Verse 3, it's printed in your worship guide.
You also can find it on your phone.
You can find it potentially in your Bible if you brought that with you.
And as we come to this, remember that this is God's word.
And God tells us that his word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.
In other words, God has not left us to walk alone in the dark, stumbling.
But instead, he's given us his word to show us the way to go.
And so that's why we read it starting with verse 3.
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.
Verse 4, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.
Kept in heaven for you, verse 5,
who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
I invite you to pray with me as we come to this portion of God's word.
Father in heaven, we praise you and we thank you.
And we thank you that you haven't left us alone, but that you've spoken to us.
We thank you that your word is powerful.
That it's your word that brings dead things to life.
It was your word that created the world.
It's your word that called us to faith in you.
And it's your word that you give to us this morning.
We ask that you would help us as we come to it.
That you would speak to us clearly in ways, in words that we can understand.
Because you know that we're but dust.
We ask that you would do that now and that we would leave here loving you more and knowing you more.
And believing that you are worth it and that you're our Father.
We ask these things not because we deserve them, but because Jesus has earned them for us.
And so we ask them in his name.
Amen.
So a few weeks ago before we started 1 Peter, we looked at, I believe it was Psalm 133, which talked about the beauty and glory of relationships.
And if you've been in the church for a while, you've lived in communities, you know there are varying levels of relationships, especially when it comes to closeness.
There's people that maybe you just greet them on Sunday morning.
There's people maybe they come over to your house if you invite them.
And then maybe you've gotten to kind of the highest level of a relationship.
You have people who they'll drop by your house even if you don't invite them.
Now hopefully you have that kind of relationship with them.
There are certain people that have folks in their lives who drop by to their house uninvited even though they don't have that kind of relationship.
That's a different discussion.
But you know as we grow in community, there's people that we become closer and closer with.
We live life with them together in their houses constantly.
Some of you in this church have those kinds of relationships.
Peter, writing this letter, had that kind of relationship with Jesus.
He had a drop by the house anytime kind of relationship.
In fact, it was probably more than that.
We have indications in the Gospels that Peter and Jesus lived in the same house.
When Jesus was in Capernaum where he met Peter, he would probably spend his time at Peter's family's house.
At one point, they were so close that Jesus healed Peter's mother-in-law.
Now if you're like me, sometimes when you open up your phone, if you swipe to a certain section, it will give you suggestions about what you should do.
It will list maybe apps that you open a lot.
I'll get suggestions about who I should be texting.
And it's usually based on who I've been texting a lot recently.
When Peter opened up his phone, he got a suggestion to text Jesus.
When Jesus, if he lived today, opened up his iPhone, he may have gotten the suggestion to text Peter, James, or John.
Because those are the ones that were closest to him.
And so Peter had this incredibly close relationship with Jesus.
And there's another thing that's less known about Peter that people don't always tell you.
And that's Peter has a verb that goes next to his name constantly in the Gospels.
And that's the verb remember.
Peter is the one who remembers.
And that's why church history tells us that Peter was the source for much of the Gospel of Mark.
Because his job was to remember what Jesus taught his disciples.
It's with that in mind that we come to verse 3.
Peter tells us, according to his great mercy that's talking about God, he has caused us to be born again.
Peter is telling us what he learned from Jesus.
We read it as our preparation to worship this morning from John chapter 3.
Jesus has this conversation with Nicodemus about what it means to love him and follow him.
And he says it's like being born again.
In other words, becoming a Christian is so radical, it's like becoming a whole new person.
There's a whole new identity and reality that you exist in.
And there's all kinds of things I could tell you about the new birth.
We could spend multiple sermons talking about what it means to be born again.
What this is that Jesus was teaching that Peter remembered.
But Peter gives us a couple things to focus on specifically in this passage.
First of all, it's that he's been born again, not just in general, but we've been born again.
This is still verse 3, to a living hope.
And he's also going to tell us, verse 4, that we've been born again to an inheritance.
When I was growing up, like some of you, I, during the summers, I would go to summer camp.
And this was in the forest of West Virginia, right outside the George Washington National Park.
And my brothers and I loved going to camp.
It was one of our favorite things.
In fact, we loved it so much that there was one year, one of us had a camp-themed birthday party
where we tried to reenact what it was like to be at camp for our birthday party
because we just thought it was the best.
We looked forward all year to going to camp.
We loved being there with the other kids, doing all these fun things outdoors.
And so it was wonderful, except for one year.
So I grew up going to camp, elementary school.
And then I got to junior high, and I was no longer able to go to the camp
where you just, you know, shoot guns and shoot bows and arrows, but you had to pick an activity.
