Activating the Power of God’s Word

God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

ONE MORNING DURING my devotions I read the words Jesus used to teach His disciples about producing fruit and loving one another. Out of all the wisdom in His instructions, one statement especially stood out:

“You did not choose me but I chose you.”

—JOHN 15:16

Perhaps it was the timing. I had just launched into my own ministry and was feeling very insecure about it. But in this moment Jesus’s words jumped off the page and spoke very personally to me. “I chose you,” I heard Him whisper.

Hearing Jesus assure me with the words I chose you was like a healing salve to my emotions. These three little words suddenly unpacked themselves and gave life to my weary self. They affirmed that although others had rejected me in the past, God chose me from the beginning. They confirmed God’s call on my life, easing my apprehension about whether people would accept me in the ministry. With this I quickly took these words and personalized them into a declaration: “God—chose—me!” The magnitude of the simple but profound truth of being chosen by God was a foundation on which I built confidence for ministry. Today it still gives me the courage to keep on keeping on.

I have come to learn that I am rarely alone in my struggles. As I travel and minister, I repeatedly hear from both men and women of every age with similar uncertainties. Many people are convinced that they are accidents or mistakes and are therefore unwanted, unneeded, or undesired. I know too well how these insecurities affected my life, which is why I believe God has called me to set the record straight.

Begin to observe the people in your classroom, in your office, at the store, or in your church. Look at how they walk. Listen to how they talk. You will likely see one of two ways in which most hold themselves: head held low and quiet or flashy and loud. While these seem to be two very different postures, both are often rooted in the same insecurity—fear of rejection. The one who holds her head low does so because she has never had anything authentic to give her identity and confidence. In fact, she has likely experienced intense rejection in the past and is afraid of being rejected again. She therefore doesn’t engage with anyone or anything in life. The one who is boisterous might have the opposite experience. He has become accustomed to people liking him for his abilities or his stuff. He therefore believes he must continue to project a flashy image to remain accepted.

These outward manifestations are the product of a society that has run amok. Sure, people of all generations have faced rejection. Kids have always been cruel to one another. People have always selected friends based on superficial characteristics such as looks or abilities. But the rejection many face today is much deeper than being passed over for a promotion or chosen last for a team. Think about the influences of these modern issues on people in our society:

• Increased divorce rates leave the other spouse feeling unwanted and the children betrayed.

• Increased births outside of marriage leave children believing they are unplanned and undesired mistakes.

• Modern science intends to show that there is neither a Creator nor a purpose to life; we are all just accidents of evolution.

• Secular culture accepts individuals based on their success, which is defined by a person’s financial situation, career, or the number of social media contacts. If you don’t achieve, you don’t measure up.

Don’t be naive about the unique challenges that pervade our culture. Many of the effects from these issues aren’t simply outgrown. Often they are identity shapers with intense power to skew our beliefs about ourselves. It is therefore increasingly imperative that we look to God’s Word as a solid foundation on which to build godly confidence and a healthy self-image.

I regularly hear people ask, “Why did God create people?” Certainly it is not because God needed us; He is not codependent. His security and well-being are not affected by anything we provide. No, God is self-sufficient, which means that He is complete and lacks nothing.

Second, God didn’t create us because He was lonely. At the time of creation, when God spoke humankind into existence, He said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). God the Father was in relationship with His Son and His Holy Spirit. He definitely wasn’t without company.

Finally, God didn’t even need to be worshipped. Unlike some of us, God doesn’t have a “love tank” that needs to be filled with words of affirmation, acts of service, or gifts. We worship God and give Him these things out of gratitude for who He is, not because He needs them to remain emotionally stable.

The answer to why God created us is fairly simple actually. God created us because He desired a family. While most of us want a family so that we don’t spend the rest of our lives alone, God’s desire was pure and not self-motivated. God simply wanted a family to whom He could fully express His unconditional love.

I can imagine that before the creation the Father conferred with His Son and His Spirit and said, “Let’s start a family to share our love with.” And He did. The Bible gives us a glimpse into this.

Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.

—EPHESIANS 1:4–5, NLT

When I read this verse, I nearly erupt with spontaneous praise. Ponder the incomprehensible implications of what it says:

• God saw you before He made the world. Long before you were news to your parents, you were the apple of God’s eye.

• God hasn’t loved you just since you became a Christian, since you “got it all together,” or even since you were born. No, God has always loved you, during everything you have been through, even before time began.

• God chose you to be set apart (holy), and He chose to see you without any faults.

• God decided, “I want __________ (fill in your name) to be a part of My family forever!”

• Through Jesus, God went to great lengths to ensure your adoption. Nothing is going to take you out!

That God adopted us adds even more significance to our place in His family. By definition, adoption means that parents choose someone not their own to be taken as their own and to share in the heritage and the legal rights of the family. An adopted child isn’t a half child or a stepchild, but a child who is completely part of the family, the same as if he or she were a biological son or daughter.

Of course, adoption isn’t without risks. The National Infertility & Adoption Education Nonprofit acknowledges on its Creating a Family website that “adoption is a leap of faith…because [children] have had experiences before coming into your home.”¹ Because of the possible complications, this organization advises adoptive parents to ask serious questions to determine whether they and the child are a good match for each other. This includes in-depth scrutiny into the pasts of the biological parents, and for an older child, behavioral indicators such as his or her ability to make friends.²

Many of us have had plenty of negative experiences prior to joining God’s family. Some come from abusive homes and parents who never knew the Lord. Others have pasts full of struggles, addictions, and regrets. Too many more have never thought of themselves as desirable to anyone. Certainly if God decided our adoptions based on an idea that “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,” we’d all be doomed! This makes God’s choice to adopt you and me all the more substantial.

