It’s a Choice

Dearly beloved of God, we live in this evil world, but we are not of it; we are in Christ.

Being in Christ we are redeemed, justified, sanctified, reconciled to God – He is our Heavenly Father now, and we are His children.

We have been delivered from the power of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. In Christ, we have the forgiveness of sins and there is no more condemnation to us from God.

God has sealed us with His spirit and He has given us nine manifestations of the spirit to operate for godly profit in our lives.

Ephesians 1: 3 reveals that our Father has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus and our hope is of glory, the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Greek texts use the word “every”, not “all” in this verse. In the Greek, “blessings” is “blessing”, and “all” is “every”, agreeing with “blessing”. If you drew a circle, all would indicate the whole. If you drew a circle and filled it full of dots, that is every. The emphasis falls on each and every dot in the circle.

Our Father did not just us bless us with a general bunch of blessings, He blessed us with EVERY spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm in Christ; each and every one of them.

He did not overlook a single detail. He freely gives us all things with Christ. Nothing was overlooked or missed.

Furthermore, what He did in Christ for one of His children, He did for each and every one of us. Think of the realm in which we are blessed with each and every spiritual blessing in Christ, dearly beloved; He blessed us in the heavenly realm. Moreover, they include an inheritance in Christ which is not temporal; it is eternal. Talk about grace!

Our Father decided that He would choose us “in Christ”. This is now our status, our position, our standing before Him.

By the counsel of His own will He planned, willed, determined, and worked to accomplish this. The Christ fulfilled His will and now we stand before God in Christ, clothed with everything that he accomplished.

In all wisdom and prudence He made known to us the mystery of His will according to the good pleasure which He purposed in Himself. He determined that Christ would head up all in heaven and in earth in the administration of the fullness of times, and in Christ we obtained an inheritance, an inheritance that will take will not fade away.

We will obtain the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ; we will be glorified together with him! He sealed us with His spirit to this end. It will take the ages to come for our Father to display the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness to us in Christ Jesus!

The Father chose us in Christ; now we have a choice to make. We may think and live as the common lot of people who are of this world, or we can choose not to be conformed to the ideas, motives, standards, and lifestyle promoted by the adversary in this evil age; we can choose to believe the measure God has given us for our believing, and think as He would have us to think; as new men in Christ. He exhorts us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds concerning who we are in Christ.

If we decide to think and live in this manner, we will be living sacrifices; it is only reasonable after all our Father has done for us in Christ. We will live as dead men raised to life! We are not compelled to do this; this is a choice we make out of love and thankfulness.

Beloved, we have the mind of the Lord so that He may instruct us. He freely gives us all things with Christ; we are indeed highly favored and dearly beloved.

Lead every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. Believe the measure He has given us for our believing. This is how we wrestle with the adversary.

We do not think as the adversary would have us think. We do not buy into his seductive ideas, the fears with which he ruins people’s lives. We do not become absorbed and distracted by the causes in which he entangles people; we do not buy into the lifestyle he encourages, nor the deceptive evil that he sponsors as light.

We renew our minds to who we are in Christ and believe the measure God has dealt us to believe; these are the weapons of our warfare, dearly beloved. Choose wisely, you are His dearly beloved one.