Ephesians 1:4 - Chosen for Holiness

If you do have a Bible turn to Ephesians, we're going to be continuing our study in Ephesians and today

I'm going to be reading Ephesians 1, verses 1 -4, but then in the course of our teaching today, we're only going to be talking about verse 4.

But I'm going to try to read the rest of it just to set some of the context and we'll see what we can say about some of these things.

But Ephesians 1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

Now, you know, if you think about the way that the church actually works and the doctrines that we are particularly and uniquely scandalized by, there are certain doctrines that are related to predestination and election that most

Christians, I would say, don't believe in, but then this is a uniquely difficult subject and topic for many.

I mean, now, you know, if you think about the kind of things that unbelievers are scandalized by, you know, there's any number of verses in the

Bible which unbelievers are going to be scandalized by, thinking about all the things that are happening as it relates to the world.

But most of the time, unbelievers aren't really scandalized by this doctrine simply because they're ignorant about it. But then the problem is that the more that you actually read the

Bible, the more that you'll realize that the Bible teaches the doctrine of election in pretty black and white terms and no uncertain terms.

And so, as you think about a passage like this, this is a passage that has caused, I think, many people probably trouble at different points in their life.

I know it's a passage that caused me some difficulty and trouble. Now, I'm not saying the passage itself caused me trouble, it's just to say that I had trouble with the concept.

And it's strange to think that so many people, myself included, have trouble with a concept which seems to be so clearly taught in the

Bible. So this is one of those passages which the plain sense of the passage is hardly ambiguous, but then when we come to it, it's the kind of thing that can be difficult for us to get our minds around.

And it's something that really does cause us to question a lot of the assumptions that you take when you go into the

Bible, when you read the Bible, it's that kind of thing. But then, as I said, as you read a passage like this, one of the things that can't be more plain and obvious is the fact that God has chosen for Himself a particular people for salvation.

And as we're going to talk about today, He's chosen a particular people for holiness in particular. Now, when you think about the way that the passage starts, it starts out with this phrase, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.

So it starts out with this phrase, even as He chose us, that expression, even as, that's one word in the

Greek. But when you think about that kind of thing, then you're meant to ask yourself, well, what came before it?

So you can understand what we're saying. And so Paul starts out his letter, basically with thanksgiving to God, he says, blessed be the

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So blessed be, that's a way of expressing thanksgiving. So he starts off with this expression, thanksgiving be, or thankfulness be, or blessed be

God. God be worthy of praise, be worthy of all blessing, be worthy of all honor. Well, why?

Why should we be blessing God, or giving thanks to Him, or giving praise to Him, or ascribing honor to Him? Why should we be doing these kind of things?

Well, we should be doing this because God has blessed us. So God has given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

And then Paul is going to start giving us a list of all these blessings that He's given us. And the first one that comes to mind, you know, the first thing that we should be thanking

God for, the first spiritual blessing that God has given to us, is that He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.

Now, as you read through a verse like that, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, it really does stand in stark contrast with much of the way that we commonly think about the gospel message, what's actually happening in salvation.

The way we actually talk about these things, most often, most naturally, we will talk about this subject of salvation as something that we choose to do, right?

So it's something that we fundamentally are choosing to do, mostly of our own volition, mostly of our own will.

There's any number of preachers that you probably listen to who are encouraging individuals to be making decisions for Christ, and I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't at some point decide to follow

Jesus, but what I'm trying to say is that we naturally talk about this subject in the realm of our response to the gospel message, meaning that we're called to repent and believe the good news and place our faith and trust in Jesus.

But then one of the things that's happening as you read through this book in general, and there's many passages just like this, this is in no means an isolated idea that shows up in the scripture, but one of the things that you're going to find here is that whatever choice it is that we make for Christ, it happens on the basis of a choice that God made prior to not only our creation, but then the creation of everything that actually exists in general.

So the Bible teaches, and Paul is telling us here today, that God made a decision to choose believers for salvation before the foundation of the world.

Now, as you say something like that, there's any number of objections that people might have to that kind of concept, and I'm not going to deal with every single objection that might come up today because there are other passages that deal with many of those things, but what

I do want to do is try to talk about some of the ways in which people are looking at the language that we find in this passage in distorting the plain, obvious, basic sense of these words.

And so as you think about this phrase, even as He chose us in Him, the most obvious sense of the word chose is the normal sense in which we use this word on a daily, regular basis.

