Born Again Love

Ten weeks into our series in 1 Peter, it’s helpful for us to go back to the beginning and remember that the Apostle Peter wrote this letter to a group of Christians who were in exile. Like we saw a few weeks ago, these people may have been literal exiles in some sense—they may have been kicked out of Rome for their Christian beliefs.

But that’s not what really made them strangers and outsiders to the people around them. These Christians were exiles because of their faith in Christ. Even if they were living in the same towns they were born in, their faithfulness to Jesus made them seem to the people around them as if they had been born in a completely different world.

And that’s because they actually had been. They had been born again, as Peter reminds them over and over. They had been born the first time into their families and societies, but now they had been given a brand new life through the Father’s mercy.

Jesus had bought them from their human heritage and given them a new hope, a new inheritance, a new family, a new story. Like Josh explained for us last week, it’s not so much that Jesus had come into their lives—it’s that they had been brought into Jesus’ life, and found their place in God’s big and ancient plan.

And being in Christ made them be on the outside of their old society. Living to please God meant that they often displeased the community around them. Acting like God’s children made them seem like foreigners to the people they grew up with.

And so it makes sense that as Peter writes to them, it wants to talk about their relationship with the surrounding world, which he’s done. He’s talked about their various trials, which included persecution. He’s told them not to be pushed back into the mold of their former way of life. He’s reminded them that they’ve been ransomed from the worthless ways in their heritages.

It also makes sense that Peter wants to talk to them about their relationship with the triune God. God is their father who has provided them with a hope and inheritance. They love Jesus though they’ve never seen him. They’ve been devoted to God through the Spirit. As they call on God through prayer they are to live before him with holy fear.

But there’s a third category of relationship that’s just as important. And it’s their relationships with each other. And it makes sense why Peter would want to talk about thee relationships when we remember that being exiles was a group experience. We often miss this in English, but in the original language every single “you” in these verses is a plural. In other words, “You all.” 

There’s an inheritance kept in heaven for you all. In this you all rejoice. Though you all have not seen him, you all love him. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you all. As he who called you is holy, you all also be holy in all your conduct. Know that you all were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers.

Peter has written all of this not to individual exiles, but to a community of exiles. A community of people who were strangers and foreigners to the people around them. And if Peter’s readers are going to thrive in exile, they’re going to need rich and robust relationships with one another within their community of fellow strangers.

And if you have attended any church for longer than one week, you know how challenging that is. Christians shouldn’t have such a hard time getting along. But they do.

Peter knows this as much as we do. And so starting here in verse 22, all the way up to verse 10 in chapter 2, Peter instructs his readers on their relationships with one another. If they’re going to thrive in exile, surrounded by a hostile world, they’re going to need each other.

And if you’re a disciple of the Lord Jesus, you know that we’re basically the same situation these people were. What Peter says to his readers is also for us. And so let’s listen in.

Requirement: Love One Another (1:22)

Let’s start by seeing that this section we’ve just read, from 1:22 down to 2:3, is all build around one main command: “love one another,” right there in the second half of verse 22. That’s the main instruction here. Peter says how we are to love one another—earnestly, from a pure heart—and down in 2:1 he explains further what this kind of love looks like, or rather what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t involve malice and deceit and hypocrisy and envy and slander.

That’s the core idea: love one another.

And surrounding this core idea, as Peter so often does, are reasons for why we should obey this command. Like we talked about this at the parenting workshop last Sunday, God so often motivates us to obey by giving us reasons. That’s what Peter is doing here. He sandwiches this command to love between two big reasons. The first has to do with something we’ve done, and the second has to do with something God has done.

And these reasons are big and significant. And we’re going to spend today looking at these two reasons. Next week we’ll then turn to focus on the specifics of the command to love that Peter gives us.

But even today, we don’t want to lose sight of where this is headed: love. So let’s start at the top of verse 22 and look at this first big reason for love that Peter gives.

Reason: This Is What You Were Saved for (1:22)

If you were writing a letter to a group of Christians, telling them to love one another, and you were trying to think of a reason for why they should love one another, what would you write? I find questions like this are helpful because they can really help us get inside the head of the Biblical authors, seeing how they thought and how different their thinking so often is from ours.

Why should Christians love one another? Peter’s first reason is that we’ve purified our souls by our obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love.

You get all that? Don’t worry, we’re not in a rush.

