Chosen

(Copyright 2008 by Hannah Miller)

Clarity of understanding is sometimes slow in coming. As on a humid morning it can take time for the fog to evaporate.

Personal clarity, for which I can take no credit, is coming. It started a few Sundays ago when our pastor asked during his sermon why we were here, worshiping in church, believing in Jesus, when in Myanmar (Burma) a storm had wiped out hundreds of thousands of a population that has just a single digit percentage of Christians. Most died as unbelievers yet there I was, alive and saved. Why? Why me? The very fact that I do believe points to the even greater and more significant fact that God loves me, chose me and did so first.

What a thought! What magnitude of love this is! God loved me first? He is pleased with me? Yet I have done nothing.

My fog cleared a little more yesterday while in family devotions we read Romans 9:18: "Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden." So not only did God choose me, there will be and are those that won't be chosen. It's not easy to grasp. In Calvinism, this is the idea of election. What joy in realizing I'm elected!

Then we read John 6:39: "And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but will raise them up at the last day." Even greater news: I can not lose my salvation because I do not carry the responsibility of attaining it. I am given to Christ and He has bestowed upon me salvation; it's not mine to lose.

And then today, I was reading through the Psalms and ended up cross-referencing John 6 again. I didn't even realize until just now but it is what we read yesterday. John 6:36 states, "But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe." I thought, "How could the Israelites not get it; how could they not realize that Jesus is God?" Then I realized as I read it again that I wouldn't get it. God could be standing right in front of me, like he did 2000 years ago to the Hebrew crowds, and I still wouldn't get it if he had not lifted my fog.

I would have to agree with Spurgeon who said, " I believe in the doctrine of election, because I am quite sure that if God had not chosen me I would never would have chosen him..."

--HM