You Have Not Chosen Me, But I Have Chosen You, and the Order Is the Point

Everything that has ever chosen him, he set up first.

That is the sentence at the bottom of this and it took him about twenty years to be able to write it. Every arrangement in his life that returns something to him is an arrangement he built, configured, and maintains, and the returning is real and it is not nothing and it is also not a choice.

It shows up everywhere once he sees it. The things he goes to at night that give him what he goes for. The friendships that run on his availability. The room he is welcome in because he is useful there. He is not describing malice in anybody. He is describing an arrangement that he assembled and that behaves the way he assembled it to behave.

And the effect is a specific kind of hunger that food does not touch: he has never once, that he can identify, been chosen by something that could have gone the other way.

There is a sentence on the last night that corrects the direction, and the direction is the whole thing.

The correction

Here it is, in the King James Version:

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain. (John 15:16)

Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.

Every man in that room would have told the story the other way. They left their nets. They followed. If you had asked any of them how they came to be there, the account would have started with a decision they made.

He tells them the direction is the reverse of what they think, and He tells them on the last night, which is when a man says the thing he most wants them to have.

And notice He does not say the following did not happen. They did leave the nets. It is a correction about which end the movement started at, not a denial that they moved.

You are chosen rather than the one who did the arranging and you were never the origin of this. John 15:16 says ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a change in your circumstances who makes a settled direction something a man knows about himself.

What He calls them four verses earlier

And the reason this is not simply a doctrine about election is what He says a few verses before it.

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. (John 15:15)

I have called you friends.

And the reason He gives is disclosure. A servant does not know what is going on; a friend does. He tells them He has told them everything, and that this is what makes the difference.

Which means the relationship He is describing runs on being known and knowing, in both directions, and it is offered by somebody who was under no obligation.

And the verse between the two:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (John 15:13)

Lay down his life. He says that the night before He does it, about the people He has just called friends and is about to say He chose.

So the sequence in that passage is: laid down for, called friends, chosen. Three things, in eleven verses, all of them running toward the men in the room.

You have been called friend by somebody under no obligation and you were never in a servant's arrangement. John 15:15 gives disclosure as the reason for the word friend, and it is His Spirit who makes that a lived relationship rather than a title.

And if the hunger has taken you somewhere heavier, if it has reached not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to hold alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody is asked to carry that by himself.

Why the configured thing can never do it

Here is the arithmetic underneath this whole category and it is worth stating plainly.

A thing that cannot refuse you cannot choose you.

Choosing requires the possibility of the other answer. That is not a religious idea, it is what the word means. If a thing was never able to decline, then whatever comes back from it is not a decision, and every declaration of regard a man receives from an arrangement he built is a declaration he supplied the conditions for.

That is why the hunger does not go away no matter how much comes back. It is being fed the wrong thing entirely. Not too little of the right thing. A different substance.

And the reason it took him twenty years to see it is that what comes back feels exactly like the real thing at the moment it arrives, and only fails to satisfy afterward, which is a difficult signal to read.

You were made to be chosen by something that could have refused you and you were never going to be fed by anything else. John 15:16 puts the choosing on somebody with a will of His own, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between a supplied response and a real one something a man can finally taste.

Which end it started at, said twice more

And two other verses that put the origin in the same place.

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Because he first loved us. Four words, and the word first is the whole sentence.

And Paul, on how far back it goes:

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. (Ephesians 1:4)

Before the foundation of the world. Which is before any arrangement anybody could have built.

And Moses, on why God picked a particular people, which is one of the plainest sentences in the Old Testament:

The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you. (Deuteronomy 7:7-8)

But because the LORD loved you. The reason for the choosing is the loving, and the reason for the loving is not given, because there is not one outside of Him.

You were chosen before anything existed to be configured and you were never selected on a quality. Ephesians 1:4 puts it before the foundation of the world and Deuteronomy 7:7 rules out every qualifying reason, and it is His Spirit who makes a choice that old current in a man's own chest.