Can I Know God's Will for My Life #2
Tom Shrader addresses difficult questions about God's sovereign election, examining whether God chooses some people for salvation while passing over others. Drawing from Romans 8-9, Ephesians 2, and John 6, he argues for the Reformed view that fallen humanity is spiritually dead and unable to choose God, requiring divine intervention. Shrader explains that God's election is based on His mercy rather than human merit, leading to proper worship and humility.
“If you know Christ today, you are a recipient of His mercy, and the most noble thing you can do is to give Him honor, worship, and praise.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Chosen By God
Recorded: May 1994
Duration: 44 min
Themes: election, sovereignty, mercy, humility, worship, grace, salvation, theology, questioning salvation, struggling with doubt, new to reformed doctrine, seeking theological understanding, pastor teaching difficult topics, mature believer, wrestling with scripture, feeling confused about election
Scripture: Romans 5:12, Genesis 6:5, Ecclesiastes 9:3, Titus 1:15, John 6:37, John 6:39, John 3:16, Ephesians 2:1-5, Romans 9:10-16, Romans 3:23, Acts 16, James 2:6, 2 Timothy 3, 2 Timothy 4:1-4, Romans 8:29-30
Theological Themes: predestination, divine election, reformed theology, total depravity, sovereign grace, unconditional election, divine sovereignty, biblical theology
Full Transcript
This is, if you haven't been with us before, the last Sunday of three Sundays that we've set aside to answer questions that you've submitted, questions that you as a group have asked. And I have to be very candid and let you know that the questions that we got that we will deal with today are probably the questions that we got the most of. I think it's a result of some lessons that we've done in the last four or five weeks, and I think the lessons raised a whole level of interest and questions and concerns and emotions that maybe hadn't been there before.
So let me give you the list of the questions we're going to deal with today. The first question really keys the whole series of questions, and I think we'll deal with more than these, but at least these. First of all, Paul speaks of God choosing those who He will save. What does that mean? Secondly, if God chooses some and ignores others, this seems contrary to His mercy. That led another question, and this was a question we got a lot: does God choose everybody equally? And then this question: election seems to eliminate the free will of man. What's the relationship between man's free will and God's election? And then the last one is this: can I refuse to choose, can I refuse His choosing of me?
And then there was another one that came in the form of about a four-page letter that basically incorporated all of these questions, but ended with this question: does this in fact make any difference at all? And I want to answer that question first. I want to tell you that I think this makes a profound difference. I think it makes all the difference in the world. I think it's a crucial question.
The Danger of Theological Ignorance
We've said in here before, and unfortunately, maybe it's just the occupation that I'm in, but I'm convinced every week that we as a church, as a body of Christ, as Christians, are much more conversant and much more knowledgeable about psychology than we are about theology. We're much more aware of what's going on in our life and getting in touch with our feelings than we are getting in touch with a God that created the universe. And I would submit to you that's an abomination to God. It's deplorable to Him, it's despicable to Him.
Yesterday was a fairly typical day for me. I picked up a magazine that a friend of mine gave me this week and told me I had to read. It was his magazine from his college that he graduated from, and they asked the question about utopia. They asked some of the staff members, what will utopia be like? What would be utopia here on earth?
They got some answers, and let me just share them with you. One came from a lady who joined their theater department in 1986. She had worked in several theaters prior to that, including the Rhode Island Feminist Theater, one of my favorites, and some others. Then what they did is they asked them to respond in building this picture of utopia to respond to different elements of it. What would transportation be like, architecture, dress, climate, all the others? And religion was one of them.
Modern Views of Religion
Now these are intelligent people, these are bright people, PhDs. They have, at least I would think based on the answers, been educated way beyond their intelligence, and here they are with these answers. This lady said religion would be experimentally based. It would be beyond any empty ritual. That's her idea of utopia.
This is a man who has been in their art department for 23 years. His answer to religion and utopia: all and none. Wow, is that deep. Here's another member of the art department who is a recent member, a younger lady I believe. She said her religion would be unitarian, universalist, which assures great diversity and tolerance.
Another member, this time a man from the music department. He said his religion would be pantheism, that everything is God, it's all motion, all energy is God. That would be his idea of ideal religion. Here's someone else from the political science department that got there in 1972. He said, I would form an earth worship. If we deified the planet, we would probably treat it with more respect, and that would improve everyone's chances of survival. Secular earthism would be an acceptable alternative.
