God Made His Choice

Why are you a Christian, and not the kinder, more generous non-believer down the road? Pastor Josh would not let that question settle anywhere comfortable this week as he opened Genesis 25 and the life of Jacob, continuing our Full Life: His Story series. The whole message circled one uncomfortable, wonderful idea: before you had done anything at all, good or bad, God made His choice. And He chose you.

This is the first of two weeks on Jacob, in the lead-up to camp on the Gold Coast. Not registered? Buy the ticket, drive, or start walking now; you'll make it in two weeks.

God is the God who makes choices

Read Genesis and a pattern jumps out. God chose Abraham. God chose Isaac. Now, while the twins are still wrestling inside Rebekah's womb, God tells her that two nations are in there, and that "the older shall serve the younger." Jacob, the second-born, gets the inheritance. In the ancient world, as in many Asian households today, the older son takes everything. The Bible keeps breaking that rule: trace the genealogy of Jesus and firstborns keep getting passed over.

Why Jacob and not Esau? Scripture gives no résumé. Paul makes the point bluntly in Romans 9: the choice came while they "were not yet born and had done nothing, either good or bad," so that God's purpose in election would rest on the One who calls, never on anything they did. "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." Pastor Josh was careful here: no emotional malice; Esau was still blessed materially and fathered a nation. The verse guards God's freedom to choose the line Jesus would come through. Sovereign means exactly that: He answers to no one.

Paul even anticipates our objection. Unjust? By no means: "I have mercy on whom I have mercy." The potter can shape the same lump of clay into a living-room vase or a pot for the rain outside. Same clay, the owner's call.

The doubt under the doubt

A shepherd in our church recently confessed to Pastor Josh that after a lifetime as a Christian, the Old Testament had started to feel too mythical for his modern, scientific mind. Pastor Josh's response surprised some of us: he struggles too, and always has, never more than in Bible college when a professor suggested the serpent in Eden was only a figure of speech.

Then there's the classic challenge every believer eventually hears: you're only a Christian because you were born into it; born in an Islamic country, you'd be Muslim. Pastor Josh's answer was to flip the question and start from who God is, not from our sociology. We measure God against our idea of fairness, and when the world looks unfair we conclude He isn't there. But the Bible says God is sovereign in His power and sovereign in His love. He can love whom He chooses to love. Before asking about everyone else, start with yourself: God made you to know Jesus. That was His choice.

Because here is what Pastor Josh thinks most doubt actually is. Not an evidence problem. A worthiness problem.

The heart of it is you just can't trust God made His choice because He loves you.

You know yourself too well. Surely there's been a mistake, or the whole thing is one gigantic scam. Doubt ends in denial, and it began with the suspicion that you couldn't be loved.

Her choice meeting my faith

The illustration that carried the sermon came from Pastor Josh's own marriage. He met his wife at 24. Beautiful and intelligent, and she chose a broke ministry student who could barely speak English. For years he kept asking her, do you love me? She had signed the paper; the proof was in front of him. But he couldn't accept her choosing him, because he wouldn't have chosen himself, and that insecurity quietly dragged on the marriage. The turning point wasn't new evidence. He decided to believe her. Her choice, meeting his faith, made the marriage strong.

He pushed the picture further, to his children. Nobody questions a father's love for his own kids. When his daughter Skye, as a teenager, asked whether he even loved her, he told her he would drop church any day and run to her. How did she know he was her father? Not a DNA test: years of love, care and sacrifice, and she believed. Before the proof, there was faith. Children secure in their parents' love live free, and Christians who know God made His choice live the same way. Even your sin, even a season of depression or struggle, cannot undo it; election never rested on your merit in the first place.

I'm here singing his glory and love of Jesus Christ, not because of who I am, but because of who he is. Not because of what I've done, but because of what he's done.

Don't sell it for a bowl of stew

So do we have any choice at all? Yes. Esau comes in from the field starving, and Jacob offers stew for his birthright. To Esau it was just another Monday; he ate, drank, got up and walked off. Hebrews 12 reads it far more darkly, warning us not to be "sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal." Sexual sin, Pastor Josh said, works exactly like that bowl of stew. Over-promised, under-delivered, gone by morning, and you barely realise what you traded away. Esau wasn't evil so much as stupid, and all sin carries that stupidity. The choice, in the end, is about knowing what is valuable.

Don't exchange the more precious thing with the immediate pleasure.

God made His own assessment of value, and the price He paid for you was Jesus on the cross. Don't throw that choice away cheap.

God has chosen you

Isaiah 55 puts the ground under all of it: His thoughts and ways are higher than ours. If God operates on a dimension above our experience, then, as Pastor Josh concluded, faith is the only logical path to the full life in Christ. Your salvation didn't fall out of the sky at random; it sits at the end of thousands of years of God's deliberate choosing, from Abraham to Jacob to a cross two thousand years ago.

That kind of faith, Pastor Josh said, comes two ways. First, come to Him as you are. He is the author and finisher of faith; you can't conjure it up, but you can ask for it. Pastor Josh's habit is to walk and tell God what he doesn't understand, Noah's Ark included, then stop at the one thing he cannot doubt: a God who loves him and died for him. Second, surround yourself with faithful people. Marinate in TikTok all week and you'll think like TikTok; refuse to choose God and something else will take over as your god. That's why Sunday worship and Friday house church matter more than we think.

This week, take the doubt you've been carrying to God directly and ask Him for faith rather than trying to manufacture it. And hold on to the word we spoke over each other as we finished, because it's the whole sermon in four words: God has chosen you.