Jesus knows what he asks of us as his disciples. He knows what we’ll have to bear. He isn’t taken by surprise by any of it. And just as he died for all the sins he knew you would commit even before you did it, he chose you to be his before the foundation of the earth and committed you to faithful obedience – knowing precisely what that would entail – because he wants to spend eternity with you.

Two thoughts (both wrong) often crop up in the believer’s mind. The first is that this sin is really the one that will put us beyond reconciliation. We kind of accept Jesus died for our sin, but we wonder whether this particular one might just put us beyond his reach. He couldn’t possible forgive this one. If only he knew this was coming he would never have accepted me in the first place.

In truth, this sort of thinking is more like the accusations from Satan. The Devil loves to tempt us into sin and, when we fall into it, loves to get us thinking that Jesus will never have us now. But you won’t find anything in the mouth of Jesus or anywhere in the pages of scripture that come close to ever suggesting this is the case.

In fact, the truth is that Jesus knew you would do this particular sin before he died for it. As God, in eternity past with his Father, Jesus chose a people for himself and he took great joy in choosing them. He knew all about them, he knew how they would sin, he knew what they were like and he chose them nevertheless. He went to the cross not only knowing who he was dying for, but what he was dying for.

None of your sin takes Jesus by surprise. He knew you were going to do it even before you knew you were going to do it. He paid for it at the cross knowing you were going to do it long before you did it, before you knew you were going to do it, before you even existed to know anything at all! Jesus knows all about you and your sin. He knows exactly what he is getting into when he said, ‘I want them’. He knew the sins he was paying for and he paid for them. Not just some of them, or the worst of them, but all of them.

What that means is there is no sin you can commit that will remove you from the love of Christ if you truly belong to him. The sign that you truly belong to him is that you repent. But if you are a repentant believer, Jesus is sat with his Father reminding him as our advocate that this is just another of those sins that he has already paid for at the cross. It was a sin they both knew was going to be committed by you, which was paid for 2000 years ago and which didn’t put them off choosing you in the first place.

That is the essence of what Paul says in Romans 8:38-39.

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