Tested and Chosen
Test time!!! Consider the following choices:
Chocolate or Vanilla?
Coke or Pepsi products?
Warner Brothers or Disney cartoons?
Marvel or DC Comics?
Star Trek or Star Wars?
Michigan or Michigan State?
Apples or Oranges?
Cover or Original Song?
Questions come in a variety of importance. Some are easy to answer and a matter of preference. Some are harder and will define who we are and what we will become. Coke or Pepsi is trivial next to College or Trade School. Not that one is right or wrong, but the choice will direct your future. Choices and Judgements are a big part of life. We struggle with this. How do you know you made the right choice? What are the consequences of that choice? How about this one?
Sinner or Saint?
How do you see yourself? That one hurts doesn’t it. I wanna be a saint, but I know my life is not very saintly. So I must choose sinner right? Yet I’m not that bad right? So I’m not a sinner. That means I must be a saint But I go to church, and I need Jesus, so CLEARLY I must choose sinner. But I’m in church, and that makes me a good person, so I am a saint…….
OK STOP
You see we want to make it all about us. Our choice. Our decision. We want to pick Jesus. The truth is Jesus picked us. It wasn’t our choice. Look at John 15:
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command you, so that you will love one another.
Look at this closely.
God loves you.
We are Jesus friends.
We were chosen by God
We are appointed by God.
We are given fruit…gifts…to share with those around us.
These are all things acted upon us. Choices made for us, not because of us. That’s a heavy thought. God chose you. Yesterday, today and tomorrow he chooses you. That is the love of our God for His creation.
You are gonna have to make a lot of choices in this life. But as you do, rest assured. God made a choice to, and he would rather see his son crucified than you removed from his presence.
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
God laid a life down for you. No greater love.
Live in that love my friends.
Pastor Dan