I want to welcome you to our continued study of the epistle of James, so you can take your Bible and open up to James.  We have much ahead of us in this great epistle.  But we're going to stop tonight for just a brief look at verse 18.  Normally we would be taking another section, starting in verse 19 since we did mention verse 18 in our last study, but I want to stop for a moment and expand our understanding of James 1:18 because it is such a great great verse.  This is a verse that really articulates in a very simple way the meaning of the new birth, the meaning of salvation. 

     I was interested this morning in the reception for our first time guests to meet a lovely young lady from Japan who understands some English, conversational English, and confessed this morning that she found it very difficult to follow what I was saying in the message.  And it alerted me, not so much to the fact that the words that I say are not intelligible, as such, but the fact that the longer you're a Christian and the more you get involved in Christianity and in the Word of God, the more sort of evangelical lingo you probably develop.  And somebody coming in who knows conversational English is going to have a very difficult time plugging in to what you're saying.

     It's a good reminder, also, that every once in a while we need to go back to the simple reality of what the gospel really is.  And that's what we want to do tonight.  Let's look together at verse 18 of James chapter 1.  It says this, "Of His own will‑‑ speaking of the Father, God the Father mentioned in verse 17‑‑of His own will begot He us with the Word of truth that we should be a kind of firstfruits of His creatures."  A simple verse but one in which is bound up all of the richness of the new birth.

     The Old Testament said "Be holy, for I the Lord am holy."  Peter says in his epistle, "Be holy, for I the Lord am holy."  In order to enter into the presence of God, man must be holy, set apart from sin unto righteousness.

     Now men are not holy.  That's obvious.  They are not righteous.  That is, they are sinful.  They do not think right, speak right, act right, do right.  They do not rightly perceive God. They do not rightly perceive themselves.  They do not rightly perceive God's truth, God's revelation, or God's law or God's will.  But even though men are not holy and they are not right with God, for the most part they do not perceive that they are not holy.  They do not understand that they are not righteous.  They do not willingly agree with the diagnosis of Scripture that they are sinful.

     Men are not holy.  And worse, they do not recognize either the need for holiness or in many cases, the absence of it.  And if they do recognize that they are not holy, they usually blame someone else for that reality.  And that's what we were discussing in our last look at this tremendous chapter.  Indirectly, men push the responsibility for their sinfulness off on God...typically.  And as we looked at verses 13 through 18, we saw that we have no one to blame but ourselves for our own sinfulness.  Certainly we cannot blame God by saying, "Well, God created us, God made laws that are impossible to keep.  God has allowed me to become the way I am by my environment.  God put me into circumstances that put such constraints on me I can't control my behavior," etc., etc.  But what James says to us is God cannot have any part in our sinfulness, either directly or indirectly. 

     So men have to be holy in order to have a relationship with God.  They are not holy.  For the most part, they don't even recognize that they're not holy.  And if they do recognize that they sin, they will usually blame someone else and that someone in a very vague sense is the God who put them in the circumstances they're in and gave them the impulses He gave them and they want to shirk the responsibility.

     So, James says in verses 13 to 18, you cannot blame anyone but yourself for your sin.  In verse 13 he says the nature of evil demonstrates that.  "No man can say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God can't be tempted with evil, neither tempts He any man."  You can't blame God for evil because God and evil are mutually exclusive.

     And then in verse 14, the nature of man.  He says man has his own problem.  Man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust..and enticed.  The problem is in man.  It is in his sinfulness, his fallenness. 

     Then he talks about the nature of lust in verses 15 and 16.  Lust when it conceives brings forth sin.  Sin when it finally comes forth produces nothing but death.  And don't you be wrong about that.  In other words, understand that that is the reality of sin.  So it isn't God because God and evil are incompatible.  The problem is in the nature of man.  And in the nature of man, the problem is his evil desire, his lust, his passion for that which is wrong.

     Then in verse 17, he goes back to discussing the nature of God and says, "From God comes every good gift and every perfect gift.  And that never varies and there's never any shadow cast on that."  So you can't blame God because His nature is to give only good things, only good comes from God.  So he says we can't blame God for our sin because of the nature of evil, the nature of man, the nature of lust and the nature of God.

