East Baptist Church – Denison, TX

Our Lives As God’s Chosen People (Joy)

John 15:11-17

My beloved as our Lord has left the Upper Room and is about to be arrested and taken to the cross, He desires for all of us as His Own to understand we were not called from death into a life that is joyless. We also need to keep upfront in our life in this body that God loves us and chooses us as His Children. We often think that the Christian is a call to a joyless, boring, and funless life, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Key words and central message that these verses hinge on is when  Our Lord says ¹⁶“You did not choose Me but I chose you,” It was not we who chose God, but God Who in His grace, knocked on the doors of our hearts with a call and an offer made out of His perfect love. 

The first thing we are called to is JOY. When we are able to step into the attitude of the joy our Lord desires for us, we see we are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way is, it is, both in the journey and in the goal of our calling, we find the way of joy. There is always a joy in doing the right thing.

When we get the avenue of joy, life gets amazing. The meaning of JOY: closely related to gladness and happiness, although joy is more a state of being than an emotion; a result of choice. One of the fruits of the spirit. Having joy is part of the experience of being a Christian.

My beloved if you do not gleam anything else from our time in God’s Word understand we as humans choose who and what we LOVE. We are not animals that do not have a choice on how or what we love, we are the only living thing made in the image of God, a God Who chose to love you in all your sin and stuff.

I think we need to stop and see what is unfolding before our eyes of faith: Our Lord is just hours away from dying for us on the Cross, and He says John 15:12 (NASB) ¹²“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”

The third thing we are called and commanded to do is be His friend. John 15:14-15 (NASB) ¹⁴“You are My friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”

Warning: Please do not take the choosing as an invitation to cast aside the Lordship and reverence of God in Christ.

And Jesus says, “I have something greater for you yet, you are no longer slaves; you are friends.” Christ offers an intimacy with God which not even the greatest men knew before He came into the world. My what a joy maker to know I am called to be friend to God in and by my coming to Christ. WOW!

We did not choose Him but Him us and as such we have a wonderful mission and that is “and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain,”