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Not Your Choice
(This is part three of a four part devotion series. We’ll be posting the last part of this series in the coming weeks. You can find the other parts on our Born Again Series page. )
John 3, Genesis 3, Ephesians 1:4
As we look at John 3 and talk about baptism and the rebirth through the Holy Spirit, people often ask, how can your baptism mean anything if you didn’t choose it? Now, I love this question because it betrays so much of how we think as American Christians.
Part of our American culture, in fact, is how individualistic we are. We like to anchor our identity on our personal choices. I chose to go to this college for school, or I chose this as my career. I chose this person to be my spouse. I chose this sexual orientation or I chose this gender. We like to make it all about our choices. Spiritually speaking, your spiritual identity is anchored in a choice. But it wasn’t yours. You see, that choice was made long before you were born. It was made by Adam. Adam was the only human being that really, truly had free choice. And he took his free choice, and he moved himself from being under God and chose to listen to the devil instead and place himself under the devil’s rule and under the devil’s authority. (Genesis 3) And because of Adam’s choice, you and I, sadly, we don’t get a choice.
We are born with the devil as our natural spiritual father. If you ever question whether or not that’s true, just look at the free, “free” choices we try to make in our life. Any time we have a chance to choose, really choose, our default is to listen to the devil. Our default is to sin, and it always has to be a struggle. Even and especially as Christians, it’s always a struggle to have to reject the devil and try to choose what God would want us to choose.
You see, God respects your choice so much that when it comes to talking about faith, he chose to use a picture that does not involve your choice at all. Being born. You see, not one of us got a chance to choose who our parents would be. We couldn’t choose where or when we were born. We couldn’t choose our name when we were born, our national identity. We could not choose our gender, nor could we choose our gifts and abilities. All of these things are given to you by virtue of your birth, by virtue of having parents and a God who loves you.
You see, our salvation, our belonging to God as his child isn’t my choice. It’s entirely God’s choice. God chose to send Jesus as our Savior who would suffer and die on the cross for our sins. God chose to call you before the foundations of the world to be holy and blameless through faith in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 1:4) God chose to send His Holy Spirit into your heart to create saving faith. God chose you to be a citizen of his kingdom through the forgiveness of sins. In fact, when you think about it, the only choice we have is to walk away from all of that. And so my prayer today is that God would strengthen you through His Holy Spirit to keep you strong, firm, and steadfast in his choice that you may rest in his choice. Amen.
