Why Did God Choose You?

Before I pray, let me point out something that encourages and guides the way I will pray for us.

Ephesians 1:3–14 is one of the most concentrated, exalted, and weighty descriptions of God’s purpose in the universe from eternity to eternity. It’s the kind of writing that stretches the mind to the limits of comprehension. It takes us back before the creation of the universe into the personal consciousness of absolute reality, God himself, and beckons us to understand the unfathomable good pleasure, will, purpose, counsel, and plan of God, as they were formulated in the infinite mind of God. We are invited to enter that mind and understand. It takes us forward to an everlasting inheritance. And it takes us to the center of the whole creation, where the most-loved Son of God shed his blood for the redemption of a people predestined to be the happy, praising family of God forever.

The sweep is vast. The heights are breathtaking. The implications pervade all of life. The realities that Paul is describing in Ephesians 1:3–14 are ten thousand times more significant, more important, more amazing, and more relevant to your life than anything that happens in Washington, D.C., or on any of the news feeds that you consult every day. Compared to the realities of Ephesians 1:3–14, those things are as nothing.

Doctrine and Prayer

When Paul is done writing this most exalted portion of Scripture, what does he do? He prays. He prays for us in Ephesians 1:15–23; the rest of the chapter is a prayer. What will he ask God to do after such a mind-bending paragraph? He’s going to pray a second time in Ephesians 3:14–21 (one of the most beautiful prayers in the Bible) after another weighty, glorious depiction of our salvation in chapter 2. So, the pattern of the first half of Ephesians is this: theology, prayer, theology, prayer — doctrine, prayer, doctrine, prayer.

What is he asking for? In neither prayer is he asking God to help us do anything. Doing comes later. These prayers are further upstream from behavior. Behavior comes in chapters 4–6. What does he pray for? Start at Ephesians 1:16–17:

I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him.

Paul has just unleashed an avalanche of knowledge about God in verses 3–14. And now he’s praying, “O God, grant that the Ephesians and the folks at TGC would be able to grasp, and receive, and treasure, and be formed by the knowledge of yourself that I have just given in verses 3–14. Grant that your Spirit would shape their spirits so that the contours of the revelation I have just given would fit.” Because, if your heart has a round hole and the knowledge of God is a square peg, not only will it not fit, but it will be very uncomfortable, and you may get angry.

He continues to pray in Ephesians 1:18–19:

Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened . . .

This is huge. Everybody in this room has eyes in their heads. And everybody in this room has eyes in their hearts. And those heart-eyes are either darkened so that you can’t truly know the reality of verses 3–14, or they are enlightened so that you can. That’s what Paul and I are praying for. Now he mentions three specifics he prays they will truly know:

 . . . that you may know [1] what is the hope to which he has called you, [2] what are the riches of [the glory of his] inheritance in the saints, and [3] what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe.

The hopefulness of your calling. The riches of your eternal inheritance. The greatness of the power that has raised you from the dead and seated you at God’s right hand with Christ. The roots of that hopefulness, those riches, and that power are in the theology, the doctrine, of Ephesians 1:3–14. But we will not know them as they ought to be known unless the Spirit of God cuts away the blinding cataracts of the eyes of our hearts. And that’s why this great soul doctor follows his doctrine with prayer. Now, let’s pray for this encounter with Ephesians 1:3–14.

Father, please give to us a spirit of wisdom and of revelation to know you. Enlighten the eyes of our hearts. Take away the blindness. And grant that we would see, and know, and love, and be formed by the truth of this book of Ephesians in this conference. In Jesus’s name I pray. Amen.

Unconditional Grace

What is Paul’s main point in Ephesians 1:3–14? That is, what is the point that everything else is serving, everything else is clarifying, everything else is supporting or defending or guaranteeing? I don’t think it’s hard to see the answer to that question, because Paul states it three times. And he states it in a way that it is plainly a goal, not a means to a goal. Look at the beginning of verse 6: “to the praise of [the glory of his] grace.” The goal is the praise of the glory of God’s grace. Then look at verse 12, at the end: “to the praise of his glory.” The goal is the praise of God’s glory. Then look at the end of verse 14, “to the praise of his glory.” The goal is the praise of the glory of God, most specifically the glory of his grace (Ephesians 1:6) — the beauty, worth, greatness, and freedom of his grace.

