Have you ever watched the movie “Toy Story”?

There is a scene where Woody & Buzz get put into a crane/claw game. You know the game you find in arcade... it’s housed in a glass cabinet with lights all around it with a joystick-controlled claw at the top. Your mission is to use the joy-stick, accurately to position it over a pile of prizes, and then release the claw while hoping it grabs and drops one of the prizes in the chute for you to collect.

Anyway, in “Toy Story”, there is a scene with the claw machine in it and the claw picks up one of the many green alien toys. As this toy gets grabbed, he says “I have been chosen, farewell my friends, I go to a better place”.

Now, do not mistake my meaning. We are not in a game or a movie, but, sometimes I feel like that. Like I have been pulled out from an old life of sin; and I have been chosen for something better.

We are chosen not because of anything we have done, or any of our achievements its not because of our past or because of our family. We have been chosen because of the love of God. We have been chosen; plucked out; and removed form a past that would have us bound to our sin.

But even when we have been removed from a past of sin and hurt, our human sinful nature wants us to return back to that past.

We imagine a past that was better and the illusions of pleasures that it had and not the brokenness or hurt that held us down. During these times its important to remember, that we have been pulled out from that past life.

The children of Israel went though this, years of slavery, they wanted a release from their bondage, from their slavery and after they were delivered some wanted to live in the freedom they were given but wanted to go back to slavery.

In all of this God still thought of them as his treasured possession (Deut 7:6), and that’s the same way he thinks of you today.

We have been chosen by God as his treasured possession, and as His treasured possession He holds you close to Him, even if you stumble or fall.