begin to live like it now.

And if you're going to die like a Christian, you better live like a Christian now. And I have no, there's no hope in my heart for those who indulge a vague hope. There's a Christian hope that isn't vague, it's valid.

The hope of the world is vain, but the hope of the Christian is a valid hope. And you, you can't out-expect God, keep that in mind friends. You can't out-expect God. It's unbelief that prevents our minds from soaring into the celestial city, and walking by faith with God across the golden streets.

It's unbelief that keeps us narrowly tied down here, looking eagerly and anxiously to the newspaper ad to see who's going to come and preach to us to keep our spirits cheered up. The body that needs to have to be chucked under the chin all the time to keep him up is in bad shape spiritually, and needs something else.

Christian Maturity and Moving Beyond First Principles

Anybody that has to have the gospel preached to him all the time, and have it repeated all the time, something wrong with him. Gospel, you have believed, you say, you have turned to God from idols to serve the living God and wait for his son from heaven, and why I have to be always attending popular evangelistic meetings and listening one time more to the same thing that you've heard a thousand times.

Leaving therefore the first principles of the doctrine of Christ, the baptism and laying on the bands and all such, let us go on in the perfection that the church of Christ is satisfied with the latest gospel peddler, the latest gospel year that comes along, it's satisfied because they have cowbells and a handsaw and a lot of other fine things.

You can get them at the 8th Street Theater in the night by just writing in. Can't think of a single one of their names, but anyway, I know they're down there with their cowbells and banjos and their hillbilly songs, and if that's what you want, go down there and get it.

And if the gospel year has to bring that in order to get a crowd, bullcrap it. Let him preach to empty seats. Christians hope is a valid hope, and born of God has been an act as truly miraculous as that act described in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

There's been a new creation there, and he has a hope now. It's a valid hope. No emptiness there, no vanity there, no dreaming dreams that can't come true. It's a valid hope. And your expectation should rise and you should challenge God and begin to dream high dreams of faith and spiritual expectation and expect God to meet them.

The Promise of Christ's Prepared Dwelling

When Jesus said, I go to prepare a mansion, a place for you in my Father's house, there are many mansions. The best some of us can do is to think of a home house or some house a little better, or maybe think of something up on the Gold Coast, where our Savior has gone to prepare the simplest and poorest mansion there, would make a hundred twenty-five thousand dollar mansion on the Gold Coast look like a growth stock by comparison.

There isn't in humanity any place, the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace or the White House or what have you, that can compare with the glory that belongs to the truly true child of God who has known the major miracle, who has been changed by an inward operation of supernatural grace unto an inheritance, unto a hope.

And you can't out-hope God and you can't out-expect God. And remember that all your hopes are finite and all God's ability is infinite. Remember that your highest hopes have a limit, but the ability to God to come true is limitless.

Remember your unearthed God is in heaven, and therefore don't be afraid to hope, don't be afraid to expect, don't be afraid to dream high spiritual dreams, and don't be expect to read your Bible, and don't be afraid to read your Bible and believe it.

Don't be afraid to read the book of Revelation, and don't let anybody shoo you away and say it's oriental imagery. Of course it is oriental imagery, but it is imagery which is struggling to say that which is so wonderful it can't be said.

So that anything he describes in the book of Revelation, you'll find the reality is infinitely greater than his description. And any hope the Christian has, let it soar, let it loose like a bird into the blue sky, let it spread its wings and soar heavenward.