In a previous article I mentioned how I heard a definition for the doctrine of election when I was much younger, that at the time made much sense to me. "Election is when God casts a vote for you to be saved, the devil casts a vote for you not to be saved, and you have the tie-breaking vote." By using some gentle mental, though, one can begin to see that there are more holes in that statement than there are in a donut shop. Not as a way to brandish a sword against someone, nor to show arrogant one-up-manship over someone, you can use that above statement to get that someone to use some gentle mental on his or her own.
You can begin by quoting the definition and then asking the person if he or she agrees with that statement, and then ask him or her, Why or why not. Then after you listen thoughtfully to the reply given, without any sort of interruption or dead giveaway body language, you can gently point out what would be the only conclusion if that statement were indeed true. Either the devil is on the same level as God (each one has the same number of votes), or worse yet, you are more powerful and influential than both God and the devil, since you have the tie-breaking vote.
What may be the hardest assignment today is to get professing Christians, who are active church goers, to use the mind that God gave them, especially in a day when spiritual showbiz or postmodern thought may await them each Sunday. It can be done, though, in a one-on-one encounter with gentleness and patience, without trying to play "gotcha." Here are some gentle mental questions that you can insert into a conversation with a friend:
1. Must God have our permission before He can do anything? I have heard people say something along these lines, "You must allow God. . .", or "Permit God to. . ."
2. Can you give me all the times where "free will" is used in the Bible to describe the essential feature of every sinful man?
3. Did and does Jesus Himself have a free will? (Free will means the equal ability to choose to sin or to choose not to sin, to choose God or not to choose God, to decide to repent or to decide not to repent, etc.)
4. If Jesus died for all the sin (which naturally would include the sin of unbelief) of everyone everywhere, then why aren't all people saved?
5. How much life is there in a dead person? (See Ephesians 2:1f to get my drift.)
6. Why is man commanded to repent of sin and believe in Christ, but there is no commandment for us to be born again?
7. What does a dead person need before he can do anything?
8. Why do so many Christians love to quote Romans 8:28 and very few of them it seems will refer to the rest of the verses that follow?
It is to this last question we now turn as we work our way through the five points of salvation: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement (or better yet, Successful atonement), and now we arrive at Irresistible Grace (or the effectual call).
When I was a boy playing outside with my friends down the street, toward supper time my mom would step out on our front porch (sorry, kids of today, but this was before we had cell phones) and say as loud as she could in her typical warm voice, "Chris, you need to come in now. It's time for supper." There might be an occasion or two (or more, but who's counting?) when I failed to hear my mother's simple request. I was having too much fun with my friends, or I was up to bat at the time. If I failed to "hear" my mother's call to me, a couple of minutes might pass, and my dad would step out on the front porch and yell something in a very manly tone of voice, "William Chris Humphreys. You come in right now. It's time to eat."
The call of my mother was a resistible call. The call of my dad was an irresistible call. (There is probably a good number of people reading this who knows exactly what I am talking about from their own personal experience!)
I could probably cite an even better illustration. A young bride sees her new husband go off to Afghanistan. He is at a location he can not disclose and communication back home is non-existent most of the time. One day this young bride gets a telephone call from an annoying telemarketer in the middle of the day. After midnight when she has already gone to bed and has been asleep for a couple of hours, she gets an unexpected, surprised call from the love of her life. Now which one of those calls do you think would be properly classified as a resistible call, and which one would be correctly identified as an irresistible call?
Here's the deal. The Bible mentions both kind of calls we get. There is the resistible call. Left in our natural state, every time we hear the outward call of the gospel, we consider it along the lines of an annoying telemarketer. God is bothering me, and I wish He would leave me alone. Or like in my case as a boy, I refuse to hear God speaking to me just like I refused to hear my mom on occasions. I am having too much fun in my sin to hear God speak to me. Such is the plight of every lost person.
All calls to a dead person go unheeded. I tried calling my mom one evening, to be exact, on February 8, 2001, and she did not answer the phone at her apartment. My sister called and got no response. A good friend called as well. None of us got any response when we tried to call her. My mom had died of a cardiac arrest, and she was sitting in her favorite chair in her apartment when we got there. No wonder she did not answer any of our phone calls; she was dead.
