The God Who Calls Sinners With a Purpose (Santosh Poonen)

God called you according to His purpose from all eternity (II Timothy 1:8-12). You were a “twinkle in His eye” (Deuteronomy 32:10, Zechariah 2:8) even before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). God chose you after He foreknew everything about you — the good, the bad, and the ugly (Romans 8:29)! It wasn’t the nails, but your sin that held Jesus to the cross. And yet, God picked you on His team, knowing full-well that you would “stab Him in the back” (I Timothy 1:15). God’s plan for you before the foundation of the world included: foreseeing you, a useless “worm” (Psalm 22:6); predetermining that Jesus would come to save this “worm”; foreseeing that this “worm” would be the ringleader in killing Jesus, the very source of salvation; predetermining that the story wouldn’t end there; foreseeing that this “worm” would respond to the call to salvation; this is the gospel that was preached on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:23-28). God’s plan for you now includes (II Corinthians 4:7-18): shining the light of immortality through your life despite the fact that outwardly you might still look like a “worm” to everyone else — you are afflicted in every way, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, constantly delivered over to death; but your confidence is in the fact that God will not abandon you, and even though outwardly things go from bad to worse, inwardly you are being renewed; so don’t look at what you can see but on what you can’t see.