So at some point in my life, I wanted to get married for a while. I wanted to get married. I was unable to find an adequate marriage partner for a long period of time, but at some point

I made a choice to marry Elizabeth, right? So I made a choice to marry her, and everyone knows what

I mean when I say I made a choice to marry her. You know exactly what I'm talking about. You know that I decided to pick her as my marriage partner out of a group of people which includes, well, now

I guess due to the fact that we've embraced sexual perversion as a society, I suppose that choice for many people includes everyone who exists in the world, but then for me, because I'm a normal person, what that meant was that I was choosing between roughly half of the population, you understand?

So I made a choice between all individuals who are women. I think at that time, Al Mohler had a list of criteria that you should be asking with a marriage partner, and he said, you know, are they a

Christian? And then question number two, are they a woman? And then because of all the confusion that's happening, the third question was, have they always been a woman?

And so, you know, I thought that was a pretty good list, and so I thought to myself, well, I'll pick Elizabeth, and then in picking

Elizabeth, I made a choice. And we all know what I mean when I say I made a choice. You know what I'm saying, right?

I'm saying I didn't choose everyone, right? I didn't decide to choose every single person to be my marriage partner,

I chose her to be my marriage partner. I picked her out of a group of people that included everyone, right?

And so, but then, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people about this kind of passage, and they read something like,

God chose us and him before the foundation of the world, and then what they think is, well, God chose everyone, right?

Well, then I would just look at them and I would say, well, that is not what the passage is saying. It's saying he chose us and him before the foundation of the world.

And so if you want to know who us is, you just read the letter, right? Just read the letter. Who is the us that are chosen before the foundation of the world?

It says, well, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, to the saints who were in Ephesus.

So it seems like the us is the same group that's being addressed at the beginning. So it says,

Paul, the apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, to the saints who were in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.

And then, grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. And then, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed who?

Us. Who is the us? Saints who are in Ephesus and faithful in Christ Jesus. How did he bless us?

Even as he chose us and him before the foundation of the world. So if you want to understand who the us is, all you do is you circle us every time it shows up.

It shows up twice, right? He blessed us with every spiritual blessing in every place, even as he chose us.

You do circle, circle, and then draw an arrow to the saints who are in Ephesus and faithful in Christ Jesus.

Those are the individuals who God has chosen before the foundation of the world. So it's obvious that God, as you read the passage, has made a choice, and that choice is to pick the saints out of a group which includes every human being who actually existed.

Now, you know, as scandalous as that feels, you have to understand something, that this is the consistent teaching of the entire

Bible. As you read through the Bible, one of the things you're going to find is that God is frequently choosing people to bless in the same kind of way, and to be the recipients of salvation in the same kind of way.

So as you read through the Old Testament, one of the things you're going to find is that of all the people who existed during the time of Noah, what did

God do? I think you read through these stories and you don't personalize them in any way, you just think they're stories.

You don't think about maybe the entailments of what's happening, but God chose Noah and his family to be saved from the flood.

Because why? Because God saw the wickedness of man on the earth, and he saw that every intention of their heart was only evil continually.

And so what did he decide to do? He decided to kill every single person who existed at that time, besides Noah and his family.

Every single person. God made a sovereign choice to choose seven people out of a group that included everyone, and he was only going to save those seven people.

So if you have a problem, like the issue is if you have a problem with this idea of choice, you have to understand something, that God is a

God who's made plenty of choices in the Bible. And the story of the Bible is the story of God choosing certain individuals and not choosing everyone.

So God is not like the rec league soccer coach who, instead of choosing people, decides to choose everyone to be a favorite.

That's not the way God actually is. God is a God who made a choice. So in the case of Noah, he chose seven people to be saved and chose the rest of them to be destroyed.

And he was right, and he was just in doing so. And then, if you keep on reading through Genesis, what do you find?

God chooses Abraham. So of all the people who existed, of all the nations that existed, he didn't choose the biggest nation, the greatest nation.

He chose Abraham to be the recipient of the Abrahamic covenant. So Abraham was a pagan idolater before that, and God chose him, out of all the people on the earth, to be a means of salvation for the world.

But you have to understand something. If God chose Abraham to be a means of salvation to the entire world through his offspring, all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

Abraham's one guy, and the world's a big place. And at some point, Abraham begat

Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, right? And Jacob, you know, God gave him a renamed card and changed his name to Israel.

And then, you know, he had 12 sons, they entered into Egypt, and by the time they're entering into Egypt, they're becoming a multitude of people.

But still, in comparison to all the people that existed at that time, they were a small drop in the bucket of all the people that existed.

