In 1991, Va. Tech Football recruited me as a preferred walk-on.  In other words, I didn’t try out for the team; instead, the coaches watched film of me playing in High School, talked to my High School coach and others, and, in the end, even though they didn’t have a scholarship to offer me, decided they wanted me on the team and offered me a spot.  Back then, in-state tuition at a state-funded university in Virginia was super affordable.  So, even though I wasn’t given a scholarship, my dad gave me the green light, and I committed to VT.  My dad joked that it would cost him more for me to stay home and eat all his food than to send me to VT. The NCAA limits the number of people you can have on your roster, so to be offered one of those spots at a major college program was just massive for me!  It was a dream come true!

However, after two years at Va. Tech, I decided to transfer to Liberty University, not because I didn’t love my coaches, teammates, or the University, but because I felt called to preach and wanted an education that would help me do it.  But, nonetheless, even though I knew God was calling me to Liberty, it was so hard to leave VT.  I had spent YEARS of my life working towards getting an opportunity like that, and now I was walking away from it.

Now, one of the main reasons I chose Liberty was not only that it was an evangelical, conservative University, but also that the head coach offered me a spot on its football team and arranged a huge scholarship that covered most of what I needed to earn my degree.  So I got a totally relevant education all while getting massive amounts of fuel to fire up my faith in Christ—WIN!!

Furthermore, when I tore the ACL in my left knee on April 1, 1995, it left me unable to play my last year of eligibility that fall.  But, instead, Liberty gave me an incredible opportunity to grow as a leader in ministry, including a full scholarship and a stipend to pursue my master's degree.  Later, they gave me another full scholarship to get my Doctorate.  So, even though leaving VT was leaving a dream behind, I had, nor to this day, have any regrets about the decision to go to Liberty.

But after transferring to Liberty, I just never felt like I could be a part of life with my teammates at VT anymore.  I was by no means a significant loss to Virginia Tech football, but I had left that family to join another one, even though I still saw every one of them as family.  Therefore, it was a shock when, years later, I received an invitation to return to VT for a football reunion.  I honestly ignored it, thinking it was a mistake!  But after receiving a second invitation, I decided to call the office and speak with Coach Hite, the Assistant Head Coach organizing the event.  I let him know they must have made a mistake, but to my surprise and encouragement, Coach Hite said, “Austin, we recruited you to VT, we chose you to be a part of this family, and that will never change.  Once a Hokie, always a Hokie!”

I’ve been an active part of VT football alumni activities ever since.  It was so encouraging to know that the people who had chosen to offer me a spot on the team still considered me part of the family, even though I had finished my eligibility playing with a different family!   You see, it turns out that there is nothing more encouraging than to be wanted … to be the person somebody picked to be a part of their family.  Whether it’s a job, sports team, a non-profit board, or a task force at work, to hear that somebody wants you to be a part of their group to do something with them is an honor.  When somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, we were wondering if you would be willing to … with us”, even if it’s something you're not willing to do, it’s an honor to be asked because it means somebody wanted you!

Perhaps the reason we feel so valuable when we are asked to be part of something is that we are fully aware of the countless things nobody will ever ask us to be part of or even consider us for.  For instance, as much as I love racing, nobody will ever ask me to be a professional race car driver unless it’s some kind of practical joke!  The reason we are so blown away by being asked to be a part of something is that so many things in this world tell us we are not seen, that we don’t matter, and that we aren’t good enough, because we aren’t!  There are more than 8.3 BILLION people on the planet, so we kind of blend in!

I did some quick, very loose, and very liberal calculations.  After playing on two different division one college football teams, spending almost a decade of my life traveling all over America and beyond preaching to crowds of various sizes, the largest of which was 13,000 people, pastoring the largest church in Dallas (North Carolina … so humor is intended!) that has now expanded into Lincolnton, NC, and even after having sermons broadcast around the world on various media platforms, at best 99.999% of the people on this planet have absolutely no idea who I am, nor care to ever know!

Furthermore, the fact of the matter is that no matter how essential we see ourselves to be to the world, when we die, the world will continue on its path without us!  Some estimate that over 117 billion people have already lived and died in human history, and yet, not one of them caused life on this planet to stop moving forward after they died.

