Election
About this series
While we regularly encourage people to be engaged in mission and give some ideas about what that could look like, our next series looks at the reasons and motivations for mission.
After the first week - What Is The Good News? - we’re going to spend five Sundays looking at the Why? of the gospel. Why is the gospel such good news? What biblical reasons do we have to engage in mission?
About this talk
C. S. Lewis wrote of his conversion, ‘You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.’ He tells how he felt pursued by God until he finally surrendered.
However, for most people, their experience of becoming a follower of Jesus invariably feels like a personal decision. Which it is. And yet, behind and before our decision is God’s decision to save us - not simply his foreknowledge that we will make that choice, but his initiative in leading us to that choice, as Lewis wrote about.
Hence Paul writes in Ephesians 1 that God “chose us” (vs 4, 11), “predestined us” (vs 5, 11) and “made known to us the mystery of his will” (v 9), all of which remind us that followers of Jesus have been ‘moved upon’ (though often unaware of that reality) before and as they make their ‘move’ for Christ. 3
Why should we be engaged in mission? Because God has chosen many for salvation and we are part of his means to help them hear.
We look at:
All of which also raises the question: what about those who are not chosen / predestined for salvation!
How does election provide a motivation for mission?
How might the truth about election make us view our friends, etc?
If you have any questions about this talk, want to find out more about Citygate Church, or want to know more about what it means to be a Christian, please fill in our online Connect form at citygate.church/connect.
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