He Set His Love On You First

There is a stretch of road out past the grain elevator where he can still point to the exact fence post.

He was twenty. He had a truck with a door that did not shut properly and a Bible with the cover coming off, and he pulled over on that verge one August night because he could not keep driving, and he got out and stood in the ditch weeds and talked out loud at the sky for something like an hour.

He was the loudest man in any room he walked into for about eleven years after that. Not obnoxious. He would want me to say that. But he was the one who prayed for people in the parking lot. He was the one who stayed after. He drove a fifteen-year-old woman with no license to her chemotherapy every Tuesday for a year and a half and never told a soul, and he would tell you now that he was not being good, he just could not sit still.

He is fifty-two. He is a deacon. He has been married twenty-six years and he has buried both his parents and one brother. He still goes out to that fence post about once a year, usually in August, and stands there.

And what he has come to think, standing there, is that God got a bad deal.

Because the man in the ditch weeds had something. And whatever it was, it drained out of him so slowly that he could not name the year it happened, and now he does the Tuesday things because they need doing and not because he cannot sit still, and he cannot honestly remember what it felt like to be unable to sit still.

He figures God picked that boy. And he figures he has been coasting on a choosing he can no longer justify.

The reason God gives, in His own words

I want to put a sentence in front of you where God explains His own choosing. He does not leave it to be guessed at. He states the reason and then He states it again, and He goes out of His way to knock down the reason you would have assumed.

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

Notice the structure of that. It is a negative and then a positive, and the negative comes first because God knows exactly what people assume.

You were not picked for the size of you. Not the number, not the strength, not the output. In fact He points out that on paper they were the least impressive candidate available.

And the reason He gives is a circle He is not embarrassed by. Why did He love you? Because He loved you. That is the whole answer. There is no clause underneath it. There is nothing in the sentence for a man to have earned or to lose.

You were not chosen for the fire, and I want you to hear that as good news rather than as a demotion. That is not my reading of a hard passage; it is the reason God volunteers about Himself in Deuteronomy 7:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient sentence about a small nation and stands it up beside a man at a fence post in August.

What the boy in the ditch actually had

Now let me say something about the twenty-year-old, because I do not want to be unkind to him and I do not want you to be either.

He was real. That August was real. Nothing here is telling you it was youth and hormones and a good song. Something happened on that verge, and God was in it.

But look at what you have quietly decided it was. You have decided it was capacity. You have decided that God took a look at a boy with a lot of fuel in him and made an investment, and that the investment has not paid, and that you are the reason.

That is not how any of it worked. You have been carrying a debt that was never issued, and there is no ledger anywhere with your name at the top of it. The written word says He did the choosing for His own reasons and kept it because of an oath He had already sworn, and the Holy Spirit does not run an accounts department.

Here is a thing worth sitting with. That boy's heat did not qualify him. It was a response, not a resume. He was loud because he had just been loved, and being loved was the event; the loudness was only what it looked like on a twenty-year-old with a bad truck door.

And a fifty-two-year-old who has buried three people does not respond the way a twenty-year-old does. That is not decline. That is a man who has been carrying weight for thirty years, and God is not comparing the two of you, because He is not nostalgic and He does not keep a photograph of you at your loudest on His desk.

You are loved at fifty-two by the same love that found you at twenty, and not one gram of it has been withdrawn on account of volume. That is written into the promise God made rather than into the mood you were in when you heard it, and His Spirit has been the guarantee on it through every quiet year since.