My point is, if you have even a remotely accurate sense of your place in this world and human history, you can quickly conclude that you are not seen, you don’t matter, and you won’t be forgotten when you die because you were never known enough to even be forgotten!  The most recognizable and desired people on the planet are, at best, nothing more than a slightly larger grain of sand in a desert covered by grains of sand that goes on further than any eye can see!  It’s no wonder that when we see ourselves in comparison to humanity, and even more so in light of the universe that we exist in, it becomes impossible to even find ourselves in it, much less see ourselves as needed and valuable.

But, what if I told you that in the vast desert of unending grains of sand, that essentially all look the same, GOD still sees you, loves you, and reached down into the sand to specifically choose you!  What if I told you that God didn’t randomly ask you to be in his family, but actively recruited you, not as a preferred walk-on who still had to pay for his college education, but recruited you and offered you a full scholarship to be on the team.  What if I also told you that God not only specifically offered you a fully paid spot on His team but that He also equipped you to successfully play the game and win on His team, so much so, that all you needed to do was say yes and get to work on the team!  Believe it or not, that is a fundamental part of the AWESOMENESS of what Paul teaches us in the book of Ephesians, so fundamental that it leaps off the pages at us in the first few sentences.

I’m not going to re-preach last week’s sermon, but just for context, let’s read the one-and-a-half sentences that lead up to the one-and-a-half sentences we are going to look at today.

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (1:1-2)

Paul just told us that he didn’t become an apostle by choosing it, but by God choosing him to be one.

Paul then writes,

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, (1:3)

That’s where we left off last week, but notice we stopped at a comma, not a period.  The second sentence of this letter goes on to say,

4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. (1:4a)

He then expounds on that in the third sentence.

In love 5 he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (1:4b-6)

Now, some of your heads may have just exploded when you read those words!  So, let’s dig into what we just read because it’s not meant to cause your head to explode, but rather for your heart to explode in worship, praise, and total glad and grateful submission to God.

Ephesians 1:4-6 teaches us two of the most awesome things we could ever be told about who we are!

 The first awesome thing it tells us about who we are is that,

 God chose to rescue us from being unworthy sinners to being totally worthy saints! 

 Those of you who were really paying attention to what I just read in Ephesians may have noticed that Paul hasn’t directly said how big a sinner we all were before God rescued us.As such, you may be wondering how I could then state that we were.  Therefore, without getting into what I’ll be preaching in the coming weeks, let me just say for now that the measure of our depravity will all start coming out in verses we will study next week, but it will then come out as bluntly as could possibly be stated in the first sentence of chapter 2.   Paul writes,

1  And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (2:1-3)

So, the idea that any of us were anything other than unworthy, sinful sinners incapable of living God’s life is simply and obviously unbiblical.God didn’t choose us because we had some kind of righteousness that made us more worthy than somebody else.  We were all grains of sand in a massive desert, and therefore, Paul says,

3 Blessed bethe God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, (1:3)

“Blessed be,” that is PRAISE GOD for giving us EVERYTHING He is and has,

 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

 “Even as he chose us” means, “in the same way” or “just as”. Therefore, just as God is totally responsible and thus worthy of praise for giving us “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” He is also totally responsible for choosing us to “be holy and blameless before him.”

 Further emphasizing that it was God’s prerogative in the choosing, Paul states that it occurred “inhim before the foundation of the world.”

The word “in” gives us the location or context of God’s choosing. Therefore, the location of God’s choosing was first in the sphere of who Christ is and what He has done, rather than who we are and what we have done, which is nothing better than sin.  He didn’t choose us in our actions or decisions or worthiness to be chosen, but in Christ and His actions and worthiness for us to be chosen!

Second, the location or context of God’s choosing was before we were ever born, which further emphasizes that it was God’s prerogative to choose us, not ours to choose Him! Now, the very first thing most Western-minded people do at this point is try to explain that it was really our decision to choose Christ, and that, in turn, God chose us.  The Bible vanquishes that idea all over the place because it says none of us wanted to choose GOD!