And when Jesus comes and he's talking to the Samaritan woman, she's trying to get him to decide a theological debate, you know, where the

Jews say they worship God in Jerusalem, we say that we worship God here, who's right? And Jesus essentially says to her, the

Jews are right because salvation is of the Jews. And you have to think about that. God had a plan to save the world through people.

Salvation was from the nation Israel, and before that, from the seed of Abraham. And God made a choice, right?

God chose Abraham. Abraham had a son, Isaac, and then he also had a son, Ishmael, through Hagar, right?

But the promises didn't go through Hagar. The promises went through Isaac, because through Isaac will your offspring be named, right?

Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Salvation didn't come through the Edomites. It came through the

Israelites. Jacob was renamed Israel at that point. And so God has always made a distinction in the way that he's operated throughout the whole thing, and so the point here is just to say that God chose a group of people out of a set of individuals that included everyone, and we shouldn't fundamentally be scandalized by this.

Now, some people, though, they'll look at this and they'll say, well, yes, but this doesn't say that he chose individuals, right?

It says he chose us. That's a group. So God chose a group. And certainly, a question you might want to ask is, is it an individual choice or is it a corporate choice?

Which one is it? Well, I gave you an example of me choosing my wife as an individual, and that's the plain sense of the word.

You understand what I'm saying when I give you an example of me choosing my wife, but then it is possible to make a choice of a group too, isn't it?

And then when you make a choice of a group, doesn't that mean you're choosing individuals to be included in that group?

You understand? So it's not an either or. Is it an individual or is it a group? God chose us as individuals to be included in a group, which is distinguished from all other groups.

That's the way that the Bible works. And there's plenty of examples you can read in the Bible of that exact thing too. So a good example that you might want to look at that's a very simple and obvious example of this very thing of basic, obvious reality of God choosing groups of individuals is what happens in Judges 7.

And if you remember what happens in Judges 7, God has raised up Gideon to be a deliverer for the people of Israel.

The consistent pattern of the book of Judges is, you know, they sin, they get themselves in trouble, they cry out to the

Lord in the midst of their distress. He raises up for them a deliverer. But with Gideon, basically, you had 22 ,000 people who had come to be members of the army.

God says essentially that the people are too many. This is verse 2. The Lord said to Gideon, people with you are too many for me to give the

Midianites into their hand. There's too many people for me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel boast over me saying, my own hand has saved me.

So God doesn't want them to boast in the salvation that he's going to win for them. Those 22 ,000 would maybe give them some reason to boast.

But then he says, now therefore proclaim in the ears of the people saying, whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home and hurry away.

So if you're scared, you can go. Of the 22 ,000, 10 ,000 remain. So that seemed to get rid of some of that group, right?

But then what happened? The Lord said to Gideon, the people are still too many. 10 ,000, still too many. You guys are going to still think you accomplished this victory.

So he made them drink water. Short of it is, you make the men drink water. The ones who bent down and drink it, put them in one group.

And then the ones who lapped the water like a dog, put them in another group. There's 300 people who lapped the water like a dog.

He said, that's going to be my group of people who are going to save you. So he went from 22 ,000 down to 300. But then the thing is,

God made a choice, right? He chose those 300 men. He chose that group of men. He didn't choose the other group, right?

He chose that group of men to be his instrument that he was going to use to bring about salvation for the people.

So the point here is just to say, when we think about this topic today, being chosen for holiness, God chose

Christians out of a group of people that included everyone. He chose a smaller group out of the midst of the bigger group.

And that's what the normal, natural meaning of the word chose actually is.

So the first thing we see is the object of God's choice. The object of God's choice is believers. The means of God's choice, notice how it says, even as he chose us in him.

Now, when you think about what's actually happening here, a lot of people read this in such a way as to say that God didn't actually choose people.

He chose Christ. But that would be the exact opposite of what's actually being communicated. He chose believers.

But he did so through means, right? So God chose believers. But then the kind of choice that he made is different than the kind of choices that we might naturally make.

And that's the point here of what it actually means to be chosen in Christ. Now, as I said, I use my wife as an example.

So I'll embarrass her again, just for the sake of trying to strengthen my marriage. Before I decided to marry

Elizabeth, I had spent some time in Bible college and seminary. And if you know anything about Bible college and seminary, one of the things you realize is that when you go to Bible college and seminary, you're surrounded by a bunch of dudes all the time.

And there is very few women there. And then the few women that are there that are around are being fought over by a bunch of desperate guys.

