02-01-09 Chosen

Last week we began a study of 1^st Peter,

a letter written by the Apostle Peter

for Christians who are facing uncertain times.

We just naturally hope for and seek

as easy and stress-free a life as we can have.

In other words,

rarely do we volunteer for pain,

and only when we are convinced

that the benefits offset the agony of getting there.

It is the way of our flesh - to want and seek the most pain-free path.

And yet when we choose submission to Jesus Christ,

our allegiance to Him will create a level of turmoil in our lives

that did not exist before.

We will find peace with ourselves and with our God

at a level we never knew before,

but we will also find an antagonism between us

and this world system in which we live

that we never knew before.

Paul was rather blunt, even brutal in the way he expressed it to his friend, Timothy.

2TI 3:12 And indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

Thanks for the encouraging words, Paul!

But that isn’t the whole picture,

in fact not even remotely.

And if we listen carefully to the New Testament writers

we’ll hear them preparing us, equipping us

for these lives we’re called to live.

And if we trust what they say to us

we will find that what our God offers us

is a life that is a very good life indeed,

a life that is deeply satisfying,

a life that literally has eternal significance.

One of those New Testament documents

that was written specifically to equip us for the tough times in life

is 1^st Peter.

And last week we just barely began our study of this book.

We listened to Peter as he told us honestly

about who we are in this world.

In his opening words

he tells us that we reside as aliens, scattered throughout the world.

And as we looked closely at the words he selected for those opening comments

we saw that he was describing us

as sojourners, foreigners called to take up temporary residence

in a foreign land.

And implied in his words

was the message that we should not be surprised

when we discover that the world system around us

is powerless to give us a true, deep sense of security or hope for the future.

And just so that I don’t give the wrong impression,

let me say that we are certainly not suppose to ignore or attempt to avoid the social systems around us.

The more we understand them

and make them work for us the better.

In fact some of our Lord’s comments to us about our use of the financial system around us may surprise you.

There was one place in the Gospel of Luke

where He went into great detail describing the shrewd business dealings of a pagan steward

and then He went on to say,

LUK 16:8-11 "And his master praised the unrighteous steward because he had acted shrewdly; for the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by means of the mammon of unrighteousness; that when it fails, they may receive you into the eternal dwellings. He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much. If therefore you have not been faithful in the use of unrighteous mammon, who will entrust the true riches to you?”

There is certainly nothing righteous or godly

about failing to make the world system work for you as much as possible.

But that is a very different thing

than viewing that system as our source of security in this world.

And from the opening words of his letter to us

Peter wants us to know

that even though we are temporarily on assignment here

this is not really our home

and it certainly is not the true source of our hope or our security.

But then in verses 2-5

he goes on to remind us of the way things really are.

And if we are able to hear what he’s saying

it gives us a basis for hope and a foundation for life

unlike anything this world system could ever offer us.

In verse 2 He says that we...are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, that you may obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood: May grace and peace be yours in fullest measure.

And before we go any farther here

I need to warn you that what I am about to share with you

I cannot explain to your satisfaction.

I cannot explain it to my own satisfaction.

I know it’s true,

just as you know it’s true in your own spirit,

but it will raise questions for which we are not given the answers.

It will help a little, I think,

if I remind us that Peter has made it clear

that he is writing exclusively to those who have already entered the Kingdom of God

through their own personal submission to the King.

This is not an evangelistic book.

This is not an open letter to the world

calling the human race to repentance and submission.

This is a closed communication

between Jesus Christ and His people.

And what He says to us here

are things we already know in our spirits,

but things our minds will have trouble with.

You see, after reminding us of our foreign status in the world,

the next thing Peter does

is to remind us of how we found our way into the family of God in the first place.

And in one of the most remarkable statements found anywhere in Scripture

Peter tells us that we ...are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

When I first came to this phrase in Peter’s letter

I did what I frequently do when confronted with a statement in Scripture

that doesn’t seem quite right to me -

I did some research on the exact meaning of the Greek words

that were translated for the English text.

The two words that attracted me

were the words “chosen” and “foreknowledge”.

I was just certain

that there had to be something in those words that I was not seeing correctly,

something that would shift the meaning in a direction that was easier for me to understand.

But the more I studied those words

the worse (or better) it got.

There is a greater message in that word “chosen”

than what comes across in the English text.

As we might expect,

it does indeed mean a conscious, willful choosing on the part of God,

a careful, specific choosing

based upon knowledge and close examination.

But there is something else tied to the word as well.

It doesn’t simply mean a conscious choosing,

but it means a conscious choosing, a careful selection because the one being selected is highly favored.

The selection, the choosing is directly linked

to the great value the chooser places on the one being chosen.

It is a choosing based upon the strong conviction on the part of the chooser

that the one being chosen meets or exceeds expectations.