Note: 10 as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; 11 no one understands; no one seeks for God. 12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12)

Personally, I think one of the primary reasons so many western minds have such a hard time with this is because we fear trusting God with the decision to choose, as if God is not perfect in all His ways (Psalm 18:30); as if He is not the embodiment of love (1 John 4:8) and thus in all of His decisions love can never be lost or incorrectly applied; as if somehow if what the Bible plainly states about God’s methods can’t be explained by us then the Bible can’t mean what it plainly states.

The fact remains that the doctrine of the free will of man is very clearly present in the Bible, as well as the doctrine of God’s sovereign providential will.The Bible leaves it as an unexplained paradox that holds us accountable and encourages our faith all at the same time!  If you repented and believed in Jesus, it’s because you’re chosen.  Two of the chapters in the Bible that deal with God’s sovereign absolute will are also where we read the guarantee that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9-10).  Therefore, John Stott appropriately wrote,

Note: “Now everybody finds the doctrine of election difficult. ‘Didn’t I choose God?’ somebody asks indignantly; to which we must answer ‘Yes, indeed you did, and freely, but only because in eternity God had first chosen you.’ ‘Didn’t I decide for Christ?’ asks somebody else; to which we must reply ‘Yes, indeed you did, and freely, but only because in eternity God had first decided for you.’ Scripture nowhere dispels the mystery of election, and we should beware of any who try to systematize it too precisely or rigidly. It is not likely that we shall discover a simple solution to a problem which has baffled the best brains of Christendom for centuries.”¹Stott, J. R. W. (1979). God’s new society: the message of Ephesians (p. 37). InterVarsity Press.

But verse 4 wasn’t written to tell us anything else about how God chose us other than “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world” because the point of verse 4 is not HOW God chose us, but WHY God chose us! Paul follows the statement of fact that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, not with the word “by,” but with the word “that.”  “That” tells us that what was just said is the context of a purpose, of a why, and that purpose, that why is “that we should be holy and blamelessbefore him.”

We dove into the word “holy” last week, so just as a reminder, in the secular sense, the word means to be set apart for the use of a deity; to belong to a deity. One of the seven wonders of the world was in the city of Ephesus, and it was “holy” to the Greeks.  Being declared holy meant it was set apart for use only in worship of a god, and in the case of the temple in Ephesus, it was dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis.  This massive building was not only more magnificent than any other in Ephesus, but also among the most magnificent in the world.  But its physical structure alone wasn’t what made it “holy,” but more significantly, its use.  The building was dedicated to honor a goddess; thus, everything that took place within it, and every way it was to be treated, was to be defined by the exclusivity, care, and honor the Greeks believed Artemis deserved.  They didn’t treat everything with that kind of exclusivity, care, and honor, just what was declared as belonging to a god; that which was declared to be holy.  Paul says God chose us to “be holy,” that is, to be those who are uniquely different from the rest of sinful humanity, and not in some random way, or in some way defined by pagan religion, but in a truly magnificent way the world can’t produce, in a way that is actually worthy of the only actual deity—Yahweh!

In addition, Paul says God chose us to be “blameless.” To be blameless is to be without fault, but more thoroughly without legal, moral, ethical, or even relational reason to not have the right to be in His presence – “before Him.”

Now here’s where it gets really cool!Concerning the phrase, “before Him,” K.S. Wuest writes,

“The word speaks of a penetrating gaze that sees right down into a thing.”²Wuest, K. S. (1997). Wuest’s word studies from the Greek New Testament: for the English reader (Vol. 4, pp. 33–34). Eerdmans.

 Putting that all together means that the purpose of God choosing us in Christ, that is in all that Christ is and did, is so that from His perspective, the perspective that sees into the very core of who we are, that knows every thought and motive of our heart, that is unable to be fooled in anyway, can look as far as the most basic nucleus of who we are and see nothing but one who is truly gladly submitted to HIM as God!The purpose of God’s choosing us is so that we can be completely unlike the sinful sinners of this world and instead completely and truly as pure and as righteous as God; so that we can be faultless in every way when it comes to God’s expectation that we love Him and others the way He loves us; so that we meet His standard of living lives sincerely and faultlessly in the morality, ethics and love that inalienably and eternally characterize God.