     Then in verse 18, he sort of sums up his argument by saying, "The nature of regeneration itself or conversion or salvation or the new birth shows us that God does not lead us into sin."  Verse 18 says, "Of His own will," in other words, it was His will, "to beget us to become like Him, a kind of firstfruits of His own creation."  So the purpose of regeneration was to give birth into life, to create us to do good not evil, to give us power over sin as a part of a new creation.  So God is in no way involved in our sinfulness.  He cannot be mixed with evil.  The problem is in man.  In man the problem is bound up with his lust.  The nature of God is such that He only gives good gifts.  And when God touches your life, it is to produce life not death, to produce righteousness not sin, to make a new creation not exercise the old one.

     So all of those things we looked at last time point to the fact that God cannot directly or indirectly be the source of sin.  God is not and cannot be tempting men to sin.  And so we looked at verse 18 in that light.  But the verse is so rich because it discusses this matter of the new birth of begetting a person, of regenerating a person and it demands a closer and longer look.  And we want to do that tonight.  He introduces us to the subject of regeneration in verse 18 in connecting with a point in his context.  And the point is what I've just said to you, he is using regeneration as a way to show you that God doesn't lead people into sin, He leads them to be creations of a new kind like Him.  He leads them out of sin into new life.  And that would be inconsistent with any thought that He would lead us into sin.  He is recreating us away from sin, not into sin.

     But apart from the context itself, as we look at the verse, I want you just to examine it in and of itself because it says so much about regeneration.  And the whole teaching of regeneration or new birth is worthy of our careful attention..  Now keep in mind what I said earlier and what we noted in the text that man is filled with lust and lust produces sin and sin begets death.  It is true that without holiness, no one will ever have a relationship with God, no one will ever fully know God, no one will ever enter into God's eternal presence without holiness.  And yet man is unholy and he is sinful and everything in his nature produces lust and evil. 

     To give you a clearer understanding of that, look at Romans with me, chapter 3...a very familiar portion of Scripture to Bible students, but one that needs examination in the light of this particular point.  At the end of verse 9, he says, "Jews and Greeks, they are all under sin."  They are all literally under the mastery of sin, they are all subject to the control of sin.  And then he goes on to show this in extent by quoting from some Old Testament passages and he says, "As it is written, there is none righteous, no not one."  There is not one human being created in this world since the fall of Adam that is righteous.  And that means that is right with God, that does righteously, that obeys the will of God in and of himself.  There's none righteous, no not one. 

     There is none that understands...that is there's none that fully comprehends that which God requires and is fully able to understand it and to carry it out.  There is none that even seeks after God.  The bent of man is to seek sin.  Men love...what?...darkness, John 3 says, rather than light because their deeds are evil.  They're all gone out of the way.  They've all diverted themselves from the path that God ordained for righteousness. They are all together become unprofitable.  The Greek word has to do with sour milk, it's good for nothing.  They're absolutely useless.  And there is none that does good, not even one.

     And then he describes the nature of their evil.  Their throat is an open sepulcher.  It stinks like a dead corpse whose scent comes oozing out of a tomb.  With their tongues they have used deceit.  The poison of asps or snakes is under their lips.  A man is basically revealed in his conversation and in his mouth.  And the ugly evil defiled deadness of his sinful nature comes out through his mouth.  The mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.  Their feet are in a hurry to shed blood.  Destruction and misery are in their ways.  The way of peace have they not known.  And there is absolutely no reverence for God before their eyes.

     Now here is a definition of sinful man.  Man without God.  And the whole world comes under this in verse 18, every mouth is stopped and all the world stands guilty before God.  And there is no way, he says in verse 20, that through their flesh they can be justified by God by keeping some rules, by obeying law even though it be the law of God.  The law simply produces the knowledge of sin, it doesn't produce righteousness.  So, there is the definition of man from Romans 3...man in his sinful state. 

