1st Peter 1:3
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
God has causes “us,” the believer, to become Born Again, and now having been made Born Again, God is at work in our lives “to will and to work according to His good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13)
John Calvin: “He shows that God was not induced by any merits of ours to regenerate us to a living hope because he attributes this wholly to His mercy. In order more completely to reduce the merits of works to nothing he says, great mercy. All, indeed, confess that God is the sole Author of our salvation, but afterwards they invent extraneous causes, which detract to that extent from His mercy.” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, Hebrews and I and II Peter, p.232, emphasis mine)
What Calvin is saying is that faith (at least, according to how Arminians view it), is a merit, and therefore trusting in Christ cannot induce God into making you Born Again, even though God specifically said at John 3:16 that He gives eternal life to those who believe in Him. (This is because Calvinists believe that people are unconsciously, involuntarily and preemptively made Born Again in order to believe, so that when they hear the Gospel, they naturally believe.) The whole argument stems on faith being a merit, which, of course, it is not. (Romans 3:27)
The great mercy of God is that when fallen man surrenders his heart to Christ, God graciously seals him in Christ, with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13), whereupon the old creature is transformed into a new creature. No one is preemptively sealed in Christ without first having submitted to Christ. You can only become sealed in Christ after first having believed in Christ.