That's how it is with all of us who are dead in our sin (Ephesians 2:1, Colossians 2:13). The phone could ring off the hook countless nights long, and my mom wouldn't hear them nor respond to them. All the screaming I could muster up in the ears of my deceased mom would do no good. All the outward calls we give to lost people will have the exact same effect, if all we have to go on are the outward calls of preaching, witnessing, the written Word, gospel tracts, testimonies or other good forms we have at our disposal.
All of us would resist God all the time if it were not for the second kind of call that God gives to many. It's the kind of call mentioned in Romans 8:28 and following. ". . .to those who are THE CALLED (literal Greek has "the called") according to His purpose." The Greek word for our English word "church" literally means "the called out ones." It is only those who love God who are the called out ones, according to Romans 8:28.
I know a lot of Christians read Romans 8:28 without thinking along these lines. I can relate, because I did that myself for a good number of years. We quote it in rapid-fire fashion, and we use it to console or encourage others or ourselves, but we fail to see that this promise is given to a very specific group of people that are specifically identified as "the called", those who have received an irresistible inward call of God which enables them to overcome their natural dead-in-sin-and-trespasses resistance to God so that now they love God. God is not some big annoyance that shows up in the middle of our lives; He has now become the adoring King over all areas of our lives.
Some people get the wrong notion when they hear the term, "irresistible grace." They imagine that there are people that are zapped into salvation, or that they go kicking and screaming against their wills into God's kingdom. They are saved when they don't want to be saved, because it is "irresistible", beyond their power to say "no." Nothing could be further from the truth. Do you think that the young bride who gets a call from her husband in Afghanistan has to be forced into talking to her husband, even if she wakes up with a splitting headache after a few hours sleep? Do you think she is kicking and screaming in protest in having to take this call from her love? Or is it more likely that a team of wild horses could not and would not keep her from talking to her husband?
This special kind of call from God is irresistible in the same sense, that when the new Love of our life calls us, nothing will stand in the way of our coming to Him. We are drawn to Christ just like a newborn is drawn to its mother. When a person is born again, or becomes a newborn spiritually (regeneration), God unilaterally and unconditionally gives life where there was death; He takes away the old "will" that would not and could not come to Christ (John 5:40, 6:44, 6:65), and He replaces it with a new "will" that will freely, readily, eagerly and lovingly come in faith and repentance to the new Love in his life (John 6:37). Whereas before God was nothing but like an annoying telemarketer or a disturbing figure who was intruding into the fun I was having in my life, now He has become my chief treasure and the One who instills me within life eternally and more abundantly. (I may not have liked it at the start, but I'm so glad I listened to my dad's irresistible calls at times, because my mom was a great cook, and I never left her table unsatisfied! I could live without an extra inning of baseball, but I could not live without my mom's cooking.)
This article has probably become too lengthy, such that some might find this piece too "resistible" by now. With that being so, I better wrap up things for now.
Just one final thought though--if a person will come to know the different calls mentioned in Scripture, so much of God's Word will fall into place now. For example, have you wondered what Jesus meant when He said on more than one occasion, "Many are called, but few are chosen"? (Matthew 20:16, 22:14) Many do receive the outward call of God through sermons, evangelism, missions, testimonies, written literature, etc., but only a few are chosen (the elect ones), who receive an additional type of call, an irresistible call, whereby one comes freely to Christ to be saved.
God commands us to do what we can do. We must call all sinners to come to Christ. We extend the outward call of the gospel to anyone and to everyone. But all of that is for naught if it were not for the inward effectual irresistible call of God. When and only when a person receives this special calling from God will that person call out to God to be saved. We find that in Acts 2 when in the same evangelistic sermon Peter said "whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (v.21) and later he said, "for the promise to unto you and to your children and to all that are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call (v.39)." One can not level the charge that knowing and teaching all these truths will shut down our evangelistic efforts. It sure didn't stop Peter one bit. About three thousand were called by God that day, and that same three thousand called upon God.
"For our gospel came not to you in word only (the outward call of the gospel), but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit, and in much assurance. . .(the inner, irresistible call) 1 Thessalonians 1:5
I do thank the Lord for those loving parents and other faithful Christians who extended the gospel call to me when I was a boy, but I praise my sovereign, good Lord for that sweet, regenerating call of God's Spirit which enabled me to respond to those cumulative outward calls.
Called by God's grace,
Chris