Let’s start to unpack these words by noticing the first phrase: “Having purified your souls.” Peter’s readers, and in fact all Christians, are people who have purified their souls.

“Souls” here, like back in verse 9, speaks about our whole self. And the word “purify” speaks about a moral cleanness, being cleansed from sin and consecrated to God.

And you might say, “I thought Jesus did that. I thought Jesus washed us clean from our sins.” And He did. Maybe you’re uncomfortable with the idea that you purified your own soul. Put that’s what Peter wrote. “Having purified your souls.” He’s pointing to the role that Christians play in the purification of their own souls.

He’s pointing to the fact that we heard the gospel and responded to it. We repented, which means turning aside from the sins we loved in order to follow Christ. We walked out of the pig sty and headed home towards our Father. We obeyed the command of James 4:8: “Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.” And so Peter is right on the mark to describe Christians as those who have purified their souls.

That word “having” at the beginning of the verb is important. It points to the tense of the verb which indicates a past action with ongoing results. Christians are in a state of purity, having purified their souls, and living in that reality today.

And this helps us begin to understand what’s going on here. Peter does not seem to be talking about the ongoing purifying work that happens as we keep on following Jesus. He seems to be pointing to the decisive turning away from sin that happened when we first began to follow Jesus.

And that’s affirmed by the next phrase, “by your obedience to the truth.” We purified our souls by our obedience to the truth, which points again to our first experience of believing the gospel.

We saw up in 1:2 that “obedience to Jesus Christ” spoke about first entering the New Covenant. In Romans 1:5, Paul talks about his mission to bring about  “the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.”

Coming to Jesus was about being “obedient” to him. And Paul, the Apostle of salvation by grace through faith, uses the word “obedience” in the book of Romans several more times to talk about coming to believe in Jesus.

We can think of it this way: the gospel is an announcement, and it comes with a command: repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s not just an invitation—it’s a command. Many people hear that command and disobey it, refusing to repent and believe. But Christians are those who have obeyed that command. As Paul says in Romans 6:17, Christians are those who “have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed.” Our first turn away from sin and towards Jesus was an act of obedience.

Now we want to clarify that it was an act of obedience that flowed out of faith. We obeyed because we believed. And it’s our faith, not our obedience, is counted to us as righteousness. We’re saved by grace through faith, not grace through obedience.

Theologically, there is a very distinction between faith and obedience. But practically, in terms of how they actually happen, faith and obedience always go together. They’re like a newlywed couple. You know they are two separate people, but you can sometimes barely tell because of how close to each other they always are.

Again, on Sunday at the parenting workshop we looked at Ephesians 6 and how Paul’s one piece of instruction to children is that they obey their parents. And that might seem strange to some people. Why didn’t he say something like “be all you can be” or “chase your dreams”? Why is he so hung up on kids obeying their parents?

And the reason is that obedience is not some fringe part of the Christian life. Everything we do, we do in response to God’s word to us. Which means that obedience is a central part of the Christian life. We believe God, and then we obey Him, and you can’t have one without the other.

Now there’s one more phrase for us to consider here in Peter’s first reason. This phrase tells us what all of this has been for. What the goal is. What was the purpose of purifying our souls by our obedience to the truth? Where was it all headed? And the answer is that it was all headed towards love.

“Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love…”

If “purifying your souls by your obedience to the truth” is talking about converting to Christ—becoming a Christian—then Peter is saying that a goal of conversion, a goal of becoming a Christian, is sincere brotherly love. This is what we purified our souls and obeyed the truth for.

In other words, we didn’t just become a Christian so that we could have a personal relationship with Jesus. So that we could enjoy God’s wonderful plan for our life. So that we could escape hell and go to heaven. We followed Jesus so that we could love.

Now I realize that we may not have known it at the time. We may not have known any of this at the time. When we first received the gospel, and someone said to us, “Yay! You’ve just purified your soul by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love!” we’d look at them like they’re speaking Greek.

But that’s why Peter is writing this. Because this is what happened. By following Jesus, we were turning aside from sin, obeying the truth, and whether we knew it or not, we were following Jesus on the path of love.

Just think: Jesus told us to take up our crosses and follow Him. Where was Jesus going with His cross? He was going to love His people unto death. He was going to lay his life down to pay our debt for us as our substitute. And so following Jesus means following Him in a life of sacrificial love.

