When things go badly, it’s easy to assume God’s favor has lifted—and that assumption runs deep enough that entire churches have been built on promising the opposite. Yet in Acts 13, the disciples who have just heard the gospel find themselves filled with joy and the Holy Spirit at precisely the moment Paul and Barnabas are driven out of the district, which raises a question worth sitting with: what if hardship isn’t the absence of God’s blessing at all?

In the movies, every important meeting starts with a clear “You may be wondering why I’ve called you here today.” Real meetings leave you guessing the whole time—and sometimes long after. We often treat God’s Word the same way, yet Ephesians 1 addresses the question head-on: why are you here?

We live in a world of constant flux, where nothing is truly stable and even the things that feel permanent haven’t been around that long. Yet Ephesians 1 takes us further back than any of it: God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.