Who Chooses Who?

"We have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God." Jesus answered them, "Did I Myself not choose you,...?" (John 6:69-70)

There is something in these verses that highlights a very subtle problem that afflicts most Christians. We find it very easy to have a mindset that we have to work hard at being a Christian, that we must please God, that we must do what is right, that we must be diligent to eliminate all sin out of our lives by refining and perfecting our behavior. We are prone to look to rules, to commands, to traditions, to church expectations to keep us in line so that we can present the appearance of being a good person. And just ask about anyone you meet as to the requirements for getting into heaven and most people, if they are really honest, will include the idea of being good enough.

When we invite people to accept Jesus as their Savior, and many Christians phrase this by saying one should “get saved”, the idea is that we have to enter into belief in such a way as to impress God with the authenticity of our belief so that He will then forgive us and do something to our records in heaven so that we can then live in heaven after we die. Nearly all of our theology revolves around what we think it takes to get saved, which in most people's thinking means being guaranteed a place in paradise.

But notice something about nearly everything we talk about in religion. Isn't our focus almost exclusively centered around having ourselves saved from some dire alternative? Many Christians think that the alternative to escape is suffering the terrible torture of an angry God who is hell-bent on making rejectors of His grace regret for all eternity that they didn't agree with Him or keep His rules well enough. But whatever your beliefs about hell may be, it is still the case that nearly all religion focuses on what we have to do to get right with God and there is almost no consideration given at all to the controversy going on involving God's reputation in this universe.

Jesus here had just stated more than once that some of His disciples did not believe even though they had plenty of evidence to do so. This whole discussion revolved directly around the issue of belief and Peter had not missed that point. When Jesus mentioned that some of them did not believe in spite of everything He was doing to encourage belief, Peter and probably some of the others began to feel that Jesus maybe was beginning to doubt their loyalty to Him. Their positions in the coming kingdom they were sure He was going to set up were possibly in jeopardy and they felt compelled to assure Jesus that they intended to stick with Him even though others were too offended to stay around. “Though all forsake thee, still I will follow” was their theme song for the moment.

But this mindset has a very subtle danger to it that Jesus did not want them to entertain; for to believe that salvation is primarily dependent on our initiative and our belief rather than seeing the initiative of God is to embrace one of Satan's counterfeit concepts of religion. If we think that our salvation is dependent on us believing hard enough rather than recognizing the great passion of God in pursuing us at all cost to Himself, then we leave place in our relationship with God for pride to come in that will inevitably contaminate that relationship.

Jesus immediately addressed this misconception in Peter's statement by correcting him and asserting the truth of their relationship. It is a truth that is very easy to overlook, but to do so will produce very debilitating consequences. Later on Jesus reasserted this truth even more clearly as He talked with His disciples just before His death.

You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. (John 15:16)

Why is it so important that we come to really embrace this truth about God choosing us and see the fallacy of thinking that our faith is what saves us?

It would take too much time to explain this in full, but nevertheless it is vitally important that we become aware of the dangers of thinking that we are somehow co-authors of our remedy and rescue from sin. We in no way can contribute to our salvation; all we can do is to respond and accept and embrace the truth about God that Jesus came to reveal, for that is the real 'good news' that constitutes the gospel. As soon as we begin to entertain any notions that we somehow are contributing to God's arrangement to save us we seriously obscure the real issues being contended in the great cosmic war we find ourselves in.

Contrary to popular opinion and religious assumptions, we are not the primary focus of the war between good and evil. Getting us into heaven is not the critical issue in this war though God makes our restoration very high on His agenda. There are far greater issues involved in this war that we fail to take into account much of the time and that too many Christians are completely ignorant of unfortunately. And until we begin to open our minds to the larger picture and begin to see God's true purposes in the plan of salvation that go far beyond our being saved in heaven, we are going to be very vulnerable to the ideas planted by the enemy that our works or even our self-generated faith somehow earns us credit with God to help us gain access into heaven.

Jesus made it explicitly clear that it was His choice to draw these men to Himself and offer to train and mentor them. It is true that they had to respond to His invitation and keep following Him, but in no way were they to begin slipping into the idea that this saving relationship was something they could contribute to in any substantive way. All they could do was to respond to the initiative of God and allow Him to transform their distorted ideas about God to the point where they could come to trust Him with their hearts.

I grew up with a great deal of confusion about this issue. I still find myself, like so many others, feeling like there is something I must do to be saved. Others asked Jesus that same question because this is such a universal misunderstanding. We have been led to believe that there is something we have to do to help earn our salvation. This issue is sometimes quite blatant but many times it is so subtle we don't even realize we are thinking it. But the righteousness that Jesus offers us has not one thread of our own devising in it. And while it is vital that we must have on that robe before we can be allowed into the presence of God safely, we can do nothing to help construct it, not even in the act of believing itself.

It has taken me many years to begin to really grasp this vital truth and even yet I come under frequent conviction of various ways I might be subconsciously trying to earn credit points with God. But God does not offer us salvation based on anything at all we do, not even the level of faith we may be able to muster up. And part of the reason for this can only be seen when we begin to understand the bigger issues involved in the war between Christ and Satan. The bottom line in this controversy is not how good or bad or worthy or worthless we are but how trustworthy and good God is. And while we easily say that, of course God is righteous and good and worthy of trust, when it comes to our everyday existence and the pressures of life cause us to question how much He is ready to take care of us, the real beliefs of the heart begin to emerge and we are then faced with whether we are going to follow Him still or whether we are just going to keep up religious appearances while failing to believe the real truth about God as revealed in Jesus Christ and in the Word of God.

I want my own heart to grasp much more deeply the truth about Jesus choosing me rather than basing my experience on any supposed value of my choice to follow Him. I sense that if God allowed me to remain under the allusion that it is my determination to follow Him that counts the most, then when the pressure becomes strong enough for me to lose that determination and I see that it will not prove sufficient, I would crash and burn and become totally despondent. But when I realize that it is God's choice to draw me into close relationship with Him alone that is the strength of our relationship and all I have to do is simply keep responding to that drawing, then even if I crash and burn spiritually, God's choice to draw me still remains and I simply have to trust His heart to not condemn me but to use those experiences to grow me up and come even closer to Him.