It’s a little bit like what we do

when we go into the produce department at the grocery store

to look for a piece of fruit.

What do we do?

We carefully examine each possibility,

checking firmness, color, size,

looking for any evidence of flaws.

And when we make our selection

we do so because the one chosen

is highly favored because of its attributes.

And here is Peter

writing his letter to those who are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

Did you ever look at yourself

and your union with God through Christ

and find yourself thinking that you made it into the Kingdom

in the same way a marginal potato makes it’s way into someone’s home?

We pick up a 10 pound bag of potatoes

and we don’t really know what they’re all like

until we get home and open the bag.

Did you ever find yourself thinking

that once God opened up this offer of salvation through Christ

to anyone who would respond

He ran the risk of getting some folks in the mix

that He didn’t really want,

people who weren’t really what He was looking for, hoping for,

but people He has to accept in order to keep His promises to the human race?

And did you ever find yourself thinking

that just maybe you are one of those people,

one of the ones He wasn’t all that excited about

but has to accept because you came with the bag?

And do you have any idea

how utterly wrong you are?

Let me tell you who you really are.

You are the chosen one of God Himself,

carefully selected by Him,

and then called to Himself by His Spirit

because you are highly favored by Him.

He didn’t just get you along with the bag,

He knew you in intimate detail

while you were still in the womb.

And He fell in love with you even before you were born

and He carefully put in place

a hundred thousand tiny factors of your life

all designed to open you up to His love

and give you the ability to hear His voice calling to you.

And Peter makes it clear

that this choosing on the part of God

was in no way random or haphazard.

That’s why he doesn’t just say we were chosen by Him,

but rather that we were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

And when I dug into that word foreknowledge

I discovered that it really does mean

exactly what it appears to mean.

It means to know beforehand.

It means that God’s choosing of you

was based upon His full knowledge of you

before you ever knew Him,

before you ever heard His voice,

before you ever came in contact with His love.

Long before you knew anything about Him

He knew everything about you.

He knew it all.

He knew where you would be damaged by the sins of others,

He knew where you would be weak,

and where you would be strong.

He knew what you would learn easily,

and where you would struggle in agony for a very long time

before you would finally hear the truth.

He knew every intimate aspect

of that utterly unique personality

that makes you who you are.

And He knew something else as well.

He knew that in spite of it all,

in spite of all of the lies and the wounds and the damage inflicted on you

by an enemy bent on your destruction

and a world system built on darkness,

He knew that once your spirit gained a glimpse of the light of His love

you would respond,

you would reach out to Him,

you would come out from the jungle of your own soul

and risk allowing Him to love you.

He knew you would come to Him when you heard His voice

and it was what He longed for more than all else,

what brings Him joy beyond anything we could ever imagine.

It fascinates me to see what Peter does for us

in these opening words of this letter.

He begins by telling us honestly

that we do not and will not fit in this world system around us,

that we are aliens in a strange land.

But then the very next thing he tells us

is that, even though we do not and will not ever fit in this world system,

we do fit absolutely with our God,

the God who knew us absolutely before we ever knew Him,

the God who chose us for Himself because we were highly favored by Him.

I know I’ve shared this with you in the past,

but I tried to put some of this truth into words

when I allowed Peter in The Fisherman

to describe that day when Jesus chose Matthew as His disciple.

I think that when we are most honest before our God

there is an awful lot of Matthew within most of us.

Matthew knew he had no claim to this Man’s love or kindness or forgiveness.

Matthew was a traitor,

a slimy little tax collector

who had sold his soul to the Roman government

for a handful of silver coins.

And when he looked at Jesus

he saw only what might have been,

if years before he would have chosen integrity rather than greed.

But then came that day when he sat at the back of the crowd,

filled with emptiness and regret,

listening as Jesus called the faithful ones to His side.

I’ll let Peter tell you the rest of the story.

The next name he spoke, however, took the crowd by surprise.

“I would also like you, Matthew, to join me.”

No one was more surprised to hear his name than Matthew himself.

He was sitting at the very back of the crowd,

his eyes fixed not on Jesus but on the ground in front of him.

When he heard his name spoken,

he looked up, then looked around him,

apparently curious to see the man who shared his name—

the faithful, obedient, devout Matthew

who had just been selected for this great honor.

But when no one else stirred,

Matthew looked at the Master.

To his amazement, Matthew saw that Jesus,

and indeed most of the rest of the crowd, was looking at him.

For a moment he just sat there,

his mouth hanging open in disbelief.

As I watched Matthew stand and then work his way to the front,

I wondered at how such different paths

could have led us both to this same spot.

I had spent much of the past year

dancing around in front of the Lord,

frantically waving banners and carrying signs declaring,

“Peter is your man!”

My boastful flesh assured me

that Jesus had indeed chosen wisely when he selected me,

and he could certainly not do better than to choose others like me.