All throughout the Bible God’s recruitment plan is consistent: He opts for the simple instead of the wise, the weak over the powerful, and the humble rather than the noble (1 Cor. 1:26). To be sure, God doesn’t pick people like we do! Just consider some of these seemingly curious choices.

When God wanted to establish a nation for Himself, He chose a man named Abraham (originally named Abram) to initiate His plan. For such a monumental task one might expect that Abraham came from a long-standing tradition of loyalty to the Lord. But that would be human wisdom. Instead, God picked a man from quite the opposite situation: Abraham came from a pagan country and a family of moon worshippers!³

How unthinkable! Out of an idol-worshipping background, God selected Abraham as the father of a people set apart to be the envy of the world. Through Abraham came Israel. Through Israel came Moses, the man who would lead God’s people from captivity into the Promised Land. Finally, out of this lineage came Jesus, who would lead us out of slavery in Satan’s kingdom into the freedom of the family of God.

Abraham’s story offers hope to those who feel they weren’t born on the right side of the tracks or don’t come from enough wealth or influence, or who feel rejected because of heritage, ethnicity, or family reputation. Remember God is masterful at bringing great things out of improbable situations. I have seen Him raise up people from families of Hinduism, Islam, or atheism to be mighty soul winners for Jesus. We can find many inspiring stories of successful business owners lifted out of generations of poverty. God certainly broke the mold with me: I am an evangelical Protestant minister from a long tradition of devout Catholics. So be encouraged! No matter your situation, God has drawn a line in the sand to say, “The old stops here. Something new starts with you!”

After Judas betrayed Jesus and committed suicide, the eleven remaining apostles desired to select a replacement for him. And so upon Jesus’s ascension into heaven they quickly returned to Jerusalem and huddled in a room to make their decision. There they came up with requirements for the selection of an apostle: a man who was with them during their time with Jesus’s ministry, and a man who was an eyewitness to Jesus’s ascension (Acts 1:21–22). From these criteria they narrowed their selections down to two men: Joseph called Barsabbas and Matthias.

Matthias was selected by the apostles in a way that we’d likely select someone today. That is, he was carefully scrutinized and chosen according to their criteria for “what makes a good apostle.” But their requirements weren’t the same as God’s requirements. You will notice by reading the rest of the New Testament that Matthias is never again mentioned. For an individual chosen for such a prominent position, you have to wonder why the Bible does not speak of him again. I believe this is because their choice wasn’t God’s choice.

Several chapters later we encounter who God had in mind to replace Judas, and it was someone no one ever would have guessed. God chose Saul, a man infamously known for ravaging the homes of Christ followers and dragging them off to prison (Acts 8:3). Saul certainly didn’t meet the requirements of the apostles! But God had a plan. While Saul was on his way to persecute more Christians, Jesus radically confronted him and told him to see a man named Ananias.

When God asked Ananias to meet with Saul, he was understandably hesitant. “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem,” Ananias argued (Acts 9:13). But God’s mind was made up. “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel,” the Lord instructed (v. 15). Amazingly, God then changed Saul’s name to Paul, and he indeed became a great apostle, writing nearly 50 percent of the New Testament and bringing countless people into the faith.

Paul’s legacy isn’t tarnished because of his years as a persecutor of Christians, but rather his past only exalts God’s work all the more. Paul serves as a real-life illustration that God sees “the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10). In other words, God chooses people by how they will finish, not by the condition in which they began. This is great news! God hasn’t passed you over because of things that happened years ago. No, He chose you despite those things. God chose you to be His instrument that shows off His transformation.

In Jesus’s day, women were not very highly regarded. In truth, women were second-class citizens who were uneducated, segregated from men in worship settings, barred from public speaking, and unable to give testimony in court. Without question, nobody would have chosen a woman to make any kind of announcement, much less a world-changing one. But God did!

After His resurrection from the dead Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene and entrusted to her the message of all messages: “Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (John 20:17).

That a woman was chosen to announce Jesus’s resurrection to a group of men was unthinkable enough, but there is something even more astounding here. Jesus’s commission to Mary Magdalene marks the first time in John’s Gospel that Jesus refers to God as “your Father” or “your God.” Don’t miss the significance of this! Jesus personalized God through a formerly demon-possessed woman, revealing Him as Father to all believers.

The unlikelihood of Mary Magdalene being used to announce such a revolutionary message only further exemplifies that God picks those the world considers weak, underprivileged, unworthy, and unlikely. He takes people from the back to the front; He changes the nobodies into somebodies; and He uses the unexpected to do the extraordinary.

No family is perfect. Not even God’s. His family tree is filled with plenty of dysfunction, misfits, and broken branches. Possibly even more than yours or mine, if you can believe that! Just look into the lives of some of those listed in Jesus’s lineage in Matthew 1:1–17:

These are just a handful from the list of forty! Still, despite the histories, circumstances, and scandals surrounding these unlikely people, each was uniquely chosen by God to make up the lineage of Jesus—to be in His family.

God also chose you. Yes, you! As we have learned, He didn’t decide to adopt you because of your family history, your impeccable past, or your abilities. He didn’t reject you because of a lack of those things, either. The Bible assures that the only requirement for our adoption into His family is faith in Jesus.

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.

—JOHN 1:12

That’s it! Before the creation of the world God made a decision about you. Think about that. He saw all the good, the bad, and the ugly of your life, yet He still desired for you to be a part of His family. What’s more, He sent His Son, Jesus, to suffer the excruciating pain of the cross to ensure that you could come into His family. No worldly rejection can measure up to the truth about the lengths God went to choose you.^*

#ActivateTheWord

God chose me!

I am not an accident; I am not a mistake. Even before the world began, God desired to have me in His family. Regardless of where I am from or what I have done, because of Jesus, I am a child of God!