It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to realize WE CAN’T DO THAT!It is IMPOSSIBLE for us to do.  At the end of the day, all we are in and of ourselves is another grain of sand in a massive desert of sand that falls totally short!  But GOD chose us to be different.  He plucked us up out of the sand and made us into a diamond worthy to showcase His glory and magnificence!  God has made, is making, and will finish making us to BE somebody we could never make ourselves to be, not because we did something, but because HE decided something!

And understand this: in saying it’s because of God, we ensure we give God all the credit, but it in no way lessens who we are; it magnifies it!Our holiness and blamelessness are not the product of our pathetic accomplishments but HIS.  That doesn’t lower what we have and who we are; it raises it to the highest possible measure.  We were immeasurably SINFUL SINNERS, and now, to God’s praise alone, we are SAINTS who are in every way truly WORTHY to be so!  This is NOT what God intends to do, but what God has already accomplished in Christ.

 The second awesome thing it tells us about who we are is that,

 God chose us to be HIS fully favored kids! 

 In love 5 he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

“In love 5 he predestined us …”

S. Wuest noted, “The verb itself means ‘to mark out the boundary or limits’ of any place or thing. When used of persons, it means ‘to put limitations upon that person,’ thus, ‘to determine his destiny.’ The preposition pro (προ), prefixed to the verb means ‘before.’”³Wuest, K. S. (1997). Wuest’s word studies from the Greek New Testament: for the English reader (Vol. 4, p. 35). Eerdmans.

 To predestinate not only means to choose ahead of time but to enact that choice.It’s not a passive choice that hopes something will be a reality, but an active choice that not only creates what is necessary for the reality to exist but also ensures its existence.  Anything short of ensuring is simply hoping, and hoping is not predestinating.

 Note: “Paul says that God has done this in accordance with his pleasure and will. This is the only reason to be found in Scripture that explains why God elects people for salvation. The reason for election is not my foreseen righteousness; or my foreseen obedience; or my foreseen response to the gospel.  Somebody will say that this smacks of an arbitrary, capricious God who plays a game of salvation-roulette and takes delight in choosing some and damning others. But we miss the point if we think in that way. Yes, salvation does relate to the pleasure of God’s will, which means that God is pleased by exercising his will to salvation. But an arbitrary, capricious will is not a good will, it is an immoral will. There is a reason why the elect have been chosen to salvation, but the reason is to be found in God and not in them. In other words, God did not choose them because they qualified for the choice. Rather, he chose them because he was pleased to extend mercy to them, while the others he passes over. God is not obligated to save anybody, to make any special act of grace, to draw anyone to himself. He could leave the whole world to perish, and such would be a righteous judgment.  Where we struggle with predestination is at this point: that God leaves some to themselves, but in other cases he intervenes. He gives a blessing to his elect that he does not give to other people. This means that God does not treat everybody alike. Indeed, Scripture from beginning to end makes it abundantly clear that God doesn’t treat everybody the same. He appeared to Abraham, called him out of godless paganism and made him the father of a great nation, but he did not do that for Pharaoh. Jesus appeared to the enemy of the church, Paul, on the road to Damascus and overcame his unbelief right there, but he did not do that for Pontius Pilate or for Caiaphas. Would it not be a ghastly thing to suggest that the reason why Jesus revealed himself to Paul and not to Pilate, was because Paul in some manner deserved or earned or merited that special revelation?”⁴Sproul, R. C. (1994). The Purpose of God: Ephesians (pp. 24–25). Christian Focus Publications.

 But the emphasis in this phrase is not “predestined” but that God did it “In love”.

 I briefly mentioned this a minute ago, but it’s poignantly stated in the third sentence in the book of Ephesians. We cannot separate the willful choosing of God from His eternal character of love.God’s choosing is done in the location of Christ and Christ’s work, and it is also done in the location of His love.  It is impossible for God to make any decision apart from love because God is love.  God cannot lay aside His love, but rather He is the perfection of love that we all fall short of, not only in our ability to be it or do it, but even in our ability to comprehend it.  Beyond that, I cannot, nor should I attempt to explain any of it.  Every time we attempt to delve into the ways of God beyond what God has stated about His ways, we walk straight into a blinding light that, although glorious, is still indistinguishable in its characteristics beyond the fact that it is so bright that it is gloriously blinding!  God’s choosing and predestinating is never void of His love—period!

