Deuteronomy 7:6

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

From Background Notes [BN] for June 30^th / July 1^st written by Pastor Bob Brown:

Was Israel the chosen people?  Our answer is a qualified "yes," provided we make clear what it means to be chosen. At no time did God choose Israel for their own sake. Israel was…

…God's chosen on behalf of the whole world. Precisely at the point historically where that sense of chosenness was replaced by a sense of entitlement and privilege, did Israel lose its status — and its freedom. In the parable, the elder son remained an insider during the years his younger brother sowed his wild oats. Yet, this sense of chosenness did not seem to make him happy. Building up inside himself was a deep and savage resentment. Half the inheritance was gone, and he was being asked to carry the whole load. That was also true for national Israel whose  population was a diminished shadow of its former self. Those who fancied themselves the guardians of Israel's national life ― the keepers of the sacred markers ― hardly exhibited the joyful liberating attitude consistent with being blessed heirs of the promises. Stingily, they held fast things like Sabbath, kosher, Temple, Torah, and land, clinging to them as the only sure symbols of national identity. Those who failed to honor them were rejected.

Then comes Jesus who had all the marks of an insider, but who freely offered the privilege of chosenness to those whom the insiders rejected as outsiders. He called the lost within Israel to come to him in order to find a place once more at the Father's table. By his actions he revealed what God as Father actually looked like. Yet in his choice of outsiders (tax collectors, prostitutes, and "other sinners"), Jesus never rejected the insiders who sincerely wanted to respond to the attentive love of their Father. We can hardly ignore the case of Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews (John 3), for example. The powerful images of the mother hen gathering her chicks ― but being rejected ― tell all too well the same story, as Jesus likens them to Jerusalem and himself (see above).  [BN, 16-17]

Join us this week in Study, Worship, Praise and Celebration at Chicago First Church of the Nazarene:

* Saturday 6:00pm
* Sunday 8:30am & 11:00am, 5:30pm