     Look at Ephesians 2.  And in Ephesians 2 it says, verse 1, "And you who were dead in trespasses and sins," and here we find that man is characterized again as being dead, the stench of a corpse.  And the characteristic of his deadness is that it is a deadness in trespasses and sins.  Just using two words to show kind of the breadth and the extent of his sinfulness.  "He walks," it says, "according to the course of this world."  In other words, his daily conduct is dictated by the evil system.  "The one who is in charge of his life is the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the children of disobedience," those are titles for Satan.  "He functions," verse 3, "in the lust of the flesh, he fulfills the desire of the flesh and the mind and he is by nature a child of wrath."  That means he is a target of judgment, he is the object of God's judgment.

     Now all this is very basic.  Man in order to have a right relationship to God needs to be holy.  Man is not holy.  Man doesn't recognize that he's not holy.  And sometimes if he does recognize that he is not holy and sinful, he tends to blame God for his circumstances, pass of the responsibility which keeps him confined under the subjection of sin and therefore cut off from God.

     Now the question comes up: what are you going to do to help this man?  What are you going to do to change the situation?  What does this man need?  External changes are not enough.  He cannot by some resolution in his own mind determine that he's going to obey the law of God and work his way out of this deadness.  He cannot give himself new life.  What he needs is to be recreated.  He needs a new heart, a new inner person, a new life principle, he needs to be born again.  He needs to start all over and come out different as if in the words of Nicodemus, he could crawl back into his mother's womb and start all over again with a different nature.  Since holiness is the absolute condition for acceptance in to fellowship with God, sinful man in his fallen dead condition can't ever have that fellowship and God won't accept his corrupt self so he needs a new life.  He needs a brand new life.

     So, when we talk about the gospel or the new birth, we're not talking about adding something, we're not talking about tacking something on.  We're not talking about putting a ribbon on a sow.  We're not talking about putting a new suit of clothes on an old man.  We're talking about a total transformation.  To enter into a right relationship with God demands a total new person.  You have to go back and start all over again and be born all over again into a new life.

     Now Scripture affirms this.  It isn't even...it isn't even new in the New Testament.  This was part of the promise and anticipation of the Old Testament.  Jeremiah, for example, says the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.  And Jeremiah says "Can the Ethiopian change his skin?  Can he by willingly and by willing...being willing rather and wishing, can he change the color of his dark skin?"  And then Jeremiah says, "Can the leper change his spots?"  And the obvious answer is of course not.  "Then may you also do good that are accustomed to do evil."  You can't change your life either.  So you need a transformation.  That's Jeremiah 13:23.  And over in chapter 31 comes the wonderful promise of that transformation.  Jeremiah 31:31, "Behold, the days come, says the Lord, I'll make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt," and so forth.  He says, "I'll make a new covenant," verse 33, "I will put my law in their inward parts, I will write it in their hearts, I will be their God and they will be My people."  I'm going to get inside and change their inside.  They can't do it on their own so it has to be done for them. 

     Man has to have a change at the very core of his being.  The natural man, that is the unregenerate man, the man that doesn't know God, the sinful man, the unredeemed man, the unsaved man, does not‑‑1 Corinthians 2:14 says, "receive the things of the Spirit of God."  He can't receive them, he's dead.  And a corpse doesn't respond to anything.

     And so, what does he need?  He needs new birth.  He needs new life.  I just read you Ephesians 2:1 to 3 how that men are dead in trespasses and sin, following the lust of the flesh, the lust of the mind, the desires of the flesh, being subject to the leadership of Satan, the prince of the power of the air.  They are children of wrath.  But it says, even when we were dead in sins, in that same chapter verse 5, Christ has made us alive and raised us up.  And here's the idea of a resurrection from the dead, of new life, of a new birth.  In Romans 6, it says when you put your faith in Christ, you die and you rise to walk in...and it uses this wonderful phrase..."newness of...what?...of life."  Now that's what every person has to have, newness of life.  The old life has to be totally done away and a new life has to come.  In Ephesians 4:24, "You have put on the new man...listen to this...which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness."  When you come to salvation, you put on a new man, a new person not new clothes, a new person.  It's a recreation.

