My friend B.J. Stockman guest posts a great piece at Zach Nielsen’s blog on 5 Encouragements from Predestination:
1. God chose you because he loved you. Ephesians 1:4-5,
in the ESV translation, says, “in love God predestined”. Therefore
predestination is motivated by love. This means that God’s choice of you
derives from his love for you. Sovereign choice doesn’t detract from
God’s love it is the fountainhead of God’s love. We don’t go deeper into
love by sidestepping predestination. We go deeper into love by diving
into its deeps. We are familiar with the fact that God so loved the
world that he gave his Beloved Son, but need to become more familiar
with the fact that God so loved the world that he predestined adopted
sons in the Beloved from all eternity (Eph. 1:5).
2. You are a gift of love from the Father to the Son.
John 17 reveals that your salvation was planned in the heart and mind
of the Triune God before there ever was a you (17:2, 24). This means
that God’s love for you is bigger than you. It is tied to the love for
which the Father has for his Son. And the reason this is encouraging is
because the size of God’s love for you is not to be gauged by his love
for you but by his love for Jesus. From his very own mouth, Jesus said,
“[Father] you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (17:23). The
astonishment that we should feel at being loved by God becomes even more
mind-blowing because God’s love for us flows in the same stream as
God’s love for God.
3. Your present sins may be many but your future sinlessness is certain. Romans 8:29
tells us that we have been “predestined to be conformed to the image of
[Jesus].” As a son of God, you are guaranteed one day to look like the
Son of God. Therefore you fight sin in hope not in defeated depression.
Your Christlikeness is not dependent upon your performance but upon
God’s predestination. Continue at Jared Wilson
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