For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (Romans 8:29)It was Freeport, Texas, about 1960. I was ten or eleven years old, riding my bike when I first met my children.
I rode by a house and a man was pulling up in his car. It was a gray convertible and he was wearing a gray suit and tie with a hat and a briefcase. Typical office worker type.
As he got out of the car, two little girls in frilly dresses came running out shouting “Daddy, Daddy.” He picked them both up and went in the house.
At that moment, I knew I would one day have children, a wife, a family. And even at that young an age, I began to wonder what my children would be like.
It was seventeen more years before Abby came along and five more before Sam was born. But it was one of those things that happens to people in the course of their lives. The child thinking one day I will be a man with a family.
That is quite a stretch for a grubby little kid on a red bicycle. But it happens to everybody at sometime in their lives: the knowledge that one day they will grow up.
The same thing happened with God. Before the world was even created, before the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters of the deep, before time even began, God knew you.
King David wrote, in Psalm 139: You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.
The Lord told the prophet Jeremiah I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations (Jeremiah 1:5).
Before it all started, God knew he would have children. He knew that they would have trouble and that his own Son would have to become like them. And like a father prepares for his family, he prepared for us.
Before anything else began, he looked down through the years and saw me. He saw my goods and my bads, my strengths and my weaknesses, my successes and my failures. And he loved me.
When I saw those children running out to meet their daddy in 1960, I fell in love with my children. And before God even started dividing the light, he fell in love with his children.
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