All right. And that's the way it works. So they're being fought over by a bunch of guys who just think, I got to get married in order to be

OK because no one's going to hire me if I don't figure out how to get married. And that consequently made the ladies that were being fought over think that they're, you know, a little better than what they were.

Right. And so, like, they just got a big head about it. And then that made them weird. And so then it's just like you can't find a lady like that.

That's the way it works. OK. But then coming back from seminary, when I saw Elizabeth, I thought, man, that's what a woman should look like.

That's what I said in my mind. And then, you know, she converted, like legitimately converted to follow the

Lord. And I thought, you know, that's what a Christian should look like. So, I mean, first, obviously, you know, you're blinded by looks.

And then, you know, later on, it's like the Lord's at work in her. And so then I made a choice. But the point, though, is just to say that most people don't make a marriage choice by denying everything that their eyes are seeing, you know, whether physically or spiritually.

Most people try to make a choice that they think makes sense. They're looking for certain things in another individual.

Right. A lot of people have checklists that they have, and some of them are pretty unreasonable. And, you know, the more that you watch

TV nowadays, TV can give you kind of an unrealistic perspective of what normal people are like, because you have like the, you know, the most intelligent, the most beautiful 1 % of people in your

TV on a regular basis. And, you know, for some people, those are their best friends, right? Because that's the only people that they're around.

The most famous, the most charming, the most witty, whatever, you know. I mean, the more you get to know them outside of the movies, you realize that they're kind of dense in certain ways.

But that's neither here nor there. But the point there is to say many people get kind of an unrealistic perspective of what a good marriage partner actually is when they're looking at TV people.

But everyone has some sort of list that they're operating under. Everyone has some sort of list. And you know, like if you're honest, you know that you don't put on that list bad breath, right?

Like scaly skin, right? Severe deformity, you know, kind of thing.

Like you don't put those kind of things on your list. Hopefully disabled, right? I mean, I know

I'm not allowed to say things like that now because everyone, like we're in a different world. But you don't put the negative kind of things on the list, right?

You don't do that kind of thing. So when you're going to make a list, you try to think about all the positive things that you can think about.

And you put all those positive things on there. And most of the time, most people's list is pretty unrealistic, right?

So, you know, if you're a lady looking for a guy, you're not going to say, hey, you know, I want to get married to a guy who is a drive -thru worker at a fast food restaurant.

Hey, if you're working drive -thru at a fast food restaurant, that's great, but you probably can't provide for a family with that. So the point there is just to say you're looking for qualities that you think are going to be exceptional in certain ways.

Often unrealistic and not normal. The problem is that as you read through the Bible, one of the things you realize about people is that God didn't choose us because we were so wonderful.

And God didn't choose us because we were so great. In fact, like if you were to think about the way that God actually picks us,

God picks us in spite of how, you know, awful and bad we actually are.

The consistent teaching of the Bible is not that we were that wonderful marriage partner and that God is just so thrilled to have.

The consistent teaching of the scripture is that, you know, all of us are sinners and that we all violate God's standards and that we're so comprehensively wicked that apart from His grace, there isn't anything that we can do to merit favor for Him.

We're the kind of people that hate everything He says so much apart from His grace that we would literally put

Him to death if we could because we refuse to have Him as King over us. And so the kind of choice that God made is a choice that was made in Christ.

It wasn't the kind of choice that was made on the basis of all of our wonderful attributes. There's a lot of Christians out there who seem to think that in order to help people to be, you know, emotionally whole and help people to be emotionally stable, that you have to basically tell them that they're just wonderful, special, unique, and amazing.

I was reading a tweet on Twitter by an infamous heretic who will be unnamed because you probably don't know who he is and there's no point.

But he says, you matter because you exist and what you do for others adds no inherent value to your mattering.

Meaning you just matter just because you exist. You are invaluable, you are precious, you are worthy, you are a treasure not because of what you can produce but because you've been produced because you are here.

Hold on. And so that's, you know, just a normal kind of self -esteem message that the world has given. But that's not the message of the

Bible. The Bible doesn't say that you matter and you're special and wonderful, unique, treasure and of yourself. You're the person with bad breath, right?

You're the person with the scaly skin. Like, you're the person with that odor that won't go away. You're the person with the massive physical deformities.

Like, you're the person who can barely understand or read or comprehend. Like, you're the kind of person who messes up every job that you do, right?

