Plan for: Thanksgiving | Advent | Christmas
Plan for: Thanksgiving | Advent | Christmas
God, as the ultimate authority, has chosen us as His special possession, and we should allow Him to shape us and choose Him back, despite not always understanding His decisions.
Welcome church! We are excited you decided to worship with us. Today, I’m not sure what you are carrying with you, but I’m believing in faith that God desires to shed light into the darkness, and free you from having to carry baggage or burdens alone.
The pursuit of righteousness; the life of faith; these are not things we have to do alone, which is what we learned from last week’s teaching.
And today we continue in our series on the book of Romans…”the most systematic and developed doctrinal book of the Apostle Paul.” There is much to learn from Romans, so much in fact that we could easily work for the next year through each chapter and verse.
Instead we’ve chosen some highlights from Romans, like sin, righteousness, unity with Christ, and today we’ve got even more powerful insight to share from Romans chapter 9.
God chooses us. What amazing news!
God chooses us. What amazing news!
If you have a Bible or Bible App, turn with me to Romans 9:14-25.
It is clear right up front in our passage that God has the final authority. He gets to choose who He shows mercy to and whose heart He hardens. And sometimes, we don’t understand that. It’s hard to imagine God would harden anyone’s heart for any reason. And yet, we’re called in faith to trust His ways are greater than ours.
Sometimes I ask myself, “God, why won’t these people come to know you? Why is their heart so hard towards you?” It is a reality for us all that we don’t fully know how God works. However, here is what we can be sure of: God chose us.
And this is the topic I want us to move forward with today. There are some key components to God’s choice to use us and call us His “special possession.”
We Were Created in His Image
Even from the beginning of creation itself, God chose to create human beings differently.
Genesis 1:27 reminds us; “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
And Genesis 2:7 says; “Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
It’s incredible to read about how God formed us. He didn’t speak mankind into existence like the rest of creation. He knew He wanted us to be intentionally set apart and different. But since Genesis 3, when sin entered humanity, we let God down. We all fall short of His standard for us. We allow sin in our lives to distort God’s image. But the good news today is that God's image on each of us is not destroyed!
Just as our Romans passage talks about, God gets to decide who and what He uses to accomplish His purposes ... View this full sermon with PRO Premium
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