Everything in this paragraph serves to show that the glory of God is worthy of your praise, especially the glory of his grace. So, let’s look at two of these three places and see what it is that gives rise to the praise of the glory of God’s grace. Let’s look first at Ephesians 1:4–6:

He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of [the glory of his] grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

One of the reasons Paul traces God’s saving grace back before the creation of the universe into the eternal mind of God is to establish the nature of that grace. Its nature is that it is, first, unconditional. The grace of your being chosen, and your holiness, and your predestination, and your adoption as God’s child is traced back before your existence, so that it would be plain that it was owing to nothing in us, since we didn’t exist. Before you existed, he chose you out of an unholy humanity to be holy. Before you existed, he predestined you — assigned your destiny. You will be his child. And the point of stressing that you did not yet exist is to make the nature of saving grace glorious and praiseworthy — namely, it is not based on anything in you at all. You didn’t exist.

But Paul wants to make it even clearer. So, at the end of verse 5, he adds two amazing words. He takes us beneath election and beneath predestination and speaks of their roots. Where did God’s choice of you come from? What moved him to set his gracious, saving favor on you? Why you? Paul answers with two words: His choice and his predestination are “according to the purpose of his will.”

How did God decide on you? Where does his choice come from? He could have simply answered, “My choice is according to my will. My will, and nothing else, is the bottom line for whom I choose to save.” As he says in Romans 9:15–16, “‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human [willing] or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”

“Your election is owing entirely, freely, gloriously to God’s good pleasure, and not to anything in you.”

So, Paul could have just said, “I am underlining the freedom — the unconditionality — of God’s saving grace by saying, at the end of verse 5, ‘it accords with God’s will.’” But he doesn’t just say that. He says, “The grace of God’s choice of you, and the grace of God’s predestination of you, is ‘according to the purpose of his will,’ or the ‘good pleasure [eudokia] of his will.’” This is almost unfathomable, that Paul would take us beneath God’s choice to its ground in God’s will, and then, as if to go deeper, to the ground of his will — from choice, down to will, down to good pleasure. Why is he doing this? He’s doing it to help us see how absolutely free and unconditional and glorious and praiseworthy grace is. The glory of God’s saving grace consists in large measure in its freedom — freedom from depending on anything in us.

Self-Determination or Sovereign Grace?

He is talking this way to keep you from believing that you were chosen on the basis of your foreknown faith. Millions of people have been taught that Christians were not chosen on the basis of the good pleasure of the will of God in unconditional grace. Instead, they have been taught that God looked into the future and foresaw human beings exercising ultimate self-determination in becoming believers. And thus, what God’s choice means is that God chose beforehand to save anybody and everybody who meets the condition — that is, who uses their ultimate self-determination at the point of conversion to believe.

When you look back at the point of your conversion to Christ, when you consider the precise moment when you passed from death to life, from outside Christ to in Christ where there’s no condemnation, from unsaved to saved — was self-determination decisive at that moment? Or was the free, unconditional, mighty grace of God decisive at that moment? If you say, “I was decisive at that moment. My free will, my self-determination, not God, was decisive when I passed from death to life, from unbelief to belief” — if you believe that, my response to you at this point in the message would be this: Paul has labored in choosing his words very carefully in Ephesians 1:4–5 to keep you from thinking that way, to keep you from diminishing the praise of the glory of God’s grace.

First Corinthians 1:30 says, “Because of [God] you are in Christ Jesus.” Tonight, we will hear from Ephesians 2 that God made us alive when we were dead. God gave us faith. As Acts 13:48 says, “As many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” It’s not the other way around.

And he’s not done clarifying the glory of God’s saving grace as free and unconditional. So, let’s go to verses 11–12, where we get the second reference: “to the praise of [the] glory [of God].”

Chosen Heirs

Ephesians 1:11–12 says,

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose [prothesin] of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

So, what is it that leads to the praise of his glory? In verse 11, Paul roots the certainty of our future inheritance in the fact that we were predestined for it. “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined . . .” Again, Paul has taken us back before creation to predestination as the ground of our hope that we will gain a great inheritance in Christ. But, just like in verse 5, he does more. Again, he pushes beneath predestination to God’s “purpose” in verse 11: “. . . predestined according to the purpose of him . . .” God’s predestining us was rooted in a purpose, a design, a plan.

