CHOSEN BUT NOT CHOICE
John 15:15-16a & Ephesians 1:3-5
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
September 7, 2025
If we’re disciples of Jesus, what’s the most essential and fundamental thing that can be said about us?
It isn’t a quality in our character or conduct, but a quality in God’s heart: His grace – His grace in having chosen us before we had any thought or inclination to choose Him. It is as Jesus told His first disciples it was: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you.”
Entirely at His initiative, the Son of God reached out to us and pulled us close in love. Our subsequent response of faith is derivative from His initiative. In fact, Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me.” In other words, we’d not be His then had He not made us His own.
All of us who believe and receive Jesus do so, not because we wised up and recognized our need of Him, but because He opened us up and won us over. We follow and obey Him, not because we have something right about us, but because He chose to help the helpless and to lead us down the right path.
His choice was first and decisive. He in His divine sovereignty, and not we in our human responsibility, sets us on a new and better path. But why did God choose us?
There’s no apparent justification for it. We the chosen are not the choicest people. We’re no worthier of Him than anyone else. We’re no better, wiser, more virtuous or spiritual than others. There’s no good reason for His choosing us but His goodness and His choosing to choose us. The circular logic there is just another way to say there’s no explaining our redemption except in terms of His unearned and unwarranted kindness.
What we are talking about here is what theologians call the doctrine of election or predestination. They formulated it to try to do justice to the clear revelation of the biblical truth that we are saved by a grace alone, a truth found in many scriptures such as today’s from Ephesians, which says God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world” – that is, before we even existed – and “destined us for adoption as his children”. Isn’t that an elaboration of what Jesus was saying in telling the disciples that He chose them before they ever chose Him and that no one could ever come to Him except that God the Father draw them?
Bearing in mind these truths lessens one spiritual problem and creates another one.
These truths lessen the temptation in the chosen to see themselves as “choice”. These truths disable the lure of arrogance and delusions of superiority. For they remind us that we can take no credit for becoming God’s people because it was all God’s doing, from start to finish. We might want to claim some responsibility for our redemption by saying “I was honest and humble enough to admit my need of a Savior” or “I had the good sense not to accept a great deal from God” or “I made something of what God offered.” The truth of the doctrine of grace, and its echo in the doctrine of predestination, reinforces our awareness that every good thing about us came originally from God as a blessing we couldn’t bring ourselves and that we’re no different than anyone else except that God as an undeserved favor chose us, no thanks to anything virtuous or special about us. If the only difference with us is due to God’s inexplicable grace, then we have no basis on which to look down on or disdain anyone.
But believing all this creates a problem. If people only become God’s own by God’s own doing, why does a perfectly good God not do that for everyone?
I hate to admit it, but I don’t think there’s anything that puts that question to rest. Unresolved perplexities like that drive me crazy, because I like to have everything figured out in a nice, neat logical package. Yet, the Bible often gives us paradoxes. A paradox is a pair of truths that seem to contradict each other. Examples of such come from the central convictions of the Christian faith: for instance, that God is one and yet three, or that Jesus is 100% human and 100% divine. Here we have the paradox of human responsibility and divine sovereignty: it is up to us to choose God when we are free not to and we are only moved to choose God as a result of His having already chosen us.
Whether we like it or not, sometimes we do more justice to all the truth we have by living with paradoxes than by eliminating them. And it is possible to act consistently with them all even though we can’t resolve the apparent inconsistencies.
Think of how Augustine urged his fellow believers to pray with the thought that everything depends on God and to labor in the cause of compassion and justice with the thought that everything depends on us. A paradox we can’t rightly resolve intellectually we can still rightly use in our behavior. Think how in praising God and bearing witness to Him, we give Him credit for doing it all; while in following and obeying Jesus we give our all to doing our essential part.
In figuring out how we can recognize divine sovereignty and human responsibility at the same time, R.B. Kuiper gives a helpful analogy. Imagine you’re in a room from which the only means of exiting are two holes in the ceiling. Hanging down from each hole are two ends of a rope which runs over a pulley above the ceiling. If you hold on to just one end of the rope and try to climb up and out by it alone, you fall. If you hold on to both ends and climb up and out by them together, you surmount your challenge.
Divine sovereignty and human responsibility are, I believe, opposite strands of a reality that one day we’ll see is of one piece. And holding on to both strands, despite the intellectual frustration of it, helps us now to live better. First, it humbles us by reminding us that God is great and His ways are beyond our comprehension – and that awareness enables us to put our heart and soul in what we can’t get our head around. Second, it bolsters our hope by reminding us that, while we have an essential contribution to make in our life with God, He is making His own decisive contribution – and the unwarranted grace of it justifies an unlimited expectancy in hope. Third, it stirs us up to generously love and serve everyone, apart from how deserving they are, by reminding us how God is generously loving and serving us, apart from how deserving we are. If we recognize that every good thing we have is a gratuitous gift of God’s grace and that He’s been good to us way out of proportion to how good we’ve been, we will, with glad gratitude, share His abundance of blessings with others; and if we recognize that He chose to love us like that “just because” and in no part because we’re choice people, the worthiness of any recipient of our love and service is irrelevant to us.
So let us choose to accept that we are chosen by God while not being especially choice, and choose to embrace our responsibility to share God’s sovereign grace with whomever we can. Let us pray.
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