Praise be to the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ, for he chose us in him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love, he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and his will. Ephesians one, verses three through five. Remember those days on the playground at school when teams would be chosen to play some game? Two captains picked the players they wanted to be on their respective teams. Of course, the captains always had an agenda. They picked their best friends first, and then they moved on to the biggest and fastest and most athletic kids in the group. There was always that one kid who was the last one picked. He was considered the wimpiest, least talented kid in the bunch, the weakest link, who was more of a liability than an asset, and who was chosen by default because no one else was left. Were you ever that kid? If so, you know what it feels like to be the kid that nobody really wants, the kid everyone thinks is a loser. You've seen the look on the face of the captain who gets stuck with you. You know how much you wish that just once you could be the one kid that was picked first, one of the kids that the captains would fight to have on his team. One of the beautiful things about these verses in Ephesians is the reminder of how blessed we humans are because we were chosen from all that God created to be his children. Nothing else in the whole universe has the privilege of being chosen to be God's children. God wants us. He wants to have us on his team. He wants to have a special bond with us, a bond that he has with nothing else in all of creation. And God has gone to great lengths to have that bond with us. Jesus came to die for us, to redeem us from sin and death. The Bible tells us that even the angels envy us because of that. Think about it. Jesus didn't die for the forests or for the whales or the sun or the moon or the stars. He didn't die for the animals. He didn't even die for the angels in heaven. He died for us. For you and for me. God chose us over everything else in creation, and he made it possible for every one of us to be saved and redeemed from sin in Christ. Because of what Jesus did on Calvary, we are given the privilege of becoming heirs with Christ in the life that God offers to all of those who will believe and obey him. It's amazing, isn't it? Human beings were the last of all that God created, but. But we are the first in his heart.