And then, as if to make crystal clear that this purpose is not to restrain his sovereignty and see how humans will use their ultimate self-determination, he says, “. . . the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). Just as in verse 5 he spoke of the “[good pleasure] of his will,” so here he speaks of “the counsel of his will” — both phrases designed to shout, “Your election, your predestination, your adoption, your inheritance, are owing entirely, freely, gloriously to God’s purpose, God’s will, God’s good pleasure, God’s counsel in eternity, and not to anything in you!” What you bring is sin and deadness and hardness. What he brings is grace.

And if we ask, “Paul, should we even believe, trust, receive, pray, and obey?” he answers, “Indeed you will; you must. And when you have believed, you will turn and look at the miracle and say with the words of verse 11 that he has done it.” He has “[worked] all things according to the counsel of his will” — including my faith. He planned it all. He worked it all to the praise of the glory of his grace.

Do you remember what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15:10? “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Of course, we believe, we receive, we trust, we treasure, we pray, we obey, we love, we work, we die for this reality. And when we come to the end, we say, “It was not I, but the grace of God.” We praise the glory of the grace of God, not ourselves.

So, we have seen in Ephesians 1:4–6 that God chose us and predestined us for adoption unconditionally “[unto] the praise of [the glory of his] grace.” And we have seen in Ephesians 1:11–12 that we may be confident in this predestination because God not only plans all things according to the good pleasure of his will, but he also works all things according to the counsel of his will — all of it to the praise of his glory, especially the glory of his grace.

To the Praise of Jesus Christ

Between these two texts (verses 4–6 and verses 11–12) that take the glory of God’s grace back into the eternal good pleasure of God, Paul lifts up Jesus Christ, the infinitely loved Son of God. And he says that everything God was aiming at in choosing us for holiness, and predestining us for adoption, and obtaining our inheritance, Jesus Christ has purchased by the shedding of his blood for the forgiveness of our sins — and this too is owing entirely to the glory of grace. Verse 7 says, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.”

Trespasses. Blood. Forgiveness. Where did this come from? Suddenly, a whole world of sin is before us, which means God did not choose holy people. He chose wicked people to become holy. He chose treasonous people, hell-deserving people. So, in the plan and good pleasure and counsel of his will was the blood of the Beloved — from eternity. The book of life where the names of the chosen are written before the foundation of the world has a name. In Revelation 13:8, John calls it “the book of life of the Lamb who was slain.” The slaughter of the perfect Lamb of God was predestined so that predestined wicked people (you and me) could be redeemed.

And it was also so that, according to Ephesians 1:10, God might “unite [or sum up] all things in [Christ].” We were chosen in him (verse 4). We were predestined through him (verse 5). We have redemption in him (verse 7). We have our inheritance secured in him (verse 11). We are sealed in him (verse 13). And so, we hope in him (verse 12). From eternal election to eternal inheritance, all the gracious purposes of God are through Christ and for Christ. He is the embodiment of the glory of the grace of God. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

When we say that the main point of Ephesians 1 is “the praise of the glory of the grace of God,” we mean the praise of the glory of Jesus Christ.

More Than Words

Here’s one last application to your heart, and mine. The goal of the universe is praise — the praise of the glory of the grace of God. What is praise? It is not mere words. I requested from ChatGPT, “Please compose a thirty-second prayer to God in the spirit and theology of D.A. Carson, in praise to the glory of God’s grace.” In three seconds, it gave me this:

Gracious Father, we bow before you, the Sovereign Lord of history and redemption. From eternity past, you purposed to lavish grace upon undeserving sinners through the blood of your beloved Son. We praise you for the glory of your mercy, unearned and unmeasured, made manifest in Christ crucified and risen. May our lives, redeemed and sanctified by your Spirit, be vessels of praise to the riches of your grace. To you be glory forever. Amen.

Is that praise? It is not. Jesus said, “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me” (Matthew 15:8–9). If there is no heartfelt loving, treasuring, embracing, enjoying, delighting, or being satisfied in the glory of the unconditional, choosing, predestining, redeeming grace of God, we are not praising. Computers will never have Spirit-given joy in the glory of the grace of God. It is the Spirit-given feeling of the worth and beauty and greatness of the grace of God for which you and the universe were made.

If that is not your portion, give yourself no rest until it is. You were made to praise — that is, you were made to feel — the preciousness of grace, and to speak it and show it.