Here's a member from the philosophy department, again, been there for about 25 years. His answer is this: not Muslim, not Jewish or Christian, I want to stay alive was his answer. And here's a gal from the language department. Her answer to the ideal of religion: none. Spiritual needs would be met by mutual respect for others, for the environment, sort of a secular altruism.
The Broader Cultural Picture
We look at that, and even though it's a college that had its roots in one of the major denominations, we look at it and say that's the institutional world. But then I get yesterday's paper, this is the local one, and I open it up. There's some guy with a cigar on the front, I don't know, in the religion section. Then there's an article by an Episcopal bishop talking about religious junkies, and he makes some decent points. But his thrust under current of this, that the article doesn't pick up, is that the problem here is that we can get addicted to this religion. It becomes compulsive. You're changing your life, and we need to be more open-minded and allow a lot of choices.
Here's an article where the Methodist Church is rethinking its stand on homosexuality. It says this: the sermon challenge was clear, even though the words were spoken softly and the crucial passages were framed in gentle smile. This is the time to "catch a glimpse of the new age of God" when Christians will no longer be divided by sex or race or age or sexual orientation. Translation: those who cling to traditional church teachings against homosexuality are living in the past and undermining God's work in the present.
And if you got the local paper, McGee Wilkes has his weekly dose of heresy in which he adds to it, what we need to do is all come, don't—
When we decide we're not going to deal with doctrine, we pay a price. We pay the price within the body of Christ, within the church, within the church as a whole where everything goes, where no one takes a stand for anything. And worse yet, where we find a commonality based on the lowest common denominator.
I got a letter from a lady who's having a particular problem with several gals in one of her Bible studies. They all are watching the same television show. It's the most popular religious television show throughout the world now. A couple of weeks ago, this man was giving his statement, his mission purpose. Here's what he said his mission was: to develop positive attitudes in people each week. Here's the second thing: to help good people become better, not bad people become good, saying even in the worst sinner, there's still some goodness.
Now we pass that off and let that go, but I want you to understand how absolutely devastating that is to the viewer who sits there and sucks it all in as though it's true. See, this is a crucial issue we look at today. I don't know how to frame it any more seriously in a crisis situation. It's got nothing to do with hostages, it's got nothing to do with bailouts, got nothing to do with our economy or race problem. We're in a theological warfare where there is a battle on for your mind and mine, a battle on to see who's going to prevail in the area of truth.
The World's Search for God
The world is not out there searching for God, big G. This is the Phoenix paper yesterday - they're back in Sedona, looking for their yin and their yang, and several of them have found it. See, they're searching all over for God, little g. They're looking for gods made in their image and their likeness. But you introduce them to the God creator of the universe and they want no part of that.
And yet you and I live in a world where we are the ambassadors for Christ. You're the ambassador for God in the universe. Have you thought about that? You're a new creature and an ambassador, you're His representative right here. What an awesome responsibility. Literally, when people dialogue with you, they're dialoguing with God's ambassador. And you don't have the privilege, I don't think, to say, "Well, I'm not a theologian." Neither am I. But we are called to know the word of God inside out.
The Last Days
Turn to 2 Timothy, chapter 3, as we even set further the introduction, because I want you to see the severity of this. In 2 Timothy, chapter 3, Paul writes to Timothy about the last days, and the last days are any days that fall between the ascension of Christ and the return of Christ. These are the last days.
He said, "Realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient of parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving." That's a key word. It doesn't mean that they're just not loving, kind people. It means natural bonds are being violated. Men hate parents, and parents hate kids. I think that's one of the characteristics of the environment you and I live in today. Most of the people that I deal with don't like, let alone love their kids.
"Unloving, irreconcilable, gossip, without self-control, brutals, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness although they deny its power. Avoid men such as these." It doesn't say that these people will be without religion. It says this: they're going to deny the only true power, the person of Jesus Christ.
Paul's Charge to Preach the Word
In 2 Timothy, chapter 4, verse 1, Paul is talking to Timothy, and I think he's talking to you and me. "I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is the judge of the living and the dead, and by His appearing in His kingdom, to preach the word, be ready in season and out, reprove, rebuke, exhort with patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. They'll want to have their ears tickled. They'll accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires, and they'll turn their ears away from the truth." Paul said, this is what the end times are going to be like.
We're going to look at some very difficult doctrinal questions today, and I know, just as sure as I'm standing here, that we're going to be five minutes into this thing, when you're going to check out, some of you. I'm telling you, it will not be five minutes before you're asking this question: "This is all messed up." It won't take long to get to that point where you're going to say, "So what?"
