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 unredeem