DIVINE CHOICE
W. Moseley
I want to speak on the subject of divine choice. It is a subject that we are all familiar with.
Scripture speaks much of choice on our side. Mary chose “the good part”. If we have the right to choose we would have to allow that divine Persons also have this right, and it would be sovereign.
These scriptures speak of the Lord Jesus choosing and the Father also choosing. I want first to speak of John 15 where the Lord Jesus says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you”. We might question this and say, ‘But I remember the time when I chose the Lord Jesus as my Saviour’. But predating that, and behind it, is the fact that He had chosen you. You would never have chosen Him if He had not first chosen you. So the Lord Jesus is saying that basically everything depends on the fact that He has chosen us.
This choice would relate to the fact that He loves us and has chosen us to be here, where He has been, in testimony. In John 15 He is about to depart but He is choosing persons to remain here in testimony before the Father. This is very blessed, and it should have a profound effect on us that He has chosen us for this wonderful place.
Then He says, “and have set you”. It is love’s arrangement, setting us in the best possible circumstances, where we can be fruitful. I think this would involve a good deal. He has chosen our company, our locality, and it would come down to the smallest details of our lives. If we are subject and do not take ourselves out of the Lord’s hands we shall prove that there could be no improvement on this, and we shall be fruitful. We might feel that if we were in other circumstances we should be able to bear more fruit. But it could not be so.
Fruit-bearing would have the Father in mind. How fruitful the Lord Jesus was in His pathway here! He desires that there should be a continuation of this in us, His loved ones. He speaks also of our fruit abiding. With some there is deterioration, but the Lord’s thought is that our fruit should abide. The Spirit would assure us that this is so.
Then we have the privilege of asking the Father in His name and the Father answers it. How the mention of the Lord’s name would affect the Father. It would be His delight to answer it. Not anyone could ask in the Lord’s name but the chosen ones who are fruitful in testimony down here. This would draw out the Father’s affections.
The choice in Ephesians relates to our place in heaven in Christ as sons. It says that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ chose us in Him before the foundation of the world. I think this would show that this is a prime thought with the Father, even having precedence over the founding of the world. We have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ, involving all that the Father’s love could conceive for our blessing and for the delight of His heart. His desire is that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. How affecting!—“before him in love”; not at a distance, but near, to enjoy His love and to respond in holy affections.
Perhaps we do not think enough of what it is to be in Christ. Divine, love has been active.
Christ has accomplished redemption, through His blood. How costly it has been, and yet how blessed. But the Father’s love would have us before Him in Christ as sons and He has been prepared to pay the price to secure us. The answer is that we are to be “to the praise of the glory of his grace”. That is all I have to say; it is a very blessed subject and should affect us greatly.
Substance of word in meeting for ministry, Redbridge
28 March 1983