Some of you may have heard of a basketball player by the name of Michael Jordan. Any of you heard of him before? Now, I don’t really follow basketball at all, but growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, I heard his name all the time because he was thought to be the very best basketball player at the time, and even today, many people say that he was the best basketball player of all time.

But did you know that, even though Michael Jordan was loved and adored by many thousands of people because of his abilities, that he only really cared about one person’s opinion of him? In addition to basketball, he was known for having a very close relationship with his dad. Michael Jordan said that his dad was his role model, hero, and best friend. In fact, it’s reported in the Chicago Tribune that Jordan would always look for his dad in the stands at his basketball games because:

“When he’s there,” Jordan said, “I know I have at least one fan.”

One of the most desperate needs that we have is the need to belong. We want to feel loved. We want to have a sense of connection with family and friends. And this is true for us all. We all want to feel as though we belong.

Maybe at times in your life, you’ve felt all alone, and you’ve worried that you’d never have close friends that you could share life with. I remember confessing to my counselor even just a couple years ago that I always thought there was something about me that caused others to not want to be close friends with me, because there have been very few times in my life when I’ve had a very close friend, and this insecurity goes all the way back to when I began the first grade at a new school, and then when I began the third grade at another new school.

This is about what I looked like in the third grade. In addition to being an extremely cute little kid, I was insecure, and I longed to belong.

And this need to belong is so strong and so fundamental to how we experience life that we even tend to gauge how effective we are in life by this metric, as if having a lot of friends and family at your funeral means that you led a more full life than if you have only a few at your funeral.

But I think if we were to ask Solomon, he would say this even this is vanity, like chasing after the wind. And yet, belonging is a need that we all long to have met. And part of the good news of the gospel is that in Jesus, we can know that we are known and loved by God.

Ephesians 1:5-6

He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One. (Ephesians 1:5-6)

Father, we thank You that we can call You our Father. Thank You for forgiving us, saving us, and bringing us into Your family so that we know that we’re loved. Help us to rest in Your care for us, and live with the full assurance of Your love. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

We talked last week about how God chose us before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless. And this week, we’re going to look at this idea just a bit more because we read in our passage today that God predestined us to be adopted.

I’m surprised that many Christians completely deny that the Bible teaches predestination at all, because whether a person believes that predestination is God choosing us for salvation ahead of time or not, they still need to wrestle with what the Bible means when it uses the word predestination. Because the simple reality is that the word is used 6 times in the New Testament, with at least 4 of those times specifically referring to this idea that God “predestined” who He would bless in Jesus.

The Greek word “proorizo” literally means “to foreordain” or “to predetermine.” When God looked at us and saw us in eternity past, He ordained and determined to adopt us into His family through Christ. And what God ordains and determines to do, He does.

Most English translations today and even throughout history simply translate this word “predestined,” and even when they don’t, the concept seems very clear.

The American Standard Version says: “having foreordained us unto adoption…”

The Bible in Basic English says: “we were designed before by him for the position of sons…”

The Darby Bible says: “having marked us out beforehand for adoption…”

And the Easy-to-Read version says: “before the world was made, God decided to make us his own children…”

So some famous preachers from history such John Calvin and Charles Spurgeon preached this doctrine, and really expounded on its implications, that God gets all the praise for our salvation, because He’s the one who elected us unto salvation, to which we respond with faith and repentance. That’s why the doctrine of predestination is usually referred to as Calvinism, because of John Calvin who really explained many of its implications.

But in response to John Calvin’s preaching, Jacob Arminius disagreed with several of the points of Calvinism, saying that it could lead to the idea that God doesn’t love everyone and give everyone a genuine opportunity to be saved. So one major criticism of Calvinsim is that if God chooses who will be saved, He would also at least indirectly choose who won’t be saved. So Arminius stressed not God’s decision to save us, but our decision to receive Christ. So this system of theology has been called Arminianism, after the preaching of Jacob Arminius.

And these two systems of theology, Calvinism and Arminianism, have divided many believers into various churches, denominations, and some on each side will even go so far as to say that those on the other side aren’t even believers! Which is unfortunate, because both belief systems get so much right, and believers in both camps love Jesus and call on Him as their Savior and Lord.

But there are certainly some distinctives and differences between them.

While Calvinism emphasizes God’s sovereignty, Arminianism emphasizes our free will. While Calvinism emphasizes God’s particular love for those that He chooses to save, Arminianism emphasizes God’s universal love for all people. The Calvinist responds to the Arminian that if salvation were dependent on us, then we could lose our salvation, and we would therefore get the glory for it. But the Arminian responds to the Calvinist that while we get no glory for our salvation, our salvation does depend on our faith and repentance, which we must continue to have in order to be saved.

