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You Are Predestined (Ephesians 1:5-6)

Scott Kercheville
05/17/15 - Sun AM

Series: Ephesians (Your Identity in Christ)

Millions of orphans wait every day for parents to love them and take them home. Imagine what this would be like. Day by day you are passed over. Day by day other kids find homes, but you wait. This would cause anyone to feel sad and unloved. The future is bleak. There is not real hope or destiny. Orphans experience this in the deepest ways. Feeling unloved and hopeless about the future is common among others too. Circumstances can cause us to feel not valued, displaced, and without destiny. This is handled in various ways. We make ourselves crazy busy so we are distracted from thinking deeply about the future. But when busyness ceases and the same void future remains, we are still disappointed by our circumstances and relationships. Many turn to seemingly harmless activities for comfort - binging on food, shopping, Netflix, or Facebook. These still leave us without the love and the sense of purpose, future, and destiny that we crave. Many will seek this in pornography, pain killers, and alcohol. Others take their lives because the emptiness of the future overwhelms them. 

Was this hopelessness God's plan for us when he created us? Certainly not. We were not created to fill the hopeless lack of destiny we feel in our hearts with temporary things. We were not created to be disconnected from hope and destiny in the first place. Paul has been praising God for blessing us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. But in Ephesians 1:5-6 Paul writes of a blessing that describes the destiny God created man to hold onto and the goal God created mankind for.

Paul says in verse 5 that God predestined us. To predestine simply means “to determine beforehand.” Last week we saw in verse 4 that God chose us. We did not first choose God, God chose us. God did not choose us because we were holy, for God chose us before the world was created and we were spiritually dead anyway. However, we were chosen that we should be holy and blameless. Therefore, “chosen” refers to who chose, when we were chosen, and what we were chosen to be, but predestination refers to the destiny we were chosen to hope in and the end for which God chose us. Therefore our question about this text should not be how did God predestine us, but what did God predestine us for - what is our destiny - and why did he give us this destiny? 

• He Predestined Us for Adoption As Sons (1:5). This is a powerful spiritual image because it means...
  • ... you were chosen despite being a child of wrath.
  • ... you were obtained at a great cost.
  • ... you receive all the privileges of being God's child.
  • ... you have a real destiny to hope in when times seem insecure.
• He Predestined Us to the Praise of His Glorious Grace (1:6)

When hopelessness threatens to over take you - pause. We can keep binging on busyness and the things of this world to try to forget our pain and insecurity; or, we can remind ourselves of, meditate on, and praise God for our destiny to receive adoption by the Father. Hope in the destiny preordained for you. Give God the glory.