This is why, over and over again, the Bible describes love as the mark of a Christian.

• “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’” (John 13:35).
• “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14).
• “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers” (1 John 3:16).
• “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar” (1 John 4:19–20).

Christians love each other. And this isn’t an extra—according to Peter, it was baked right into our conversion to Christ. Repenting and believing the gospel meant purifying our souls by our obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love.

And so the connection between Peter’s reason and Peter’s requirement or command is fairly straightforward. Loving one another was one of the goals of your salvation. So do it. Put this into practice.

Reason: You’ve been born again (1:23-25)

Now that’s just the first reason. And I’ll be honest: I feel like this first reason needs some balancing out. This language of purifying our souls by our obedience to the truth could make it sound like this is all just something that we did. But Peter knows better than you and I that this is only one part of the picture.

And that’s why in verse 23 he gives us a second reason, which runs parallel to the first reason, that focuses on God’s action in our conversion to Jesus. Look now at verse 23: “Since you have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).

We could only purify our souls, we could only obey the truth, we could only repent and believe in Jesus, because God had already caused us to be born again by his pure mercy. It’s all of grace.

This idea of new birth should be familiar because Peter has brought it up a lot so far. Also familiar are these next words, “not of perishable seed but of imperishable.” This is not the first time that Peter has contrasted earthly, perishable things with heavenly, imperishable realities. Our inheritance is imperishable, kept in heaven for us (1:4). We were ransomed not with perishable gold or silver but with the blood of Christ (1:18).

We so often get this backwards, thinking that the physical things we can see with our eyes are more real than the spiritual realities described in Scripture. Peter is working as hard as he can to help flip the script and show us that these spiritual realities are way more real than the perishable things here on earth. The kingdom of God is way more real and long-lasting than all the imperial power of Rome.

And so he draws our attention to the fact that we’ve been born again, begotten again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable.

Some of you might hear Peter talk about a father begetting us with seed and think this sounds a bit like human reproduction. And it does, because it’s supposed to. These words deliberately contrast how humans were begotten the first time with how we were begotten again by our Heavenly Father, this time not with perishable seed but with the imperishable seed of the word of God.

And Peter is not the only one to talk this way. John points in the same direction when he writes that those who received Jesus “were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). 1 John 3:9 says, more daringly, “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9).

The language of seed also makes us think of agricultural reproduction. It works that way in the original language as well. Just like farmers and gardeners bring forth plants by placing seed in the ground, so our Heavenly Father has caused us to be begotten, born again, through His seed.

And what is that seed? What is the seed that goes into the ground and germinates and comes up as new life? It is the imperishable seed of the word of God. Peter defines this imperishable seed as “the living and abiding word of God” in the end of verse 23. This is the seed that causes us to be born again.

James 1:18 talks about this. After introducing God as the “Father of Lights,” he wrote that “Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures” (James 1:18). We were born again through the word of God. It was the word that gave us new life, that gave us the faith to believe in the first place. “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

One of the best places to see this is in the parable of the soils that Jesus told (Matthew 13:1-9). And here’s where the agricultural picture comes to the forefront. In that parable, the seed is the word of God. And sometimes we think that we’re the soils. But Jesus explains that we’re not the soils—we’re the plants that grow up when the seed is planted.

“As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while, and when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away” (Matthew 13:20-21). The rocky ground isn’t the person. The person is “what was sown on rocky ground”; in other words, the plant. “As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Matthew 13:22).

Not surprisingly, this whole picture of us being the plants that grow up in response to the seed of the word has a wonderful Old Testament background. God promised as a part of his covenant with David, “And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more” (2 Samuel 7:10). And through the prophets God used this language to describe bringing His people back from exile:

• “I will plant them, and not pluck them up” (Jeremiah 24:6).
• “And it shall come to pass that as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring harm, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 31:28).
• “I will sow her for myself in the land” (Hosea 2:23).

And that’s just a few. There’s at least as many others. And with that background, when Jesus tells the parable of the soils, what’s He saying? He’s saying that the time has come. The exile is ending, the word of God is going out like seed, and the ones who hear the word and understand it are the ones who are planted as God foretold.

It’s that same picture picked up by Peter. God is doing his great work of bringing the exile to an end by sending out his word and causing His people to be planted and grow up. And so we are begotten, born again, not through perishable seed, but through the living and abiding word of God.