 “for adoption as sons”

 Now, unfortunately, once again, the topic of conversation is all too often the word “predestined” and not the emphasis Paul is making on the context or location of that process (God’s love) and the purpose of that process—ADOPTION! The grammatical purpose of this sentence is not the process of predestination, but that we are predestined “FOR adoption as sons.”

 To be adopted as a son means God the Father is bringing us into the same relational status as His eternally begotten Son—Jesus! Last week, we talked about privilege.I can’t think of a bigger privilege than being adopted as a fully favored child of God, meaning I’m as loved and as favored as Jesus!  To be fully favored doesn’t mean I have the rights that Jesus has.  For instance, only Jesus has the right for all of humanity to bow before Him and worship Him.  But to be fully favored means God doesn’t see me as a lesser son with less access to His Kingdom.  I’m NOT Jesus, nor will I be praised as Jesus is and will be praised, but all the universe will one day know who I am—I’m a fully favored child of God who is fully loved and treated as such by God!  The Father loves me as He loves the Son, and I am united with Him as He is united with the Son!   Therefore, as we talked about last week, all of God’s life and all that the eternal Kingdom of God has are mine, not because of what I’ve done but because God adopted me!

“… The person who had been adopted had all the rights of a legitimate son in his new family and lost absolutely all rights in his old family. In the eyes of the law, he was a new person. So new was he that even all debts and obligations connected with his previous family were abolished as if they had never existed. That is what Paul says that God has done for us. We were absolutely in the power of sin and of the world; God, through Jesus, took us out of that power into his; and that adoption wipes out the past and makes us new.”⁵Barclay, W. (2002). The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians (p. 92). Westminster John Knox Press.

Finally, Paul tells us the method of our adoption.This was all done, “… through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”

 We adopted our oldest daughter from Ethiopia, and my wife did all the paperwork.I don’t have words to properly convey the amount of ridiculously redundant paperwork an international adoption requires.  She still has it all in a very large three-ring binder.  Ironically, in 2010 and 2011, of all the forms and applications that we had to fill out for the government of the State of North Carolina, the government of the United States and the government of Ethiopia, the one that charged us the most money, took the longest to process stuff and when we flew halfway around the world to bring Ada home told us we would have to come back later because paperwork that we not only filed but they sent us copies back with stamps confirming it was filed had not indeed been filed was none other than the United States Government!  Luckily, because this had been happening so frequently under that administration, we were told by others who had gone through it to bring two copies of everything.  Therefore, when the person at the embassy told us we couldn’t bring our daughter home because we hadn’t filed “x, y, and z,”  my wife looked him straight in the eye and said, “uh, yes we did” and then handed him copies of all the paperwork the State Department claimed we hadn’t filed and she did so with the copies containing the stamps and seals put on them by the State Department that they had received and processed them!  It was a proud moment for me as a husband!

 Under Roman Law, they had a process for adoption as well.

Note: “The ritual of adoption must have been very impressive. It was carried out by a symbolic sale in which copper and scales were used. Twice the biological father sold his son, and twice he symbolically bought him back; finally he sold him a third time, and at the third sale he did not buy him back. After this, the adopting father had to go to the praetor, one of the principal Roman magistrates, and plead the case for the adoption. Only after all this had been gone through was the adoption complete. When the process had been completed, the adoption was indeed complete.”⁶Barclay, W. (2002). The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians (p. 91). Westminster John Knox Press.

However, when it comes to our adoption in Christ, we had to be purchased from the curse of sin, a curse that God placed all of humanity under as sinners.We are going to talk much more about that curse and the “glorious grace” of what Christ did to justly adopt us as we go through Ephesians 1 and 2, so for now let’s just state the obvious.  We were not adopted because we did something that caused God to say, “Oh man, you’re really good at being good, way better at it than those other grains of sand in the desert.”  We in no way earned our adoption.  We didn’t pay a cent toward the cost, or do an ounce of the work, or do anything that made us any different than any other grain of sand in the desert—God did it all!  Everything that led to our adoption was accomplished in the life and work of “the Beloved,” another name for Jesus!