Now, I have a lot of respect for both Calvinist and Arminian theology, because both of them aim to be biblically faithful and to praise God for His love and grace. But if you take either system of theology to its logical conclusion, it leads to ideas that most Christians are not comfortable affirming.

Put it this way: if the difference between a saved person and an unsaved person is what God did, like the Calvinist would say, then the unsaved person isn’t truly to blame for his damnation. God simply didn’t choose to save them. And if the difference between a saved person and an unsaved person is what the person did, even if it’s just having faith, like the Arminian would say, then the saved person could boast in themselves, because they themselves decided to follow Jesus.

And if you’re wondering which one I am, whether Calvinist or Arminian, or which one the Bible really teaches, I would say both, and neither.

Such systems of theology can be helpful in studying and simplifying what the Bible says, but God’s plan is greater than we can comprehend. We’re talking about what God purposed in eternity past, and how God thought about us and all of humanity as He formulated His plans for all of history! This is a huge plan!

The best summary of all this that I’ve ever heard comes from Pastor Peter Hiett of Denver, Colorado. He says:

God is love, and so desires to save.
God is Almighty, and so can save.
God is Jesus, and so does save.

This highlights the truth that God didn’t predestine us in an impersonal way, but in a very intimate way. God saves us because He loves us. He doesn’t save us to exert His authority over us or even over our eternal destiny, although He has every right to do that, since He’s the Potter and we’re the clay as Paul wrote in Romans, quoting the book of Isaiah. But Paul wrote here in Ephesians that God predestined us not just as lumps of clay, but to be adopted as sons.

You see, predestination isn’t just about heaven and hell. It’s about relationship. God chose for us to be His sons and daughters. He chose to adopt us into His family.

As many of you know, I have a YouTube channel that has shown many of the ways that we care for our youngest daughter’s needs, while seeking to direct people to the hope that we have in Jesus.

Like much of YouTube, I get a lot of negative comments. On my channel specifically, that often means people saying that we should have aborted Raelynn instead of bringing her into this world to suffer.

Now, not only do I disagree with them about their “solution,” but I always like to see what they say when I let them know we adopted her, and we’re blessed to have her in our family. Because usually, when someone finds out that we adopted her, they always respond with amazement:

“Wow! You adopted her, even knowing how much it would be to take care of her? Even knowing she was going to bring tears, and pain, and heartache? Now that’s love!”

And I agree. This is what God did for us. He brought us into His family, even with all our baggage, because He loved us.

It’s funny that I also get a lot of comments on the channel saying that Raelynn looks like Abby and me. I usually just say thanks with a smile.

Did you know that as God’s adopted children, we begin to look like Him? As we saw last week, when we receive Jesus as Savior, we become holy and blameless, having all of our sins forgiven, and we begin to live as holy and blameless in the world today.

And this is such a cool thing that not everyone knows. When we adopted Raelynn, even her birth certificate was changed. Abby and I are listed as her parents on her birth certificate, not as her adopted parents, but as her parents, because we are her parents. We’re her parents legally, relationally, and in every way that’s recognized.

Being adopted into God’s family means that we’re fully, unquestionably, and in every way God’s real children!

The apostle John wrote about it like this, talking about receiving Jesus:

But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)

As God’s children, we have the rights of children. My kids can come in and out of my home anytime they want, because it’s their home, too. And no matter what happens in life, I’ll always love them as my kids, and nothing’s going to change that. Being adopted by God means that we have a special relationship with God, and nothing can take that away from us.

This happens, as Paul wrote in verse 5, “through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” In other words, God eagerly adopted us into His family. He was pleased to do it. He didn’t feel obligated to do it, or under any pressure to do it. God simply loved us so much that He saw us in our need, because of our sin, and through Jesus, rescued us from our lostness for Himself.

I do a lot of things in life out of selfishness. I tune people out when I’m working, and I act like it’s a major inconvenience if they interrupt me to talk. And when I walk up to a group of people, I often interrupt their conversations as if what I want to say is more important. When I order pizza for dinner, I order the pizza that I want without checking to see what others want, and then I always eat as much of it as I can, stuffing my face hole as if it’s my last meal. I’m an incredibly selfish person!

But God doesn’t act selfishly, even when He does something for Himself, for His own glory and according to His own desires. When God desired for us to praise Him, He didn’t merely command it, but gave us His Holy Spirit. When God desired to save us, He came down in the form of a man and died on a cross. And when God desired to show wrath toward sin, He took it upon Himself, so that we could be shown His mercy.

