You Did Not Choose Me, But I Chose You: Why We Believe and What We Are Supposed to Do About It

By Peter Zelinski

Do we choose God or does God choose us? Passages throughout the New Testament either assume or directly state the point that the believers were chosen to believe. Yet that idea is foreign within the modern context that sees belief in God as a victory of personal choice. In "You Did Not Choose Me, But I Chose You," author Peter Zelinski explores the premise that the knowledge of God we experience as belief is something God has awakened within us. That premise reorients our understanding of our lives in this world and the life to come. As the book explains, God is transforming believers by renewing their minds. In doing so, he is realizing an objective described for us in the Bible, an objective pursued without variation through both the Old Testament and the New.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780984747757

Book preview

You Did Not Choose Me,

But I Chose You

On the nature of Christian faith:

Why we believe and what we

are supposed to do about it

By Peter Zelinski

www.peterzelinski.com

Copyright © 2018 by Peter Zelinski. ISBN 978-0-9847477-5-7. Cover: Detail from Study for Nicodemus Visiting Jesus by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1899).

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible®. Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. 

To my daughters

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

—Romans 12:2

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

—John 3:16 KJV

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

—John 3:16 NIV

For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

—John 3:16 HCSB

You did not choose me, but I chose you. I appointed you that you should go out and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you.

—John 15:16

Therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship.

—Romans 12:1

Contents

Introduction: Your Mind Was Changed

A Note About Scripture References

PART I: WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU

Chapter 1: In Defense of Unbelief

One cannot choose to be born.

Chapter 2: It Matters

To misunderstand why we believe is potentially to misunderstand your mission.

Chapter 3: The Synthesis of John

It took nearly the entire first century to understand who had lived among us.

Chapter 4: The Sheep Have Waited for the Shepherd

Nicodemus had high regard for Jesus, but was not a believer in Christ.

Chapter 5: Does God Desire All Men to Be Saved?

He has saved according to his grace, given before time began.

Chapter 6: Mixed Feelings About Miracles

Who were the believers to whom Jesus drew near?

Chapter 7: He Chooses

He has done so from the beginning.

Chapter 8: Where Body and Soul are Destroyed

Infinite torment is not real.

Chapter 9: Can I Know That I Am Saved?

You can know this about yourself. You cannot know it about another.

Chapter 10: The Apostles’ Awakening

When the apostles were with Jesus, they had not yet been born again.

Chapter 11: You Were Chosen

The world had you in its spell, so you were taken against your will.

PART II: WHY IT HAPPENED

Chapter 12: Does God Want People in Heaven?

God’s aim, and his aim for his chosen, is presented all throughout scripture.

Chapter 13: The Meaning of Believe in Him

The belief of the sheep finds its full explanation in Jesus.

Chapter 14: Futility Falls Away

Look upon death and live.

Chapter 15: Timeless Life

Jesus spoke of life, and not just life after death.

PART III: WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Chapter 16: The Slender Trail of Joy

The world will be remade through our decision to choose freedom and life.

Chapter 17: Afflicted by God

If you love me, keep my commands is not a dare, but the solution to a problem.

Chapter 18: Love Without Distinction

The commands of Christ advance indiscriminate love.

Chapter 19: Make Disciples, Not Converts

Evangelism is not proselytizing. Evangelism is feeding sheep.

Chapter 20: What is Joy?

Make your life not a sacrifice, but a living sacrifice. Jesus gives permission.

Chapter 21: No Longer Asleep

Our focus is on the gift.

*  *  *

MEDITATIONS

Logic

Lord

Life

Scripture

Greater Work

Our God

Memory

3:16

The New Age

Death

Unparented

Commands

Finished

Barriers

Love

John

*  *  *

About the Author

Introduction

Your Mind Was Changed

This book was written to Christian believers. Its subject is Christian belief. The basis of this book is one simple idea: You did not choose to be a believer. We who cherish a relationship with Jesus Christ, we who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and believe in his bodily resurrection, did not choose this belief, because it is not possible to humanly choose this. We believe because God chose us to be his believers.