     The best and most graphic illustration of this is found in the wonderful encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus.  So turn to John 3 and let's look at it briefly and remind ourselves of this wonderful wonderful story.  "There was a man of the Pharisees," that is he was a religious leader of great esteem.  He may have well been as prominent as any teacher because in verse 10 Jesus says, "Are you...and uses the definite article "the teacher of Israel and don't know these things?"  So here is one man who recognizes...is recognized perhaps publicly as "the teacher" in Israel of some great stature of Pharisee well versed in the law.  He approaches Jesus and says, "We know You're a teacher from God."  Here is a man of great esteem.  Here is a man who recognizes his own calling but recognizes one who is even significantly above himself in understanding.

     So, he comes to Jesus.  And he says in verse 2, "We know You're a teacher come from God for no one can do the miracles that You do except God be with Him."  And he never says what's in his heart.  He doesn't ask a question but Jesus reads his heart.  "And Jesus answered," that's an interesting statement because he didn't ask anything, he just said, "You're a teacher," and went on to say You come from God, we know that.  "But Jesus answered the question in his heart and said, Truly, truly, I say to you, except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God."  And He knew that what was in the heart of Nicodemus was, how do I get into the Kingdom?  Here was a man who was the teacher in Israel, a Pharisee, had it all going religiously, but knew he had not entered in truly to the Kingdom of God.  How did he know he hadn't?  Because there was nothing inside of him confirming that. 

     So he comes to Jesus and the question of his heart is, what do I do to get in the Kingdom?  And the implication would be, "I'm very religious, I study the law.  I try to live by the code of the Old Testament.  I'm a very ethical man.  I'm a trusted man.  I'm a respected man.  What do I need to add to my life to get in the Kingdom?"  And Jesus said you don't do anything, you start all over again.  You just kill the whole thing and start with birth.  You have to be born again.  And Nicodemus said to Him, "How can a man be born when he's old?"  Now he's not asking the physical thing.  Give him a break, he's not saying physically how can I go back and be born, he knows what Jesus is talking about.  He is simply picking up on the same use of veiled language, of parabolic talk of the Mishal, the kind of speech that they used and he's picking up on the same metaphor, the same descriptive terms that Jesus is using and he's saying, how does someone so many years in one religion, so many years following one code, so many years to be now a Pharisee and a rabbi and a teacher of the law ever go back and undo all of that and start all over again.  That's what he's saying. 

     And if you have ever witnessed to an orthodox Jew of any years, you will understand this mind set.  How can I ever unravel all this lifelong pursuit of religion and start all over again?  That was what was in the mind of Nicodemus.  Can he enter the second time in his mother's womb and be born?  And he's tongue and cheek at that point.  He's saying that again, consistent with the analogy that Jesus is using.  How can I be born again spiritually?  He knows Jesus speaks spiritually.  How can I do it?  How can it happen?  And Jesus says to him, basically, you can't do it.  You can't do it, Nicodemus.  "Truly, truly I say to you, except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot...what?...enter the Kingdom of God."  He says you can't do it.  It has to be done by water and the Spirit.  It has to be done by a power and a resource outside yourself...outside of you.  And that power is the water and the Spirit.

     Now what does that refer to?  That's the water of salvation, I believe if you go back for a brief moment to Ezekiel 36, you will see.  Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus in very familiar terms.  He knew the Old Testament.  He knew the promise of Ezekiel 36.  Verse 25, "I will sprinkle clean water upon you."  Who's "I"?  God.  This is a sovereign act and "You will be clean from your filthiness and from all your idols will I cleanse you."