And so I decided that year I was going to go to a go-kart camp.
And so you'd show up for the week, and you'd have different teams of kids,
and they would build a go-kart, and the goal was at the end of the week you'd get to race it.
Now that sounds wonderful.
It was terrible.
And it was terrible because this was a camp on a shoestring budget,
and so part of what they would do is they'd break up these teams,
and they'd have different volunteers who would lead them.
So you'd have dads who had a background in mechanics who'd take a group of kids,
and they'd say, okay, we're going to build this go-kart, this dad's going to lead this go-kart, so-and-so.
I got on a team with a dad and his son and me.
And this dad and his son had an amazing time building their go-kart that week.
However, they didn't invite me to help them with things.
I mean, I was there.
I was 12 or 13 at the time.
I didn't really know exactly how to self-advocate, you know.
I would ask them at times, what can I do?
There wasn't really a lot.
And this father that I was working with wasn't the greatest man in the world.
At one point, he would tell us, you know, these other teams,
they're not going to win at the end of the week
because they don't understand how wheel alignment works in the front of go-karts.
Like, we're 12.
We're not supposed to understand how wheel alignment works in the front of go-karts.
It was terrible.
On top of that, there was this other punk in my cabin.
And he and I had interacted in previous summers,
and he let me know that he had some tricks.
He and his dad had figured out, you know, the right way to race go-karts.
He was not going to share that with me, however.
Capone, you're not going to get in on our secrets.
It was awful.
It was my worst week at camp.
It was awful day after day, feeling like I was excluded from these people.
I didn't belong right there of a different birth than I am.
There's a father and a son.
I can't break into this.
I'm supposed to be having this amazing week building go-karts.
And yet it turned out to be quite the opposite, right?
I was feeling out of place in this situation.
Wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
I was shut out.
But I had one hope.
With this camp, you got dropped off on a Sunday,
and it went all the way until the next Saturday.
And I knew that when Saturday came, there was a road in the camp,
a dirt gravel road that ran across a creek on a bridge,
and then it ran into camp.
And I knew that on Saturday morning,
rolling down that road with dirt blowing behind it,
there was going to be a red manual transmission,
1998 Subaru Forester rolling down the road,
probably in second gear.
And behind the wheel of that 1998 red Subaru Forester
was going to be Charles Capone Jr., my father.
And no matter what happened that week,
I knew at the end, he was going to come and pick me up.
And that wasn't a faint hope.
It was a living hope.
It was a living hope because my father was alive.
It was also a living hope because I knew my father's character,
and Charles Capone Jr. was not going to be late on Saturday morning to pick me up.
He had picked me up in previous years from camp.
He was my father, right?
He loved me, he cared for me.
There was no way he was going to forget that that was his day
to come to camp and give me full and final salvation from this situation.
Why does it matter that God is our father?
No matter what happens in this world,
no matter what the people reading this letter face,
they know no matter what,
God is going to come for them.
And he is going to give them,
verse 5,
a salvation
that's going to be revealed in the last time.
And when he comes back,
he is not coming back
on a red manual transmission,
1998 Subaru Forester,
but he is coming back,
as the Old and the New Testament tells us,
on the clouds with all authority
and power and glory and dominion.
And as Philippians 2,
chapter 2, verse 10 tells us,
every knee is going to bow down
and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord.
Because God is our father,
we know that he is coming for us.
And no matter what happens in this world,
nothing can change that.
It's according to his great mercy.
This is the word from the Old Testament
that we've translated as God's never stopping,
never giving up, unbreaking,
always and forever love.
He's called us to be born again to a living hope.
It's not a dead hope.
It's a living hope because Jesus is alive.
It's happened through the resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Because Jesus died and actually rose from the dead,
these people have real hope in real time
because God is their father.
As they look back to something
that actually happened in the past
that Jesus died and rose from the dead,
they can also look forward
to a real historical event
that is going to happen when Jesus comes back.
And so they can live in the present
with hope and faith
no matter what's going on around them.
Now Peter would have known
that Jesus rose from the dead.
And he would have known
because he would have met Jesus
after he rose from the dead.
Peter interacted with Jesus.
He walked with Jesus.
One thing that Peter's going to tell us
later in this letter
is that we need to have a reason
for the hope that's within us.
In other words,
we need to know why it is
that we believe that Jesus rose from the dead.
We need to know why we have a living hope.
Now of course ultimately we have this living hope
because God works it in us through his spirit,
but of course there's many things
that encourage us that he uses.
One of them is the testimony of Peter.
Remember that Peter is a middle class fisherman,
small business owner,
and after Jesus died
he could have easily gone back to that business.