Let me just tell you, with all the emotion I can muster, I think, with all my heart, this may be one of the most important forty-five minutes you'll ever spend. And I know that sounds arrogant, but I'm telling you it's absolutely true. Let's get into these questions, and let's start at the beginning by just acknowledging that there's no way we can answer them completely today. We'll give you some answers. This is a discussion in terms of God choosing.
The debate over God's sovereign election has gone on for years and years, with good minds on both sides of the issue. If we look historically at what we're going to call a Reformed view and opposing views, we would line them up like this: Augustine on one side, Pelagius on the other; Luther on one side, Arminius on the other; Calvin on one side, Wesley on the other; Edwards on one side, Finney on the other. That would be a fair breakdown.
There are good minds on both sides of the issue, but I want to tell you something, and I'm going to give you my bias. All the great minds are on one side of the issue. If you take any person and you say, "Give me the ten great minds in philosophy and theology," you're going to get on that list Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards. You're not going to get Pelagius, Wesley, Arminius, or Finney.
Two Views of Election
For the sake of this discussion, let's call one view the Reformed view or the Calvinist view, and the other view the Arminian view. Those will be the two views we're going to look at as we answer the question relating to the doctrine of election.
The first thing we have to do is give you a definition of election. This is Charles Ryrie's definition of election: "Election is God's unconditioned and pre-temporal choice of those individuals whom He would save." Here's what Ryrie says: election is God deciding, according to His own will and before time as we know it began, who He would save. That's the doctrine of election in the Reformed view.
The Problem of Man's Condition
The problem becomes this: before we can answer God's choosing, we have to determine what state man is in. Paul states the problem in Romans chapter 5, verse 12: "Just as sin entered the world through one man, death through sin, in this way death came to all men because all men sinned."
Here's the basic premise: Paul says all have sinned. This is not Paul regurgitating Romans 3:23. Paul's saying right here in Romans 5 that when Adam sinned, all of us sinned. That's the classical definition that provides us a perspective of man that we see throughout Scripture.
Genesis 6:5 says, "The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every intent of his thoughts and his heart were evil continually." Ecclesiastes 9:3 tells us "the hearts of man were full of evil, madness in their heart." Titus 1:15 states, "To the corrupt and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Their very minds and their conscience are corrupt."
This brought the fathers who drafted the Westminster Confessions to say: "Man by his fall fell into a state of sin, and he has wholly lost his ability of will to anything spiritual accompany salvation. So a natural man, being altogether adverse from good—he's opposed to good—and dead in sin, he's not able by his own strength to convert himself or prepare himself thereunto."
Man's Desperate State
We go through all these to tell you one thing: man is in real trouble without God. Not only is he in real trouble, man without God is in fact dead. Man is hopeless without God—not just sick, but dead. Absolutely dead.
I don't know how many of you saw the movie Princess Bride. What a great movie. Princess Buttercup is in love with Wesley, and Wesley goes off on a journey. While Wesley's gone, Princess Buttercup becomes betrothed and committed to Prince Humperdinck. The battle is on because Princess Buttercup wants Wesley and not Prince Humperdinck.
So the battle ensues, Wesley's on an adventure, and Wesley is killed. They bring Wesley, in the best scene of the whole movie, into the magician. The magician is Billy Crystal. They bring in Wesley, they lay him down on the table, and the first thing Crystal does is he takes a look at him, takes his arm, lifts it up, and it drops. Crystal says, "I've seen worse." They said, "No, you couldn't see any worse because he's dead." Now remember what Crystal said then? Crystal said, "No, no, no, no, he's mostly dead. So he's partly alive."
Two Views of Man's Spiritual Condition
That's the Arminian view of man. The Arminian says he's mostly dead—that he's very, very sick. He's gravely ill. He's on his bed, but he's not dead. You present the claims to Christ, and there's just a little flick in there that will fire him up and he can respond. The Arminian has the picture of the man laying there, very, very sick, and you take the spoon of the medicine that will heal him and you lift it to his lips. He's so sick, but he has just the strength to open his mouth and get down the medicine. That's the Arminian view of man.
The Reformed view of man says this: he is there and he is dead. Were he alive and could you get the medicine to his mouth, the Calvinist says, he'd spit it all over you. He does not want anything to do with Christ. He's dead. He's fallen into the ocean. He's sunk to the bottom, he's had his three times up, he's been in the bottom of the ocean for three days, and he's absolutely dead.
