From "The Secret of Grace"

From the manuscript I just sent to Harvest House this week: The Secret of Grace - Release date: April 1, 2014 Harvest House Publishers

Our adoption in Him was the eternal purpose our Triune God had in mind all along. The coming of Jesus into this world wasn’t a reaction to what Adam did in the Garden of Eden when he sinned. The story of redemption doesn’t begin with Adam. It predates Adam all the way back to a time when there was no date! It was our God’s plan to bring us into His family before the first second existed in the human dimension we call “time” When there was no “space” there was already Grace. You were in His heart before the first molecule was spoken into being.

Before Adam sinned, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world had assured your safe delivery into His arms. As numerous theologians have said: “You were found before you were lost.” Your adoption in Jesus Christ is the result of a love set on you long before the first ray of light exploded out of the mouth of Christ and started its race across the universe. The gospel is the good news that you are included in the victory Jesus accomplished over sin and death. You were included even before you knew or believed you were included. Even when you stood in the darkness of unbelief there was a “true light that enlightens every person by his coming into the world” (John 1:9) and you blindly stood in that Light of Love. People without sight can’t see the light but it shines on them nonetheless. You may have lived all eternity with a darkened mind and never have known the Light but He knows you. The light of His love has always shone on you.

Your faith in Christ isn’t the tipping point that causes the efficacy of His finished work to be real. Your faith is a response to a Reality that existed while you didn’t even know what you didn’t know. “I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness,” God says to you. (See Jeremiah 31:3) Speaking of His crucifixion, Jesus promised, “And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself" (John 12:32, NLT). “Everyone” includes you.

In Jesus Christ you have been adopted – given the full standing of a son – by the Father Himself. “It is by His doing that you are in Christ Jesus,” Paul told the Corinthians. (See 1 Corinthians 1:30). It’s not because of anything you do. Nothing you do has caused you to be placed into Christ Jesus. That happened as a result of a divine act of grace.

With baited breath, all of heaven watched until the fullness of time came and, in the person of Jesus, the eternal plan our Triune God had held in His heart forever came bursting into time and space like bright rays of sunshine penetrating dark clouds. “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons,” Paul proclaimed in Galatians 4:5. How could such a thing happen to us? “He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,” Paul explains in Ephesians 1:5.

Does that include you? Jesus died once for all, according to the Scriptures. The Apostle Peter said, “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18).