There's no indication
that there was a tank
in the fish business in Capernaum
during the couple years
when Peter was following Jesus.
In fact, we were told
at the very end of the Gospel of John
that Peter did that at one point.
He went back to his fishing boat.
Had Jesus not risen from the dead,
Peter would have had every reason
to go back to his old life.
But instead, because he knew
and had experienced
that Jesus had risen from the dead,
he chose something
that was much more challenging,
hard, and difficult.
He chose something
that was going to be less lucrative
for him financially.
Instead of going back to his job
as a fisherman,
he followed after Jesus,
preaching about him.
We see this in the book of Acts
and suffering for him.
Peter's testimony
is part of the reason
that we have confidence
in Jesus' resurrection from the dead.
Why else would Peter,
a man who hated suffering,
choose to suffer?
And why else would Peter,
a man who could have gone back
to fishing,
instead transition
to preaching the Gospel
and being persecuted for it?
Peter does it
because he knows
that God is his Father
who has caused him
to be born again
to a living hope
through the resurrection
of Jesus Christ
from the dead.
And so that no matter what,
he has a salvation
that's ready to be revealed
in the last time.
If we have faith in Christ,
the same is true of us.
Saying that God is our Father
is not a sentimental story
to end a sermon.
And it's not a line
in a devotional
to make us have a warm feeling.
But it is the actual reality
and fact
that we need to know
to give us hope,
to look forward
as we live now
to what God is going to do
in the future
and we have confidence in that
because of what he has done
in the past.
And that is how
we're going to be able
to do
what Peter is going to tell us
at the very end
of chapter 5
which is stand firm.
That's why it matters
that God
is our Father.
That's not the only thing
that this new birth
has given, however.
When I was at this camp
and things weren't going well,
this was in West Virginia.
Now I didn't live
in West Virginia.
I lived in Southern Maryland
right outside Washington, D.C.
And while I was at camp,
my home in Southern Maryland
still existed.
Imagine that.
I had a room in this home.
That room could not be touched
by anything that happened
at the camp.
I had relationships
at this home.
I had a family.
There is nothing
that happened
in West Virginia
that could touch that.
When Peter says,
we've been born again
to an inheritance
that is imperishable,
undefiled,
and unfading,
kept in heaven for you,
he is saying
not only
what we've already seen
that no matter
what happens,
God is coming for us.
He's also saying
that no matter
what happens,
there is nothing
in this world
that can touch
or affect
what God
is preparing,
has prepared,
and is securing
for us.
Nothing that happens
to these readers
in modern-day Turkey
as they're experiencing
persecution
as Christians
will affect
their inheritance.
It cannot be touched.
It's imperishable.
Nothing can ruin it.
It's undefiled.
Sin doesn't have
any effect.
It's unfading.
No matter how long
it's there,
it will still be
as beautiful as ever,
and it's kept
in heaven for you.
When I was in
West Virginia,
just because I was
separated from my
home in Maryland
did not make that
home any less real.
When we live
in this world
feeling out of place
and facing opposition
from the world
and in the world,
the fact that we
cannot see
and are not
with our inheritance
from God
right now
does not make it
any less real.
The salvation
that's talked about
in verse 5
is not just
a salvation from,
but it's a salvation to.
My Father
was not just coming
in his Subaru Forester
to rescue me
and provide
a salvation
to be revealed
in the last time
from West Virginia,
but he was also
taking me back
to Maryland.
The readers
of this letter
are not just going
to experience
salvation
from
their struggles
in this world.
They're also being
delivered to
this full
and robust
salvation
that includes
their inheritance.
They have become,
because God
has adopted them
through the resurrection
of Jesus Christ
from the dead,
brothers and sisters
of Jesus
and sons
and daughters
of God,
which means
that they are heirs.
Everything that God
has given
his son
belongs to them
as well.
That's the full
salvation.
Of course,
the salvation
includes being removed
from the penalty
of sin,
right?
It's not less than that,
but it's more than that.
It's taking part
in the world
that God has prepared
that no longer
has the effects
or presence of sin.
It's like the new creation.
It's like the original creation
in Genesis 1 and 2
and even better.
And not only is it even better,
it's like the creation
that never had Genesis 3.
No sin was introduced.
That's what these people
have to look forward to.
Why does it matter
that God's their father?
It matters that God's their father
because he has given them
and is and will give them
an inheritance.
And it's an inheritance
that cannot be touched
by anything
in this world.
It's kept in heaven,
verse 4,
for you.
Now, how do they access
all these privileges
of the sons and daughters
of God?
Peter tells us
that this is something
that happens through faith,
verse 5.
Now, we've talked about faith before.
Remember, faith is three things.