God's Choosing in Action
Now comes God's choosing. In the midst of that scenario, God reaches down through the depths of the ocean, lifts the man out, and breathes life into him. Now there is the classical dilemma. When we talk about choosing, we don't need to put it in any fancy terms, and we don't need to make it say something that it isn't. That's the choice. Those are the two sides of the issue.
Here's a graphic view, a chart if you will, of man from a Reformed view. Here's pre-fall man. This is Adam and Eve in the garden.
They were able to sin, and they were able to not sin. They had the ability to sin or the ability to not sin. But once Adam sinned, this is the picture of Adam's life. He had the ability to sin, but he was unable to not sin. In other words, all he could do was sin.
That was the only capacity that Adam had. It's the only capacity that you had when you came into the world. That's what Paul says in Romans 3: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No one does good, no not one."
The Dilemma of Man's Inability
Here's the dilemma. How is someone who is unable to do anything good ever going to do the ultimate good act of responding and choosing God? That is a very difficult question. If you accept all this that we've talked about, really the discussion is over, because that is the issue.
God, dealing with fallen man, had some options. It is presumptuous to try to figure out the options God had, but here's four of them and He may have had more. Man totally lost in a fallen state, unable to respond.
God could decide to save nobody. God could decide to provide opportunity for everyone, which in fact would do no good. If the call went out to everyone equally, to a lost man who couldn't do good, it makes no difference. He's not going to respond. Or God could directly intervene and save everybody, or God could directly intervene and save some.
As we analyze God's options, we're going to throw out one and three real fast. We know that He decided to save some, and we're going to throw out that He came involved and got in everybody's life and saved everyone. Obviously He didn't do that. So we're left with those other two options. I would submit to you that what God has done is decided to become directly involved and intervene in the lives of some people in the world, not everyone.
No One Can Come Unless the Father Draws
Here's what Jesus said in John chapter six: "No one can come to Me unless the Father draws him." "For this reason I've said to you that no one can come to Me unless it's been granted to him by the Father." Jesus said this: "No one can." This speaks to the ability of man. No one has the ability to come.
Now John 3:16 said, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, and whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life." Is that true? Sure, that's true. But that does not speak to man's ability. All that says is whoever believes can.
Here's the issue: no one can come. No one has the ability to come. No one will come unless God gets involved directly, unless God draws him.
We see that word two more times in scripture. It's a Greek word. It means literally to compel. Here's how we see James use it in James 2:6, speaking to the poor and the rich: "You've dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you and drag you into court?" You want to guess where the word "draw" is in that verse? "Drag."
Here it is in Paul and Silas find themselves in a situation that's pretty ugly in Acts chapter 16: "They seize Paul and Silas and they drag them into the marketplace." Here's exactly what Jesus is saying to you and to me: "No one can come unless God draws him."
But God
Turn to Ephesians chapter two. In Ephesians chapter two, we pick up one of those key moments in all of scripture. Ephesians chapter two, verse one, Paul speaks to all of us and he says this, as believers: "You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of the world, according to the prince of the power of the air of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest."
And the first two words of verse four: "But God." "But God being rich in mercy because of His love, His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive with Christ. By grace you've been saved."
Here's what Paul says. Paul says exactly the same thing. Paul says, I want you to understand something here. God got involved. God got involved and intervened at this point in time and He in His sovereign election decided to save you, decided to save me and rescue us from sure separation from God.
The Question of Fairness
Now the minute you hear that, you want to cry out and you want to say that isn't fair. In fact, that's what the next question was. That seems to run contrary to the idea of the mercy of God. That's not fair. I mean, if God is going to choose some, then He ought to choose all of them, right?
Turn to Romans chapter nine, because Paul in Romans chapter eight, I think, teaches pretty clearly the doctrine of election. In Romans chapter nine, Paul has just given us this illustration. He's just talked about God choosing some and not others, predestining some and not others.
In Romans chapter nine, Paul gives us an illustration. Now if ever Paul wanted to make a point here and put the nail in the coffin and say it's equal to everybody, but I really don't mean that God chooses some, here's his place to do it. But look at the illustration he uses in Romans chapter nine, verse 10.
"There was Rebecca also when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac. For though the twins were not yet born and they had not done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose, according to His choice, might stand, not because of works, but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, 'The older will serve the younger.' And thus it is as written, 'Jacob I loved, Esau I hated.'"