     What He is saying to Nicodemus is this: number one, you must have a sovereign cleansing by God.  Secondly, it comes through the Holy Spirit.  You need a sovereign salvation that comes from outside yourself.  Just like Ezekiel prophesied, clean water, cleansing your filthiness.  Paul writing to Titus talks about the washing of water through the Word, the water of regeneration.  And verse 26, "A new heart will I give you and a new Spirit will I put within you.  Take away the stoney heart out of your flesh, I'll give you a heart of flesh...then this...I'll put My Spirit within you and cause you from the inside to walk in My statutes.  You shall keep My ordinances and you shall do them."  So when Jesus says to Nicodemus, you must be born of the water and the Spirit to enter the Kingdom, He's taking Nicodemus right back to Ezekiel 36 and saying you know what the prophet said, you need a sovereign cleansing that comes from God outside yourself and the planting of His Holy Spirit in your heart to give you a new life and a new heart and a new motivation. 

     Why?  Verse 6, if you tried to do it on your own, "That which is born of the flesh is...what?..all you're going to do is reproduce what?...yourself, more of you, but that which is born of the Spirit is...what?...Spirit.  So don't be surprised that I said you must be born again."  Don't be surprised.  Then He says, "The wind blows where it wants and you hear the sound and you can't tell from where it comes and where it goes and so is everyone that is born of the Spirit." 

     You know what He's saying there?  He's saying I can't tell you how or when the Holy Spirit does this but this is a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.  It can't be charted.  You can't even see it coming or going.  But the Spirit of God moves in where He wills and gives new birth to whom He wills as sovereign God by the agency of the Spirit through the washing of the water of the Word in regeneration, cleanses the heart and plants that Spirit within a man.  What you need, Nicodemus, is a new life and that is a sovereign act of God.

     Just what Jeremiah 24 said in verse 7, where God said, "I will give them a heart to know Me," a new nature, a new heart, a new life.  "If any man be in Christ," 2 Corinthians 5:17, "he is a new creature.  Old things have passed away, behold, all things have become new." 

     So, what I'm saying here is that a new birth is essential.  That's what salvation is.  It is God sovereignly coming down to a sinner and by His grace cleansing that sinner and planting His Spirit in that sinner so that the cleansing of that sinner takes care of his relationship to God and the planting of the Spirit takes care of His power to live in the will of God.  And that's the purpose of regeneration.

     Now I'm going to ask four questions in our verse, James 1:18, let's go back.  That was introduction.  James 1:18, I want to ask you four questions about regeneration, very simple questions and it won't take us but a brief time to answer the four.

     First question: what is it?  You've just said that man is...man cannot know God without holiness, man is not holy.  Man doesn't recognize his unholiness and when he does, he tends to blame God.  How's he ever going to get out of that dilemma?  Here he is blaming God for it or not recognizing it.  How's he ever going to change?  You say, "Well, somebody brings him some higher standards, some better ethics, a law that he is supposed to keep and he does it on his own."  No.  "That which the flesh produces is more...what?...more flesh."  So what has to happen is, he needs the divine intervention of a sovereign God who by His Spirit comes in, washes away his sin, plants a new life in him, gives him His Spirit to energize that new life unto obedience.  That is a sovereign act.  That's really regeneration.

     But let's get into this verse and look at the four questions.  Question number one, what is it?  What is the nature of regeneration?  And I've already alluded to it.  In fact, already covered a great portion but just this phrase, "Of His own will, He begot us."  That's the nature of regeneration.  It is God bringing us forth, giving birth to us as new beings.  You're not the same.  You're a whole new creation.  It's the same verb, by the way, exactly the same one used back in verse 15.  God when He conceives brings forth regeneration, brings forth new life, it's the very same verb.  It is in an aorist tense so it looks back to the event of salvation when we were born by the divine parent and given new life as children of God. 

     Now if you want a technical definition for "He begot us," here's one that I think is excellent.  It's given by the theologian Burkhoff(?) many years ago but really says it, "Regeneration is that act of God by which the principle of new life is implanted in man and the governing disposition of his soul is made holy."  That is a great definition.  "Regeneration is that act of God by which the principle of new life is implanted in man and the governing disposition of his soul is made holy."  That is a total transformation.  That doesn't sound anything like Romans 3, does it?  Or anything like Ephesians 2:1 to 3.  In fact, Peter says we become partakers of the divine nature.  God gives us His own life, His own self, His own righteous character, His own holiness is implanted in us.  Just a tremendous thought.