the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Grace for Today
1 Thessalonians 1:4
‘Your election of God’
Read 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
What does the Bible teach about election? Any honest man who reads the Bible must recognize that the Word of God does teach the doctrine of divine election and that this doctrine is a prominent theme of the New Testament. You may not understand it, you may not be able to explain it, but you cannot deny that our Lord and his apostles taught election. You know it and I know it. But what is election? What does the Bible teach about election? These are the questions we must seek to understand.
Divine election is God’s eternal choice of his people. It is God’s eternal and gracious purpose to save all who in time are saved. Election is that eternal act of God’s grace by which he separated and distinguished you who are saved, and all who ever will be saved, from the rest of mankind, saying, ‘I will be their God and they shall be my people.’ If you are saved, you know that your salvation is God’s work. True, you do believe on Christ, but God enabled you to believe and caused you to believe. God has distinguished you from the rest of mankind. He has done something for you which he has not done for other men. Now all I am saying is this: election is God’s eternal purpose to save you.
Listen to the Scriptures. Our Lord said, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you’ (John 15:16). Luke tells us that when Paul and Barnabas preached the gospel, ‘As many as were ordained to eternal life believed’ (Acts 13:48). Paul tells us that every blessing of grace comes to us from God the Father, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ: ‘According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will’ (Ephesians 1:4-5). It is written that ‘God hath saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began’ (2 Timothy 1:9).