Note: “in the Beloved” This is a PERFECT PASSIVE PARTICIPLE. Jesus was and is the Beloved Son and shall always be. This title was used in the Septuagint (LXX) for the Messiah. It was substituted for “Jeshurun” (Jerusalem) in Deut. 32:15; 33:5, 26; and Isa. 44:2. The Father used this descriptive title for Jesus in Matt. 3:17; 12:18; 17:5. A significant theological parallel in Col. is 1:13.”⁷Utley, R. J. (1997). Paul Bound, the Gospel Unbound: Letters from Prison (Colossians, Ephesians and Philemon, then later, Philippians): Vol. Volume 8 (p. 75). Bible Lessons International.

Now, there are a lot of different directions we can go here, but given the amount of debate that people want to have about what we just read in the book of Ephesians, I think the most applicable challenge I can give is this,

Challenge

Do you have the faith to trust the God who is eternally bigger, better, and smarter than you, or are you confined to trusting a god who can only do what you can comprehend and explain? 

 Now listen, that challenge goes far wider than simply addressing the Biblical teachings of predestination and election.  It goes to the heart of everyday life.  For me, knowing God chose to adopt me and then did all the work to make it happen only makes me want to sing praises.  Like last week, it does nothing but make me want to slap myself upside the head when I start moping around, acting like I’m somehow anything less than eternally privileged!  I feel no need whatsoever to attempt to explain the unexplainable; rather, I praise God that He chose to adopt me and did everything needed to adopt me!

On the other hand, I tend to forget that truth when things in life go crazy.  If I don’t feel the need to explain the unexplainable paradox of man’s free will and the total sovereignty of God choosing and predetermining us, then why do I demand God explain Himself when everything goes upside down in life!  Why can’t I just trust God there as well!

I’m willing to praise God and trust His love for my eternal destiny, but then I somehow grow prone to wonder and even doubt His love and sovereign hand when everything goes crazy.

I have to actively remind myself of the most obvious truth in the Bible: God is as eternally sovereign as He is eternally loving.  There is never a moment when both are not equally true.

I have to remind myself that no matter what’s going on in my life, I am a fully favored son of God, that He will never leave or forsake, because if I have repented and believed in Jesus, I can know that He has made me eternally holy and blameless before Him—period!!

So at the end of the day, whether its praising God for leading me to repent and believe in Him so that I could be saved, or believing God in the craziest and most painful circumstances of life, the truth of the matter is that God is always eternally bigger, better and smarter than me, He never stops loving me, He will never forsake me, and my ability to explain any of that changes not one ounce of how true it always is!

God chose me to be a fully favored son in His family, and that’s the reality of my existence forever!

Discussion Guide

Can anyone recall how you felt when you weren’t picked for something?  (a team, a job, etc)

Ephesians 1:4-6 teaches us two of the most awesome things we could ever be told about who we are:

 God chose to rescue us from being unworthy sinners to being totally worthy saints! (1:4a)

 Someone share the Gospel in less than 1 minute

What part does God play in our salvation?

What part do we play in our own salvation?

How would you equate Him choosing us vs. us choosing Him?

What does ‘Holy and Blameless’ look like in a ‘saved but sinful’ human?

 God chose us to be HIS fully favored kids! 

Can anyone recall how you felt when you were picked for something?  (a team, a job, etc)

How does God’s love for us coincide with God’s choice of us?

Related to ‘our adoption’, which part of verses 5-6 mean the most to you and why:

            through Jesus Christ

            according to the purpose of His will,

            to the praise of His glorious grace,

            with which He has blessed us in the Beloved

*could also spend your time defining the 4 points listed above

Challenge

Do you have the faith to trust the God who is eternally bigger, better, and smarter than you, or are you confined to trusting a god who can only do what you can comprehend and explain? 

Monthly Objective:  Connecting Believers to Believers

How can we care for each other, within our group, this year

What plan do we have in place to be intentional about prayer