In him we were also chosen.

Ephesians 1:11

In him (Christ) we were also chosen.  If I am not mistaken, Paul is including himself in the “we” here.  This is the great leveler, Jew and Gentile alike are chosen; as are white people, black people, Americans, Africans, rich and poor, etc.  None have earned the right to be chosen.  That is the labor of divine love.  There is no way we could have earned the right to be chosen because the one who chooses is far, far above our own contentions.

This truth came to me with great force in my early days as a Christian missionary in Tanzania and still shapes my spiritual beliefs.  My education and cultural understanding was that I am going to live among people who were somehow inferior to me, at least culturally.  I saw myself superior to them because I was an educated, white, Mennonite Christian with a solid history of faithfulness to God.

As I look back, I found myself, after a few years in Tanzania, under conviction of the Holy Spirit – a mysterious thing, to say the least, but more real than the morning sun.  I realized that I am a sinner, dependent completely on the grace of Jesus Christ.  I found myself among Tanzanian believers who felt exactly like I did – people who are saved by the same blood of Jesus and carriers of the Holy Spirit as I.  Nothing else matters; we are one in Christ, a solid reality that shook me top to bottom.

For the first time in my life I began to understand what Paul went through as a Jew among Gentiles, as in this marvelous letter to the church at Ephesus.  I understood him because I was discovering the same thing about the grace of God.  It brings all to the same spot where we kneel as repentant sinners, and discover, then, that others, quite a mixture, are there as well.  All else fades.  Sinners being saved by the same Blood become a new thing on the face of the earth.  I think this is what Jesus meant by life in the Kingdom of Heaven, right here on earth.

I ponder again the depths of Paul’s life-changing insight, In him we were also chosen.