Matthew, on the other hand,

came forward in utter disbelief,

still unable to accept what was taking place.

His fearful flesh,

combined with his sense of shame and failure

over his union with the hated Roman Empire,

made him feel as though Jesus was making a mistake.

Even when he finally reached the six of us standing next to Jesus,

he stood a few feet away.

I looked over at him,

saw the amazement and insecurity in his eyes,

and in a rare moment of selfless compassion

reached out and placed my hand on his shoulder.

That was the first time I ever saw him smile.

He took a step closer to the group and said,

“I can’t believe this! I can’t believe he chose me.”

Silent tears were streaming down his cheeks...

Some of you have read the current national bestseller called “The Shack”.

The book contains a remarkably non-traditional presentation of our Creator

and of His love for each of us,

and though there are some areas where the author and I see things a little differently,

there are a number of places where he powerfully communicates the way things really are.

But I mention the book this morning

because there is a phrase the author repeatedly has his imagined God saying about a number of individuals in the book.

He says, “I’m especially fond of that one...”.

That one phrase

may capture better than anything else I could offer

the heart of what Peter is telling us

when he tells us that we were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

For, you see,

as uncomfortable as that truth may be to us,

and as much as it unsettles us

to wrestle with the reality of our Creator

personally selecting us for Himself

because of the great value He places upon us,

it is the way things really are.

We have been chosen by our God,

and though we will never fit well in this world,

we fit perfectly with Him

because He is especially fond of us - of you and of me.

Funny how it is...

though on the surface it seems like the knowledge of this truth

would be glorious news to us,

yet in reality it can be terribly unsettling

because it restructures the very core of our relationship with our God.

Certainly we want to know

that God loves us in a generic sort of way,

that if we were to meet Him on the street

or find Him in a room when we entered

that He would be kind in His attitude toward us.

But given our own anxiety about so many things in our lives

that we know simply are not exactly

or perhaps even remotely what we think He would want them to be,

we also take comfort in the thought that there is at least a little distance between us and Him.

Though we don’t consciously think in these terms,

we may like the thought that there are an awful lot of people in the world

and maybe He’s sort of busy with some of His more difficult cases

and really isn’t all that focused on our individual life.

In other words,

there is with all of us

an element of fear in our attitude toward God

that makes us uncomfortable in our relationship with Him.

But when Peter comes along

and tells us that not only is God’s attention not focused somewhere else,

but that in fact His attention has been fully focused on us since before our birth

and He has carefully, consciously chosen us for Himself

it must of necessity cause us to rethink our whole attitude toward Him

and His attitude toward us.

At the very least,

it means that He sees us

very differently than we see ourselves.

And that, I can tell you, is true with absolute certainty.

You see, my friend, He is indeed especially fond of you,

and He wants you to know that truth first of all, most of all,

because only when that truth begins to take root within us

will we then begin to trust what He says to us.

And then, just one final comment about the choosing thing before we close -

does the fact that He has chosen us

mean that He has not chosen others?

And the answer to that is NO.

Do you remember when we first started this study

I emphasized that these words were written specifically to Christians?

I did that because what God is saying to us here

is something that God has already spoken to our spirits,

something that only the Christian can hear and understand correctly.

Even through all of our natural fear and anxiety in our relationship with our Lord,

what I’ve just told you about God personally choosing you and calling you to Himself

is something that lines up perfectly

with what you already know in your spirit.

In fact, you knew it could not be any other way,

and you have at times found yourself wondering, “Why ME? Why did He choose ME?”

He wants you to know the answer to that question -

He chose you because you hold a very special value to Him

and He chose you because...well, because He is especially fond of you.

But the truth is

He is especially fond of every one of His creations.

But here’s the problem -

the only ones who can ever know that truth

are the ones who have chosen to respond to His choosing.

And unless we do,

until we do

we cannot know His heart or enter into the life-changing discovery of His love.

One of the biggest problems we run into

when we attempt to understand this

is that because we can relate to only one person at a time

we all live with a concentric circle approach to relationships

and we assume God must as well.

By that I mean

that each of us mentally manage our relationships

on the basis of their importance to us.

We all have a small inner group of relationships

or often just one relationship

that we place in our inner circle.

Typically this is our marriage partner or our immediate family.

From there,

we have a second ring of relationships

that hold great significance in our lives,

but that are less important to us than those in the inner circle.

And from there we move out to less and less significant circles.

And if we say to ourselves or to another person

“I am especially fond of that person”,

we are saying something significant about their placement in those circles.

But what we often fail to realize

is that there are no concentric circles with God.

Because He is able to relate fully and completely and personally

to every individual at all times,

He never ever has to choose one person over another.

And for Him to say, “I am especially fond of this person”

does not mean that He is not especially fond of the person next to them.

Now, we’re only half way through Peter’s opening words,

but we’ll have to wait until next week

before we look at the second half.