Election: Christ’s Honor and Our Blessing (2 Thessalonians 2:13–17)

• Today on grace to you, >> he preached the gospel so that those who were chosen could hear it and believe it. Prompted obviously by the Holy Spirit under the preaching of the gospel they would believe because they were the chosen. We have all spiritual blessings. What in the world makes us so embarrassed about the gospel? For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
• Second Thessalonians chapter 2 and I’ll begin reading at verse 13. But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. It was for this he called you through our gospel that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
• So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us. Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father who has loved us and given us eternal comfort and good hope by grace comfort and strength in your hearts in every good work and word.
• No doctrine is more loved and more resented at the same time than the doctrine of eternal election. divine sovereign choice, predestination. In fact, there are those who suggest that this doctrine is actually devilish. Rationally and emotionally, it seems unfair and destructive of free will and human autonomy and choice. But ultimately according to scripture, it’s not our reason, nor our sentiment, nor our feelings, nor our desires that determine what is true.
• God has already determined that. And it is further unacceptable to make God in our image to design him to fit our own ideas of what he should be, what he should do and what he should not do. making your own perhaps more comfortable, more rational, more human God, twisting your own instincts about God is essentially an assault on him and it misrepresents him.