UNCONDITIONALLY CHOSEN & LOVED

Remember as a kid being part of choosing teams in P.E. class?  The P.E. coach would select a couple of team captains who were most likely the two most athletic students in the class.  Then, one by one, they would go back and forth choosing the members of their team for whatever sport the class was getting ready to play.

Subject to the sport to be played, the team captains would choose first those they believed would be likely to benefit their team the most.  It also meant that those of us who were the least athletic would be chosen last.  Regardless of where you may have fallen in the selection process, it would have left you with a feeling about where you landed AND about where those who were chosen first and last landed.  

In this model, some are more "chosen" than others.

I have used this illustration many times when speaking to groups.  I usually suggest we try it ourselves or at least ask the group to consider what it would be like if we did.  What if we had all the men in the room stand up, select two captains, and have them choose teams for a football game...?  Who would be chosen first?  Who would be chosen last?  Why?  How do you think those would have been chosen last would feel?

The less "chosen" you feel in that process, the more likely you are to start thinking and maybe even saying out loud:

• Who wants to play anyway?
• This game is dumb. 
• I don't want to play.
• My ankle hurts...I don't feel well... I'll just watch...

That is a natural human response when we feel others are chosen to participate and we are something less than chosen.

Can I just tell ya something?  We are not likely going to genuinely and humbly surrender to or faithfully serve in obedience a God we do not really believe loves unconditionally.  In the very same way God came looking for Adam and Eve in the Garden, you better believe that, oh hallelujah, God came looking for you.  When you are feeling something less than chosen or less than unconditionally loved by God, read all of Ephesians 1 aloud to yourself. Each time the Apostle Paul uses a pronoun such as our, us, or we, replace it with my, me, and I.

Prayer - 
Father, Your Word tells me I am unconditionally chosen and loved by the Creator of the Universe not because of anything I have done or can do for You.  This truth sits at the center of my hope in Jesus.  Help me to lean hard into these Biblical truths in my day to day and to live in such as a way that others are asking me about my hope.

#Missions #Evident #MásDeTi

For he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before him.  -- Ephesians 1:4 (CSB)

For he chose ME in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before him.