You Were Wanted Before You Were

The Question Underneath All Your Questions

If you sit with any human being long enough — any human being who has lowered their defenses enough to say what they actually wonder — you will find that the deepest question of their life is some version of: am I wanted? Not loved in a general sense. Wanted. Desired. Pursued. Sought after. The kind of wanted that does not have to be earned by performance or extracted by pleading. The kind of wanted that existed before the wanting was negotiated with.

The reason this question runs so deep is that every human wanting you have ever experienced has had conditions. Your parents wanted you, but some of their wanting depended on who you turned out to be. Your friends wanted you, but they wanted you in certain contexts, for certain reasons, at certain ages. Your partner wanted you, but the wanting came after a long screening process in which you had to pass the earliest dates. Even your most loyal wantings arrived after you had done something to be wantable. And in the quiet hours of the night, you have wondered: does anyone want me purely? Does anyone want me before the performance?

That question has an answer. The answer is so old it predates the concept of old. The answer was answered before your mother was conceived. Before your grandparents met. Before the first homo sapiens walked out of the Rift Valley. Before the dinosaurs. Before the planet. Before the star that would one day give the planet its light. Before time. The answer is: yes, you were wanted. Purely. Before the performance.

The Eternity Before You

"For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will."

EPHESIANS 1:4-5

The words are so familiar that you can read them without feeling the weight, so let me force the weight on you. Before the creation of the world. That is not a metaphor. That is a chronological claim about when the wanting of you began. It began before there was a world. Before there was a you. Before there was a time in which a you could exist. In a region of existence we have no good words for — eternity past, the pre-creational silence, the before before beforeness — the Trinity was talking, and in that conversation your name came up.

Let that image live in your mind for a minute. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit, in the timeless conversation of the Godhead, speaking you into the plan. Not speaking you into existence yet — that comes later, at the moment of your conception. Speaking you into the design. Your hair color in some way decided. Your particular laugh in some way decided. The quirk of your voice that says uh before difficult sentences. The precise tilt of your smile that your mother noticed at three months. All of it chosen. Not accidentally generated. Chosen. Because a conversation about you happened before time, and in that conversation you were wanted.

This is the doctrine of election at its tenderest edge. People treat election as a cold actuarial doctrine, a God in a back office stamping approval on some files and declining others. That is not what Scripture describes. Scripture describes a Father choosing in love. The verb is agapē. The chosen-ness is not a legal status. It is a warm blood relationship, initiated by a Father whose heart is set on His children before His children are even cells.

What Jeremiah Heard

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."

JEREMIAH 1:5

Jeremiah was young. Probably seventeen. He had just had a vision of God calling him to prophesy to a nation that did not want prophets. He was panicking. He said, "Alas, Sovereign Lord... I do not know how to speak; I am too young" (Jeremiah 1:6). And the Lord's response was not trust Me for the future. It was look at the past. Not your past. Mine. The past that runs back into eternity. Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.

The Hebrew for knew is yada — not knowledge-about but knowledge-of, intimate knowing, the same word used of Adam knowing Eve. God is not saying I had data on you. God is saying I knew you, as a person, in relationship, before you existed. This is an impossible sentence, and yet it is the kind of impossible sentence only God can utter truthfully. He knew you before there was a you to know. And the knowing was not cold. The knowing was the kind that sets a person apart.

Now: you were never called to be a prophet to the nations the way Jeremiah was. But what God said to Jeremiah, He says in analogous language to every person He has chosen. Your particular calling will be different. Your particular placement will be different. But the structure of the wanting is the same. Before you were formed in the womb, you were yada. Before you were born, you were set apart. The intimacy of the Father's knowledge of you pre-dates your very existence. You did not start to exist and then gradually earn God's attention. His attention came first. Your existence is the fruit of the attention.

The Unearnable Love

Understand what this means about the quality of the love. Every other love you have been offered came after you had done something to deserve it. Even a mother's love, which seems pure, comes after nine months of her body being bent around yours — a biological investment that, however one-sided, still constitutes a kind of basis for the attachment. Romantic love comes after a meeting. Friendship comes after a conversation. Even God's love, as some would have you believe it, comes after a prayer you prayed or a decision you made.

But the love described in Ephesians 1:4 has no basis in you. It cannot have a basis in you because you do not exist yet when the love is chosen. The love precedes you. It has no cause outside the Father's good pleasure. It cannot be revoked because of something you do, because it was never given on the basis of something you did. It is the only love in your life that is truly unconditional — not because the conditions have been waived but because the conditions were impossible in the first place. You could not have met them. You were not yet.

This is why unconditional election is not a harsh doctrine but a glorious one. Every other system of divine love makes God's love conditional on some quality in you. Reformed theology alone insists that the love is so old and so free that it cannot be based on anything in you, because you were not yet a candidate for the love when the love was decided. Your value to God is not something you contributed to. It was given. And what is given cannot be earned back, cannot be revoked, cannot be negotiated away. The love simply is, in the same way God simply is, and you are the recipient of a love that is as eternal as the God who chose it.

What to Do With This Tonight

Take the longest breath you have taken in a while. Let yourself feel, for just a moment, what it would mean if this were really true. Not approximately true. Not mostly true. Actually true. That the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the timeless conversation before creation, wanted you. That you were a delight in a plan that was being drafted before the first star. That the Father looked at the blueprint of His universe, and your particular face — or the spiritual pre-form of your particular face — was one of the points of the blueprint He was most pleased by.

If even a sliver of that lands on you, let it do its work. Let the quiet terror you have carried all your life — am I actually wanted? — be answered. Let the answer be the oldest word: yes. Yes, you were. Yes, you are. Yes, you will be. Your wantedness does not expire because it did not begin. It is eternal on both ends. The God who wanted you before time will want you after time. In between, He will also want you. There is no moment of your existence — past, present, or future — that is not suffused with His having-wanted-you.

This does not make you grandiose. It does the opposite. It makes you small in exactly the right way. You are a beloved creature of a Father who decided, in eternity, that the universe would be a better place with you in it. You are not great because of what you have accomplished. You are great because of who chose you and what He pleases to do with you. The greatness is not yours. The greatness is His, and you are inside it, the way a drop of light is inside the sun.

Sleep tonight in that. When the insecurity comes back tomorrow — and it will, because the flesh does not die in a single evening — remind yourself: I was wanted before I was. The wanting did not start with my performance. It started before my existence. And what was decided before my existence cannot be undone by my performance. Then let the insecurity fall off you like water off a coat. You are wanted. You have always been wanted. You will be wanted forever. The love letter was written before time. It has your name on it. It is not going to get misaddressed.

"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!"

1 JOHN 3:1

Lavished. Not budgeted. Lavished. This is the Father who chose you before the creation of the world, now pouring His love over you like a wedding feast. Eat. Drink. Be full.