Now what Peter does next is zoom in on this “living and abiding” idea. He wants us to grasp this idea that God’s word, which causes us to be born again, is lasting and permanent. So he turns to an Old Testament text, from Isaiah 40. Turn there if you have your Bible.

Isaiah 40 is written for the Jews in exile. God is promising that the exile is coming to an end as their sins will finally be dealt with. “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (Isaiah 40:1–2).

And after promising that God come to his people, levelling mountains and filling valleys to prepare the way for him, verse 5 says that “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’” (Isaiah 40:5).

But that begs the question. The mouth of the Lord has spoken—but can we trust that mouth? Can we trust those words? As centuries pass, can we still rely on these promises?

And that’s where verse 6 comes in. “A voice says, ‘Cry!’ And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’ All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (Isaiah 40:6–8).

God’s promise to redeem his people from exile will not fall because, though people perish like grass, His word endures forever.

It’s interesting that Peter quotes verses 6-8 from the Greek Old Testament with one small change—where the original says “the word of our God,” he writes, “the word of the Lord.” “The Lord” for Peter is always a title for Jesus, and so here we see a strong affirmation from Peter that Jesus is God. Jesus’ word is God’s word and vice-versa. The word of the Lord Jesus Christ will endure forever.

Now before we turn back to 1 Peter, look at verse 9 here in Isaiah 40. “Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9).

Isaiah pictures a herald, a preacher, coming to the people of God to deliver the good news that the strong and eternal God had come to rescue them from exile.

And now look back at 1 Peter 1:25, where, using those same words right out of the Greek Old Testament, Peter says that this word—the word of the Lord—is the good news that was preached to you. What Isaiah foretold has happened for Peter’s readers.

What Peter is saying here is so significant and so multi-layered, but let’s see if we can take one layer at a time.

1) First layer: Peter is saying that the good news of Isaiah 40—that the exile will end as God comes to rescue His people—this has finally happened in Jesus. The herald of good news that Isaiah talked about is the apostles who came, not just to some cities in Judah but to people from every tribe and nation to proclaim the good news that Jesus lived for us, died for us, rose for us, reigns over us, is coming back for us, and because of this, humanity’s long exile away from God has come to an end. God has come to save us.

2) Second layer: just like Isaiah 40 preached hope to the exiles in Babylon that they would be able to go home because of God’s sure word, so Peter’s readers, including us, can be comforted that God’s word is just as sure to us. Our status as exiles in this world will not last, because this world is passing away like the grass of the field, but the word of the Lord endures forever. The Roman Empire and the Canadian Government can try their worst, but we know what’s going to last.

3) Third layer: Peter is showing us that we have been born again through the word of God. This is how we were saved, whether we knew it or not at the time: someone proclaimed the word to us, and that word fell on good soil, and what sprang up was life. Our new, born-again life. We were born again through the seed of God’s powerful, effective, living and abiding word.

4) Fourth and final layer: all of this is a powerful reason to love one another earnestly from a pure heart. Remember the plural “you”s. If you’ve been born again, as you look around at your church family, you are seeing people who, like you, have been born again through the living and abiding word of God.

The spiritual life that you share with each other is more real and more permanent than anything here on earth. You may have a connection with people who were born in the same country or province or town as you. But that’s grass that’s going to wither and fall. You may have a connection with people who were born in the same family as you, from the same physical seed. That, too, is a perishable community that’s going to wither and fade along with all flesh.

But the word of the Lord that has caused you, together, to be born again, endures forever. This is your forever family, bound together by something so much more permanent than human genetics.

These are your people. These will be your people after the empires of this earth have crumbled. These will be the people you’re going to reign with on the new creation. You will share eternity with these people because you’ve been born again together by the same eternal seed.

Suddenly, so many of our petty squabbles seem so small, don’t they? And that’s Peter’s point.

Now we need to wrap this up here, but please remember that this is just part 1. Next week we’ll pick up back in verse 22 and move on to chapter 2 and explore in more depth what this love looks like.

But we can’t get there without understanding these two huge reasons to love. We love because it’s what we were saved for. We love because we were born again by the same eternal spiritual seed.

And I think one of the best ways to put this part of the passage into practice is just to pray that God would help us get this. Take a few moments now in the silence to ask God to help you see your brothers and sisters in Christ in this way.

And may God use his truth to lead us to be a community of love.