Mess up every job you do. And not only, like, you mess it all up, but you're the kind of person who fundamentally you have a moral problem deep in your heart where you refuse to submit to God.

And God chose that kind of person to be his treasured possession. And they are a treasured possession to him not because they're so intrinsically valuable.

They're a treasured possession to him because that magnifies the kind of grace and the kind of mercy and the kind of compassion that he shows, which is so foreign to us because we love people who are lovable.

We don't love people who are unlovable. And we deeply struggle to show care and compassion towards people who do us wrong.

But this is not the kind of God we serve. The God we serve shows us in him despite who we actually are in of ourself.

And we come to have great value and worth in our association with him, not just independently as if we are just unique and special and wonderful in of ourself.

So we see the object of God's choice. We see the means of God's choice. He chose us in him. But third, we see timing of God's choice.

When did God choose us for holiness? When did he do that? And the text says before the foundation of the world, God made a choice to choose you in Christ before the foundation of the world.

So if you're a Christian and if you're a believer, God made a sovereign decision far before you ever decided to follow

Jesus. You know, before you ever decided to repent of your sins and believe the good news, God in eternity passed before the foundation of the world was laid.

Far before not just you existed, but anything existed, God chose a particular people to be his treasured possession in Christ.

So God made a sovereign decision to choose you for salvation before he created anything. So what does that mean?

It means that his choice was an autonomous choice. It was a guaranteed choice. It was an unconditional choice and a comprehensive choice.

There's some sort of analogy to this kind of choice that we can make. If you think about your choice, like many of you are having children, you made a choice at some point to have children.

And if you think about the way that choice worked, there's some parallels to the way God made a choice for us, but then there are some remarkable differences if you understand what

I'm saying. So when you chose to have children, you didn't make an autonomous choice. Now that's a fancy word that basically means an entirely free choice, but it was a real choice, right?

What I mean is to say that you made a choice to have children, but it wasn't just a completely free choice that's uninfluenced by anything around you, right?

Obviously, it was funny to watch a lot of you start having kids because all it took was for like,

I think maybe Kayla to have a baby. And then everyone, all the other women after that started getting baby fever, right?

And you can't say it was just your idea that had nothing to do with Kayla because that wouldn't be true, you know? So once she had the baby, a lot of you started getting the baby itch, right?

And Harrison was rebuking everyone, and so part of it was that too. And I did a little rebuking too. He took it further.

He took it further than me, but I'm proud of him.

But the point though is just to say it wasn't just you and your will and your decision. There's a lot of other things that were happening, right?

So there's a lot of people involved in that that were influencing you, but you have hormones too that were influencing you, right?

So, I mean, God's put us on bodily cycles that we have to figure out what to do with, and I'm not going to go into great detail about that, but you know what

I'm talking about. Like there are bodily cycles that tell you that you were designed to have babies, and you can ignore them as long as you want to ignore them, but they still tell you what you're designed to do, and we try to pretend like they're not telling us certain things, but then they are, right?

But then also, He made you a human being, right? He made you a specific gender, even though we're trying so hard to pretend like we're the opposite genders, and you have individuals dressing up like the opposite gender, and they look like freaks of nature.

But that's not the point. The point is to say that you're influenced to do this in a wide variety of ways, and way beyond that.

So God had a sovereign plan before the foundation of the world to, as we're saying, to save people. That means that they have to actually exist, and so He had a sovereign plan to knit you together in your mother's womb and arrange the entirety, the history of your affairs.

A lot of you got married. How did you get married? Well, through a series of events that you had absolutely nothing to do with, that you couldn't bring about even if you wanted to, some of which we won't go into.

But the point is, you made a choice, right? It was a real choice, but it wasn't just a completely free, uninfluenced, independent kind of choice.

It's not that kind of choice, but you made a real choice. But then it's not really a guaranteed choice. So some of you struggling to have kids, for some people it was easy.

You said, hey, I want to have a kid. You can't just make it happen on your timetable, right? It doesn't just work that way.

So you can make a decision, we want to try to have a kid, but it's dependent upon a lot of other things, including

God's sovereignty and His will, and it's not something that you can just guarantee to happen. You understand?

It's dependent. But then, I mean, unless you're like a sadistic baby murderer, right? It feels mostly unconditional, right?

I mean, if you're a sadistic baby murderer and you do an ultrasound, you realize the baby is going to have some sort of deformity. If you're like your father, the devil, you'll kill the baby, right?