Further, he chose us for salvation through this belief. Not all are chosen, but we were called out to believe. We didn’t do anything to deserve the call; the choice was made beyond the world and before our lives on earth began. All of the ways we have each chosen to obey or follow Christ in our lives came later. We do make choices as believers, but first we have to believe. And your experience of belief in Christ began in that moment or that season in which God, according to God’s timing, awakened the belief that he had predestined you to possess from the beginning.

Of course, this is a strange idea. It is strange to many, at least. The modern, churchgoing Christian routinely believes something quite different. The modern Christian often takes it for granted that belief in Christ is a personal decision that he or she made, and therefore a personal decision that should be urged on others. Yet the authors of scripture did not see the matter that way, and sometimes stated the point explicitly. Their understanding of faith as something given by God, outside the bounds of any human choice, can be seen in Ephesians 1, 2 Timothy 1, Luke 14, John 3, John 6, John 10, and John 15, among other biblical texts we will take up in the course of this book.

But there is more. The purpose of this book is not to cluckingly correct a misapprehension. I hope you find far more value in the book than that. Beyond explaining your election as a child of God, this book also explores the meaning of that election in terms of God’s purpose for your life. He has a reason for choosing us. He had a purpose in choosing you.

Coming to understand my own faith as God’s choice rather than mine has set me free to seek and recognize the purpose written into my life, and to walk in it more committedly. Doubt and perplexity once muddled my experience of belief. Coming to understand my faith as God’s gift rather than my exertion has cleared much of that away, releasing the joy and the power that are the natural and normal expressions of faith. I wrote this book to try to give words to this. I wrote this book in the hope that the ideas in this book will find their way to other Christian believers who will find the same life in these ideas that I have found. I wrote this book in the hope that others, and the kingdom of God along with them, might benefit from the same liberation.

*  *  *

I will not be advancing this book’s premise under the banner of others who have also advanced it. That we believe because we are predestined to believe is not a new idea. As I say, scripture speaks of it, but readers who are familiar with the idea likely also know that church leaders through the centuries have championed it in various ways. Certain movements are commonly associated with a predestinationist view of faith, the labels for two such movements being Calvinist and Reformed. My intent in this book is not to take up either of those labels or champion any of those movements, largely because I am not sure the leading voices of those movements would happily lend me their banner. For the most part, I tell a different story than they do. I describe God’s choosing and awakening of the believers within the context of a particular aim God is working through the world, an aim we find running through scripture. Moreover, I assert and defend a particular view about how we should understand all of the people we share the world with who are not believers in Jesus Christ. Has God specifically rejected those people whom he has not chosen for belief? Has he doomed these people to suffer in hell forever? No and no! I will have much to say about this. I believe some of the most basic contemporary Sunday-morning assumptions about the world, the people in it, and the afterlife all need to be re-examined, and the Bible is our guide to this examination. I have written this book to believers, but as you read it, I expect you will come to see that this is a book about nonbelievers every bit as much as it is a book about those of us who have been given belief.

I also affirm human free will. That affirmation further serves to separate the ideas that this book offers. The predestinationist view of faith is often presented within a view that says God predestines everything, including sin and evil. That is not the view of this book. I do argue that neither you nor any other person can possibly make a decision for Christ in terms of humanly choosing to begin to believe. But after God enacts his choice for you to believe, I argue that you will hopefully make all manner of decisions for Christ. Indeed, the very hope of your making these choices, so that the benefit of your believing in him might flow outward, accounts for at least part of why God made the choice that he did.

*  *  *

You did not will yourself to be saved. That is the message of this book, but only part of the message. A more complete statement of the message of this book might be: You did not will yourself to be saved—halleluiah! For if it were up to you, how could you have chosen this through the working of your own human will? How could you ever be confident that your will had made the choice truly?

After all, before you were saved, you were unsaved. You were a broken creature, twisted by the weight of your obedience to the sin and death that rule this world. How could a creature such as this understand the need for salvation purely enough to choose it for what it is? Humanly, we do not have this understanding. We choose even seemingly spiritual things for entirely human reasons.

