Bautista Service
Devotion 1: Love Chose
Ephesians 1:4
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. You’re driving down Speedway. You eventually need to get up to Grant, but you’re a strategist, so you watch the traffic patterns and keep an eye out for the slow drivers. You profile the drivers ahead of you by the type and age of vehicle—and whether you get a glimpse of the driver on their phone (!). So, you drive along assessing vehicles and watching for traffic to get heavier, and then—in a split second—you decide. You pick just the right moment, just the right street to turn north on to minimize both your time driving and your frustration. Some decisions are made quickly, on the spot. Other choices are simply routine—left sock, then right sock, then left shoe, then right shoe. Putting them on in any other order, of course, is madness—it would make the whole process feel awkward! You likely made the choice without ever thinking much about what you were doing—and you don’t think much about it now either. Here’s something the Apostle Paul wrote about God and a choice he made: For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. This sounds a lot different than a spontaneous decision or one made with no thought, doesn’t it? No, this sounds quite intentional. Look at how this one sentence is stuffed with divine truths and teachings and how those reveal the love God. It begins with the truth that God chooses us. It’s not the other way around. I know there are a lot of people who feel that a person makes a choice to believe and follow Christ. This is not only inaccurate and unbiblical, it is impossible. There are SO MANY places in Scripture where God expresses and explains the truth that we who have faith in Jesus have it as a result of God choosing us because we cannot choose him. As you hear what God has made you, you realize what you were not before God made his choice. God chose us…to be holy and blameless in his sight. We were not those things. We were the opposite of those things. Instead of holy, we were sinful. Instead of blameless, we were guilty before God. That is a spiritually dead condition. The Bible explains that this is the natural condition of each person, and since that is the case, people are unable to reach out to God and, in fact, have no desire to do so because they are enemies of God. So, if we were to be close to God, something dramatic would have to be done. And our loving God did it. His love prompted him to make a calculated choice. It was impossible for us to come to him, so he decided he would come to us! Here’s another mind-blowing aspect of this: he made his choice before we even existed! Even more mind-blowing: he did this before he created anything! In eternity, God was thinking about you. Out of all the people who have ever or will ever populate this planet, God saw you coming and with a love undeserved, he picked you out to be holy and blameless before him. Before God said, ‘Let there be light,” or “Let us make mankind in our image,” he was thinking about you; he chose you.