Learning to Hear the Voice of Love - God Chooses Us

All of us know what it’s like to want to be chosen for something. 

Maybe you dreaded recess at school, knowing that you’d be among the last to be picked for a kickball or dodgeball team.  Many of us remember the feeling of trying out for a team in Jr. High or High School, and waiting nervously until the coach posted the roster on his or her office door after the last tryout.  Would we make the team, or would be be cut?  Maybe you were a musician, singer or actor and you remember the feeling of trying out for a chair in the band, or a role in the school play or musical, and waiting nervously for the director to post the results. 

As we’ve grown into adulthood, the desire to know that we’re chosen for something remains.   We know well the pain of rejection in dating relationships or marriage when somebody decides that they no longer love us and no longer choose us.  We work hard and do our jobs, hoping to be chosen for a promotion, raise or recognition from the boss, only to be crushed when it doesn’t come.  Sometimes as our kids get older and become teenagers on the verge of adulthood, the choices they make and the words they speak may make it feel as if they reject our love. 

When we’re rejected or passed over or discarded, it hurts.  When those things happen, we internalize the rejection and believe that we’re unwanted and unloved and insignificant.  This becomes a huge part of the lie of self-rejection in our hearts and minds.  We may know in our heads, in an academic sense that God loves us.  But we start to believe that He would never choose us, because nobody else chooses us. 

Ephesians 1:4-6 tells us differently though:  “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-- to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”

This is huge, wonderful, beautiful news for us when we struggle to believe that God wants something to do with us, and that He loves us and thinks we’re significant. 

I love the way The Message paraphrases v.4: “Long before He laid the earth’s foundations, He had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of His love, to be made whole and holy by his love.” 

Let that blow your mind for a minute.

Whether we believe that the earth is 10,000 years old or even millions or billions of years old, God had us in mind before He made any of it.  Not only did He have us in mind, He chose us for a relationship with Him through his Son, Jesus Christ. 

Do you hear God’s love for us in that one statement?  We.  Are.  Chosen. 

Our lives are not an afterthought.  They are not a mistake.  They are not insignificant.  They have been planned by God for all of eternity and He chooses us.  God doesn’t choose us because we’re good at sports.  God doesn’t choose us because we can sing really well or play an instrument.  God doesn’t choose us because we know how to climb the corporate ladder.  God doesn’t choose us because we have everything all figured out and can handle things on our own.  God chooses us because He loves us no matter what. 

V. 5 tells us that God chooses to love us and to bring us into a life-giving relationship with Him through Jesus because it brings Him pleasure!  Rick Warren, in his bookThe Purpose Driven Life, puts it so simply and beautifully when he says that we bring a smile to God’s face when we believe His promises about us and learn to trust in his goodness and love through a life of whole-hearted worship and obedience to Him.  Not only does God choose us for a relationship with him, He takes pleasure in loving us and being in relationship with us. 

V.6 tells us that all of this comes through Jesus.  Because of Jesus, our lives can be a celebration of God’s goodness, even as we struggle to overcome the voices in our heads that cause us to reject ourselves.  As we learn to fix our eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:2), we are reminded that God chooses us.  As the author of our faith, all of these good things begin with him and his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead.  As the perfecter of our faith, all of these good things continue in our lives when we see his love for us and hear the Voice of Love calling us out of darkness and into new life.