But then most Christians aren't that sadistic, you know? And if you are, you're probably not a Christian. If you're that kind of person, you're not a

Christian. You need to repent. No murderer will inherit eternal life in that way. That's not to say that you can't repent of being a murderer like Paul.

It's just to say that if you're a proud murderer, you're not a Christian. But the point, though, is to say it's mostly unconditional, meaning you're choosing to have a baby.

Whatever comes out, you're going to accept, right, if you're a Christian. We're going to make a baby, and whatever comes out is going to be a part of our family, right?

But then the problem, though, is I'm saying it's mostly unconditional. It's not like completely unconditional because you chose who you're going to get married to.

Didn't you choose who you're going to get married to? Meaning you're thinking, I want to marry the kind of person who

I might like to look at the kind of babies that they would produce, right? So I remember there was a

Dr. Phil episode of a girl who got plastic surgery or whatever, and she got plastic surgery and made herself look a certain way.

The guy married her. The kids came out weird looking, right? They came out weird. They did. And then he was trying to sue her.

He was trying to sue her for deceiving him. That's what he did. So for him, you see how

I'm saying it's mostly unconditional? So for him, he didn't realize all the conditions that he had assumed.

He thought they were going to look a certain way, but they didn't. This is true. Christians should never do this, but if you go to the sperm doctor or whatever, it's the same guys that every woman...

There's all the pictures and the profiles, and most of them aren't used. It's just the same one, the same guy that's spreading his name out there.

But for us, what I'm trying to say is it's mostly unconditional, meaning you do think when you choose to have a baby, you're going to accept, if you're not a sadistic murderer, what comes out, and you're making a choice.

And then that person is going to be a part of your family, regardless of what happens. You get what

I'm saying? With very few strings attached, not completely unconditional, but mostly. But then it's also kind of a limited choice you're making.

It's not a comprehensive choice. So think about it. You're making a limited choice, meaning once they're in your family, they're in your family, but you don't really know what the result of all that is going to be.

Theoretically, you could birth a baby Hitler kind of thing. You don't know. I mean, you could birth

Hitler, but there's not really a take back kind of thing. But you can't plan everything in such a way that is going to absolutely and totally prevent that from happening.

You're making a very limited choice in the moment to have a baby and to try to raise the baby and try to influence the outcome of their life.

But you can only do so in a limited way without absolute control. Does that make sense what I'm saying? But then also, it's a gracious choice, isn't it?

I would say of all the things that are parallel, gracious choice might be the only one that mostly is parallel in that, you know, this is something

I didn't learn when I was a kid. I didn't learn how gracious it is. My parents decided to actually have me. And so most kids with a chip on their shoulder think about all the bad things that their parents do and wish they could do better.

But then the problem is that once you actually have a kid for the first time, you realize that, man, like my life is devoted to keeping you from killing yourself or your brothers and sisters, right?

Like that's what I devote my life to. I devote my life to keep you from doing something crazy and dying. And then, you know, the first few months of your life, you're going to keep probably both of us up all night, every night for a few months, at the very least, if it's really tough, you know, five, six months or something like that.

I could have an easier time. You have to be fed every, you know, few hours for a long period of time.

You're going to keep your mother sleep deprived for months at a time, probably. Then we have to change your diapers for years.

Like we literally have to change your diapers for years, figure out how to buy clothes for you, figure out how to feed you.

Like instead of like getting to buy all the stuff that we want to buy and do all the things that we want to do, we have to actually take care of you and watch you and provide for you and feed you.

And not only that, we have to do that for like 18 years of your life. You know, a lot of people out there are failing to launch.

So a little bit longer now than that for some. But no, I mean, we have to spend the rest of our life trying to figure out how to go to work.

Like I go to work every day. I spend a third of my life working. Can you imagine this?

Like I spent a third of my life working so that my family can have a roof over their head so they can figure out how to eat.

Right. Like you didn't deserve that. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like kids, you didn't deserve that. I mean, you didn't.

You didn't do anything. Like when you were a thought in your mom and dad's brain, when you were a thought, hey, we would like to have a baby.

That thought was completely different than what you are. Right. You didn't contribute anything to that decision to have you.

And you haven't contributed. Like right now, you haven't contributed anything to being alive for the most part.

We can't put you to labor and make money off of you or we go to jail. Right. So the point is you do nothing to pay us back.

Right. We have to work and provide for you. And at some point we're going to get old and then it's going to be our turn.