It's, first of all,
knowledge.
It's knowing the facts,
knowing that Jesus died
for our sins
and he rose again from the dead,
that he's paid the penalty
that we deserve
and therefore we're going
to have life with him.
It's not just knowledge,
though it's belief.
It's actually believing
that those things are true.
And then finally,
it's not just belief,
but trust,
living as if those things
are true.
And what does that faith
look like?
Well,
it looks like
Peter kind of faith.
Peter had so much faith
that when Jesus
was suffering
and praying,
Peter fell asleep.
Peter had so much faith
that when Jesus
was going to the cross
and people asked Peter
if he knew Jesus,
Peter said no
because he was afraid
of being persecuted.
And Peter had so much faith
that after Jesus
went back to heaven
and he'd been given
his mission
to evangelize,
there was one point
where he avoided the Jews
because he thought
it would embarrass him.
And so Paul
had to come
and rebuke him.
That's the kind of faith
Peter had.
That's the kind of faith
that God uses,
faith that is imperfect,
flawed,
and faltering
to provide
his sons
and his daughters
with salvation
and an inheritance.
And that faith
God used
in Peter's life
to grow him.
And so he also
had other kinds of faith.
He had the kind of faith
in the book of Acts
where he boldly
proclaimed the gospel
even when it led him
to suffering.
And Peter had
the kind of faith
that at the end
of his life
he was willing
to be crucified
upside down
because he did not believe,
this is what church history
tells us,
he did not believe
that he was worthy
of suffering a death
like Jesus did.
He believed he needed
something that was
a step further
going upside down.
In other words,
it is Peter's faith,
verse 5,
but also,
verse 5,
God's power.
these people
facing the potential
of loss
in this world,
perhaps wondering
if they have
what it takes
to stand strong
and remain firm,
have the example
of Peter
who's writing to them
who failed
over and over again
as an illustration
of God's power
to his people
in their weakness,
guarding them
and holding them firm.
We're told in verse 4,
this inheritance
is kept in heaven
for you,
so the inheritance
is being guarded
who by God's power
you are also
being guarded
through faith
for salvation
ready to be revealed
in the last time.
In other words,
we can't lose
our inheritance
because if we have
faith in Christ,
God refuses
to lose us.
We cannot lose
our inheritance
because God
refuses to lose us.
It is by faith
our faith,
but it's not
our power.
It was Peter's faith,
not Peter's power.
the beginning
of his time
with Peter,
Jesus says to him,
calls him,
he calls him
to follow after him.
And then Peter
fails dramatically
as I've already
discussed
in this sermon.
And so he goes
back to what he knows,
he goes back
and fishes again.
This is at the end
of the Gospel of John.
And Jesus comes
and finds him
and performs
the same miracle
that he did
at the very beginning.
He causes Peter again
to catch a whole boat
full of fish
when he can't catch anything.
And then he makes
Peter breakfast
over the same
type of charcoal
that was in the fire
that Peter was standing by
when he betrayed Jesus.
And finally,
at the end,
Peter asks him
about another disciple
and Jesus says,
Peter,
don't worry about
that other disciple.
You follow me.
Peter's faith,
God's power,
calling him
over and over again
despite Peter's
failures and mistakes.
It is Jesus
who comes to him
with his grace,
the same grace
that Peter offers
to his readers now,
helping them understand
why it matters
that God is their father
and why that's not
a sentiment
but a true
and living hope
that they can,
like he has,
stake their lives on.
And so he offers
that same power
to anyone else
who is willing
to follow after him
like Peter
in faith.
Why does it matter
that God is our father?
it matters
because he is coming
back for us
to provide a salvation
in the last time.
And it also,
and there's nothing
in this world
that happens
that can threaten that
and take us from it.
It also matters
that he is our father
because he has provided
an inheritance for us
and no matter
what is taken away
from us in this world,
that inheritance
cannot be touched.
And finally,
God being our father
matters because
like my father
driving down the road
in West Virginia,
it is not us
and our faith
that seek out God.
But like with Peter,
it is God
and his power
that seeks out us
and guards us
through faith
for salvation.
And so that's why
we can say
as Peter begins here,
verse 3,
blessed be the God
and father
of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
Please pray with me.
Father in heaven,
we thank you
that you are our father.
And we thank you
that we can approach you
boldly,
knowing that you guard us.
And while it's our
small and weak
and feeble
and faltering faith,
it is your power
that holds us
and keeps us,
we ask that you
would help us,
that you'd remind us
of the hope
that you hold out to us
and you'd help us
to stand firm.
We ask these things
not because we have
earned them,
but because Jesus
has earned them for us
and so we ask them
in his name.
Amen.