For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them.
Deuteronomy 7:6-9 ESV
This passage was the call to worship for yesterday’s Kirk Center services. I’ve shared before that the Christian faith is inherently paradoxical.
Paradox is, as G. K. Chesterton noted, “truth standing on her head to get attention.”
God’s love is paradoxical in that we can do nothing to deserve it. In fact, it is only when we stop attempting to prove that we’re good enough to deserve God’s love that we actually begin to experience it.
The people of God in the former administration of the Covenant (that is, Israel) were chosen not because of any inherent qualification.
They weren’t a large nation, they weren’t a powerful nation. God’s choice seems, at first glance, peculiar. Yet, God purposed to set his affection (his love) on this people–he chose them.
God chose us too.
The purpose of God’s choice is to set us apart and commission us with task of bearing witness to Christ’s transforming grace.
There are times when God asks us to do things that seem incongruous with the values we see around us. It’s called discipleship–learning to follow the example of Christ as he is presented to us in the Scriptures.
- God invites us to discover contentment by giving.
- God invites us to gain our lives by losing them for his sake.
- God invites us to become wise by rejecting the wisdom of the world and embracing the foolishness of the gospel.
Ask yourself: what is God asking me to do in order to take the next step in discipleship?
Thanks be to God!
Jeff Gissing 