You're going to have to take care of us when we lose a brain. Right. All right. But the only way you're going to do that and not put us in some home where we're going to, you know, like have people hate us, do weird things to us is if you realize, man,

I owe them a debt, you know, a big debt. And that's what the Bible talks about honoring your father and mother is because my goodness, that was a gracious thing that I exist because these other people decided, they made a decision to bring me into the existence with God's help and then take care of me as helpless as I was coming into the world for a long period of time.

And so, yeah, I think there's a part of what I'm trying to say is a part of that choice that's gracious there and that parallels

God's choice of us. And then also it's a loving choice here. So it's a loving choice, which we're going to read in the next verse.

That's for adoption of sons. So most people make kind of a loving choice. Maybe not most people anymore, but who knows.

But normal two -parent families who decide to have a kid are making some sort of loving choice, maybe like a self -motivated like, you know, but there's some love kind of there the way

God is. But here's the point. The point is you make a real choice to have a child based on limited knowledge of what they'll be like with a limited ability to control what they do, who they will become.

But it's your choice you make that has very little to do with them, like who they actually are at the moment, right? Very little to do with them.

They aren't born yet, right? So the best you can do is marry someone that has admirable traits that you hope will be embodied in your child and try to steer them towards a future you desire for them.

You understand? All right. You have no ability whatsoever to cause or influence them to be the way that they want to be.

And if you're a kid, and we all were at some point, you had no ability to influence your parents to have you in any way, to bring you about, to bring you into existence.

You had no ability whatsoever to do any of that. They made a choice to have you apart from anything you could do, right?

When God chose us to be holy, here's the point. It was an autonomous choice, meaning God made it before the foundation of the world.

He made a choice to choose believers. And because no one else existed but Him, it was a completely free choice.

God is the only one who's able to make completely free and independent choices. He made a choice within Himself to bring you about, okay?

It was completely free, unconstrained by anything. It was a guaranteed choice, meaning when God decided to choose believers for salvation, it was guaranteed.

It wasn't, you know, a tentative plan that He was making. He made a plan that included, at a certain point in history, you would come to be born in the exact time and place by the exact people that He wanted you to be born by.

You would have the exact life experiences that He wanted you to have, be put in the exact situation.

So the Bible says that all things work together for good, for them to love Him and be called according to the purpose. He changes times and seasons.

You know, He gives wisdom to the wise. The thing is, God made a guaranteed choice to bring you into existence and have a particular and very specific plan for you.

It was an unconditional choice, meaning He didn't look at you and think there was anything in you that sufficiently constrained

Him one way or the other to have you. You were a rebel sinner just like everyone else was.

The Bible says, They've all gone aside.

They've all turned to their own way. There's none that does good, no not one. There's no one who seeks after God.

God didn't make a choice based on anything in you or anything that He foresaw that you would actually do independently apart from His will.

He made a completely unconditional choice to choose you. And not only that, it was a comprehensive choice, meaning it was a choice to bring you into existence, to let you walk down the script that He has written for your life, and bring you at some point in history, in your lifetime, to a point, if you're a believer, of salvation.

And then at that point, give you justification, adoption, holiness as we're going to talk about.

He made a comprehensive choice to arrange the entirety of your life in such a way that it was going to ultimately culminate and glorify

Him. Not only that, it was a gracious choice, meaning there's nothing you could do to contribute to it, nothing you could do to earn it, and it was a loving choice.

So God chose individuals for holiness, and that choice had nothing to do with anything about you, which we're going to learn about as we go through this passage.

He didn't just choose you because you were better than anyone else. He chose you because you're just like everyone else, and He wanted to glorify

Himself by showing what grace and mercy and love actually looks like. And so God made that kind of choice to choose you with the purpose that they be holy and blameless.

Now, as I was looking at this, I was trying to decide what was better.

Is it better to describe this as a purpose or a goal? And it seems like a lot of times we use purpose and goal in an interchangeable kind of way.

So a goal is like an objective that you might have, and the purpose is the motive that drives you towards a particular goal.

And when you think about this, God chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

Is that an objective in and of itself, or is it a purpose that's driving towards a different objective?

And at the end of it, I settled on purpose because I thought that that made the most sense based on what the Bible says and other places in particular, because it can go either way.

Ephesians 5, 22 -27 says, Husbands, love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave

Himself up for her. So how did Christ love the church? Well, He says

He gave Himself up for her that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of the water with the Word, so that He may present the church to Himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

And that sounds a lot like the kind of thing that we're talking about in this passage, doesn't it? So God chose us and Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

But notice how being holy and blameless before Him is a purpose that's driving towards a particular goal.