For example, we can respond to positive emotion. That is, we can attend a church because we enjoy the uplift of an encouraging service. We can also respond to fear, showing up in church because we are afraid of hell. And we can respond to persuasion, affiliating ourselves with a movement because we are enthralled by the preacher or impressed with the people who are a part of it. None of these is a choice for Jesus. The presence of any of these motives does not mean belief is absent, but transformative, transcendent belief entails something entirely separate from any of these drives. To choose the divine, to choose what is not of this world, one needs the capacity both to recognize the divine and to prefer it to the way of this world. Humanly, we do not possess this capacity.

That is why the choice is superhuman. To choose the divine, one needs the divine to enter in. And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, that is exactly what happened: The Spirit of God entered into you, changing what you perceive, what you value, and what you know.

Your mind was changed. This is what happened to you. I don’t mean the set of opinions inside your mind was changed; I mean your very mind was changed. If there is one line of scripture, one fragment of one verse that can summarize the entire book you are reading, summarizing it perhaps even better than the verse chosen for its title, then that line is this imperative from the apostle Paul:

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. —Romans 12:2

That is what God did. He gave you a renewed mind. Until God gave you this mind, awakening the destiny he had implanted within you from the beginning, you could not believe the truth because you could not see it. Your mind is the very lens with which you perceive, the means by which you comprehend the world. In the past, you saw the world through a distorted lens, limiting what you were able to recognize within the world. But then the time came when God gave you a mind able to see what you couldn’t see before. Maybe he gave this new mind to you in an instant or maybe he gave it to you over a season of time. He gave you a mind able to see the sovereignty of God and a mind able to see your own belonging to the kingdom that he is advancing. Others do not see these things the way that you do.

Therefore, that understanding is a privilege. More, that understanding is a component of an inestimable gift, because the touch of the divine renewing our minds has given us salvation into eternal life. Meanwhile, the understanding is also a calling, because God has lifted us out of sin and ignorance for a reason.

There is work he is doing in this world. There is specific work aimed at a specific result, and he is doing that work through you and me. It is a work of joy as well as effort, a heavenly work rather than an earthly one, and we are to step into that work and become increasingly better laborers within it. Romans 12:2, the verse quoted above, does not say to simply take pleasure or comfort in the renewed mind. It says we are to be transformed by the renewing of the mind.

Accordingly, this book does not just defend election, the predestination of faith, Calvinism, or whatever term might be applied to the premise that God gives us our belief. I do make that defense, and I will do so at length, but then I leave that defense behind after Part I of this book, because there is more than this to cover.

Part II of the book is about God’s aim in this world, and what scripture tells us about the objective he is moving to realize, the great work into which the believers are called.

Then, Part III is about the role we play as individuals, and how we are to face the question of what to do with the redeemed lives we have been given by God’s choice and God’s grace.

Be transformed by the renewing of your mind, wrote Paul. This is a book about God’s calling of his believers, but its focus is not the renewed mind. Rather, it was written to those who already have the renewed mind, whether or not they recognize that this is what they possess. The book’s true subject matter lies elsewhere. Its focus is the same as the focus of those words from Paul. That is, the focus of this book is transformation.

Peter Zelinski

2018

A Note About Scripture References

Details set off in parentheses ought to be parenthetical. The information contained between parentheses should be interesting in the context of the subject at hand, but not necessary to the writer’s purpose. Parentheses are a sign that what is inside of them can be safely skipped.

Yet Christian writing includes a type of parenthetical information that implies a different level of importance. That is, Christian writing includes parenthetical scriptural citations, meaning citations that look like the one I am placing at the end of this sentence (Genesis 1:1). Invoking the Bible as they do, punctuated as they are by the central colon, these citations seem to pointedly declare their significance. The effect is distracting.

In this Christian book, I have followed the convention of including these citations. I have included parenthetical scriptural coordinates for verses providing the biblical foundation for assertions made all throughout the book, even though I am aware that my doing so chops up the text of the book and detracts somewhat from the reading experience. I feel I need