As Paul wrote in verse 6, God did all this “to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One.” God is praised because of how He magnified His grace in saving us through Jesus, the Beloved One.

That Greek word for lavished, “charitoo,” literally means to be highly favored and so incredibly overwhelmed by grace.

You see, God’s grace is poured over us such that we are completely engulfed by it, like by the waters of the ocean. And we needed that much grace, too, because our sins were that offensive to God. But where sin abounded, God’s grace abounded all the more.

I read about a man named Brett Archibald who was stranded by himself in the Indian Ocean for more than a day. Now, that may not seem like much if you’ve heard the stories about people lost at sea much longer than that, even over a year, but the thing that makes Brett Archibald different was the fact that he didn’t have a boat, a raft, a piece of wood, or anything at all to help him stay afloat. After falling off of a charter boat, his only choice was to tread water. So he did. He tread water in the middle of the Indian Ocean all by himself, without a hope of anyone rescuing or even seeing him ever again.

He began to pray. His first prayers were filled with anger and profanity. “God, why did this happen? I can’t believe you’d do this to me!” But after a while, his prayers turned from “Why me” to “Why not me?” He reflected that he hadn’t been a very good person, and had even failed at being a father.

As the hours passed, he fought cramps, dehydration, and stings from jellyfish. And then he saw it: the boat he fell from was coming back toward him. He started screaming and waving, “Hey, I’m here! Praise God, I’m saved!” But then as the boat approached him, he noticed that it wasn’t slowing down, and that they didn’t see him, and they passed right by him, and just sailed away.

He couldn’t take it anymore.

“I just lost it,” he said. “I screamed at the world. I screamed at life.”

After a while longer, he felt a shark bump into him from below. It eventually lost interest and swam away, but Archibald decided at that point that he could not go on any longer. He prayed one last time, made his peace, exhaled all the air out of his lungs, and allowed himself to sink under the water.

After sinking for a bit, he attempted to breathe in the water of the ocean. But, of course, he started choking on the water, and he instinctively started to swim to the surface of the water. As he was blacking out from nearly drowning, he saw a vision of the cross, and he thought that he was dying. But when he opened his eyes after emerging from the water, he saw that it wasn’t a cross, but the mast of a ship that was looking for him. After about 28 ½ hours at sea, he was rescued.

I share this story not to say you should give up the will to live if you’re ever in a similar situation, but only to say that God saves us when we realize that we cannot save ourselves, and that we are completely at His mercy.

And I actually think that this is a great illustration of baptism as well. When we receive Jesus as Savior, we are washed completely clean! We don’t just dip a toe in God’s mercy, as if we just need a little grace, because we’re just a little sinful. No! We’re surrounded by God’s mercy, and completely overwhelmed by God’s mercy, so that we can truly be transformed by God’s love, being made new by God’s redeeming grace.

But before we receive Jesus, all that can seem like death, because in a way, it is death. We die to ourselves so that we can find that we truly live in Jesus Christ.

In a few weeks, we’re going to look at the benefits of being adopted into God’s family as sons and daughters, because it comes with a rich inheritance. But for now, I just want us to dwell on the truth that we are loved by God. There’s nothing we need to do to earn His love. We are completely accepted into His family by grace through faith, and we belong. We have our greatest needs met in Christ.

So even though I have the tendency to feel like I don’t belong, I know that Jesus is always with me. And even though we do need each other, and as a church, we ought to be there for one another, when you have Jesus, you have a friend that’s closer than a brother, because we have a Father that has brought us into His family.

This has at least two massive implications for how we live today.

Number 1, as God’s children, we can rest in God’s love. And I feel like I say this all the time, but God’s first desire for us isn’t to work harder, because we can’t work hard enough to earn anything from God. God wants us to rest. And the reality that we’re adopted just reinforces this that much more! God is our Father, and we are His children! If God says we’re loved and forgiven, we can believe it. We don’t have to wonder about it. We don’t have to feel at all as if we need to earn it. God loves you, and He will never stop loving you. Rest in that.

Number 2, as God’s children, we are to rejoice in God’s love. Just like Michael Jordan with his dad, we have an audience of One. That means serving God out of the joy of His love. It means showing His love to others, putting His love on display. It means loving others just as God has loved us. God has loved us unconditionally, even though we sinned against Him, so we ought to love others the same way. Even if it means rejection by others, persecution at the hands of others, ridicule from others, we are to keep on loving them, praying for them, believing for them until they come to Christ for salvation. God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and we’re His ministers of reconciliation, as God is reconciling the whole world to Himself.