And what is that particular goal? The goal is that God before the foundation of the world chose for Himself a bride, which is a group of people, the church, which, you know, that's why it's helpful to have some sort of corporate category here so you don't make the thing weird.

The point there is just to say that God chose the church to be a bride for Him in the future, right?

So if you're writing a song about wearing a wedding dress, Derek Webb, then that's creepy. That's not the point. The point is the church is presented as a body, a metaphorical gift that's going to be given to the

Son at the culmination of history and God's choice of individuals before the foundation of the world.

He chose them that they may be holy and blameless before Him. God made a decision to save individuals and declare them instantaneously to be holy, to give them the righteousness of Christ attributed to them as a free gift, but then not just leave them as God's righteousness, but also they're given an imputed righteousness in theological terms, but they're also given an imparted righteousness.

So God determined to clean them up, right? And present them as a gift to Jesus at the end of the age when

He returns. So God has chosen us before the foundation of the world. He saved us in time, started a process of cleaning us up, right?

And by the time we die, we're going to be, you know, a lot further along in the spotless and blameless kind of category than we were when we started.

But then instantaneously when we die, we're going to be finally perfected, removed of all spot and wrinkle, presented to God as a gift.

And so, you know, what are we talking about here? That we should be holy and blameless before Him? The whole package is all of it.

God has chosen us. He's instantaneously set us apart, devoted us to His purpose, and then He's progressively going to be making us more holy and blameless over the course of our life.

And finally, when we die, we'll be, you know, when we see Him, we'll be just like Him. So how do we respond to all this?

Well, I think we respond by saying that the primary thrust of the passage is we should thank God for His gracious choice of us despite what we deserve.

The text says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.

We should thank God for what He's done for choosing us. If you're saved, you should thank God for choosing you, having a plan to save you, transform you, present you as a gift to Jesus at the end of the age, a plan that was based on Him, that was unconstrained by anything outside of Himself, a plan that's utterly gracious, utterly compassionate.

He's given you mercy. He's given you what you don't deserve. You should thank Him for this sovereign, gracious choice.

You should rest in the nature of the choice that was actually made, meaning if God chose you to save you,

He's fundamentally changed your life. If He's done that, you have to understand if He's began a good work in you,

He's going to be faithful just to complete it. There's nothing you can do to add to that choice or change that choice. He made a choice to have you, just like I made a choice to have my kid, and when

I have my kid, I'm stuck with him, right? I'm stuck with whatever. They're ours. We're glad to be stuck with our kids.

But what I'm saying is whatever happens at that point, they're going to be our kids, right? The thing is, if God saved you, you're

His, and you're secure in that, and He's not just going to leave you where you're at. He's going to change you and make you better, right?

But you can rest in the knowledge that nothing can separate you from His love, neither height nor depth, nor principalities or powers, or any created thing can separate you from the love of God, not even your own sin, your own failure, your own weakness.

Your relationship with God is absolutely, totally secure. We should let it motivate us to greater faithfulness.

If God loved you when you're unlovable, when you're His enemy, when you're spitting in His face, if He had a plan before the foundation of the world to take individuals like that and redeem them and save them, then let that be a means that motivates you to greater devotion to Him and His purposes.

And if you don't know Him today, here's the thing, you don't know what group you're in, and it doesn't really matter, right?

It doesn't really matter to some degree, because the same message of the gospel was Jesus died to save sinners.

The way we respond to that message is by repenting of our sins and believing the good news. And so, you know,

I can't walk around and see who has an E written on their forehead. I don't know. You don't know. The point is, from our perspective,

God's telling us the math behind the scenes, but as far as our responsibility is concerned, God's called us to command everyone everywhere to repent.

And if you're here today and you don't know the Lord, it's your job to repent of your sins and believe the good news and put your faith in Him today, and then you can thank

Him as we are that God had a plan to make that happen before the foundation of the world. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank You for the opportunity we have to think about Your Word, think about things that You've given to us.

Lord, we pray that You help us to be a people who are humbled by the knowledge of what You've done in Christ, that You, before the foundation of the world, have chosen for Yourself a people to be

Your own treasured possession. Lord, we thank You that Your grace and Your mercy and Your plan and Your wisdom are just exhaustive and inexhaustible.

Lord, we know that we have nothing that we can do to contribute to these things in any way,

Lord, but we know that You have a plan for us and pray that You would help us to respond as You call us to the message of what

You've done on the cross. In Your Son's name I pray. Amen. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Providence Church.

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