I remember I once walked into a college classroom and a man was there pacing. I asked him if something was wrong and he said he was distressed as his marriage was falling apart. His trouble was that he was so confident that the Lord had told him to marry this woman years before. But there were some significant problems, if I remember correctly, infidelity being one of them.
“Why” he cried out. “Why would God tell me to marry her if this was going to be how things turned out?”
I tried to comfort him. That just because God might have indeed let him to marry her, it did not guarantee faithfulness on either of their parts. He could have just as easily rejected gone down a path of sin as she did. We are all given free will.
I thought of this when I read about Jesus choosing the 12 apostles.
In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles: Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
Choosing of the disciples was such an important decision that he literally he spent the whole night in prayer. There were many good, Godly disciples to choose from and a lot of not so Godly disciples to choose from. And at the end of the prayer time, Jesus chose these men.
His list included some unsavor characters. James and John were hot heads and Peter himself declared he was an unclean man, I’m guessing a cheat and a womanizer. Matthew was a greedy sell-out to the Romans and Thomas was a doubter. Then there was the Zealout as well as Judas who cared more about money than he did about Jesus.
Why is it, then, that Jesus chose these ones? Certainly there were hundreds of better picks. But for whatever reason, after an all night of prayer, Jesus chose this mess of a people. One of them who would betray him unto death.
Didn’t Jesus, when he prayed to the Father, know what kind of men these were? And even what Judas would do? Why then choose these ones.
We don’t know all the reasons for that. But we do know that Jesus saw the heart and not the outside. He saw what they could be, not who they were in the present. And it was through these men that the world was forever changed.
What it means that there’s hope for you. And me. God sees what others do not. We, too, are his his chosen ones in Christ. It is not man who defines us, but God. It is not the thoughts of others that shape us into who we become, it’s our time with Jesus and being shaped by the Holy Spirit.
Does it guarantee our faithfulness? No. But it gives us hope. That God can look beyond our screw-ups and lead us to do things that truly impact the world.