God's Response to Our Objections
Oh my, you've got to be kidding me. That is really not fair. But Paul knows how we're going to respond, and look what Paul says. Verse 14: "What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be!"
"For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.'"
I have compassion. Here's the situation. You and I want to look at God's choosing, and we immediately want to say it's not fair. And Paul says, let me ask you, what's not fair about it? Where's the injustice? Paul said, everyone deserves to be separated from God forever, and I will give to those people absolute justice, and to others I will give mercy.
God never moves to a position where it becomes unjust, and God never moves to a position where it becomes unfair. He says some are going to get justice, which is fair, and some are going to get mercy. It's not equal. If to you fairness means equality, you're in trouble. Equality is not equal, because God is going to save some, and He is going to just stay with others and give them justice.
But let me tell you the tension here. The minute you go to God and say, "God, why don't you give mercy to everybody?" you've robbed God of His ability to be God. The minute you say He's obligated to give it to everybody, it's no longer mercy, it's obligation.
The Wrong Question and the Right One
Now let me tell you what I think has to be one of the most abominable questions God ever hears: "God, why didn't you save my sister, or my brother, or my mother, or my father?" I believe when people hear this, the first reaction they have is exactly that. Only one time has a guy said to me, and that happened to be my reaction too, only one time has a guy ever said to me, "I got a question. Here it is. Why'd He save me?"
See, that's the whole point. If you know Christ today, you are a recipient of His mercy. The most noble thing you can do, the only natural response to a real master of a real slave, is to give Him honor, and to give Him worship, and to give Him praise.
Does God Choose Everyone Equally?
You see that? That makes sense. It really answers us and throws us into the next question, which was, does God choose everyone equally? And the answer to that is, absolutely not.
The Arminian view says this: the call goes out. God awakens a man to the point that he has some ability, some capacity to respond. The Reformed view, the classical view, the Calvin view says, no. God does not choose everybody equally.
And if you've got any sense of rightness in you, you have to be asking, what about my free will? In fact, that was the question that came with every one of them. Seldom did one question come in on this. It came in as a series, and the very question that came up was this idea of free will. What about free will? What about man in his natural state? Does God violate man's free will?
Defining Free Will
Let's use this. Let's throw this up as a definition of free will. Free will is the ability to make choices without any prior prejudice, inclination, or disposition. Are we willing to use that as a definition of free will? That would be, when somebody says you've violated my free will, that becomes kind of the definition. What you've said is you've made me do something here, you've exerted me. What he's really saying is my will is free.
So when we talk about free will, we're talking about the ability to make choices without any prejudice, inclination. Is that right? Of course not. Obviously it's not. Every choice we made is based on prior inclination and prejudice.
If I stopped and said to Lori, "Why are you sitting in that chair today?" you will get from Lori an explanation why she's there. She didn't just arbitrarily fall there. She likes to sit in the front. She says, "I look taller when you're closer." And she's comfortable there. I used to have a guy that came on Wednesday night, and he would always sit in the same place because he said, "You're left-handed, so you have a tendency to look to your right more than your left. And I want you to see me because I want eye contact."
We don't do anything without some prior inclination. R.C. Sproul uses the classical illustration of Alice in Wonderland. As Alice comes to the Cheshire Cat, remember? And she looks up at the cat and said, "Which way should I go?" And the cat said, "Where are you going?" And she said, "It doesn't matter. I don't know where I'm going." And he said, "Then it doesn't matter." The illustration of the neutral-willed mule, stuck equally between a barrel of wheat and a barrel of oats, with no prior inclination, with no stimulus, with no motivation, simply starves to death.
Edwards on Free Will
So you and I are going to make all of our choices based on all sorts of input, all sorts of data. Jonathan Edwards defines free will this way. He says, man will always choose according to his strongest inclination at the moment. That you will always do what you want most.
That you sat in that seat because that's the seat you wanted most. That you married that person because that's the person you wanted most. That if you're walking down the street and somebody comes up and puts a gun in your head and they say, "Your money or your life," you will give them your money because what you want, even though your will has been coerced, what you want most is your life more than your money.
Here's the whole issue. What's the nature of man? Edwards says that you and I have to make some choices, that they're moral choices and they're based on our inclination, they're based on our drives, they're based on what we want most. That our freedom is in fact limited by God.
Can I Refuse to Choose Christ?
And here was the last question we got. Can I refuse to choose Christ? If in fact God has come and I'm lost from Him and separated from Him, that I don't want any part of Him, can I in fact refuse the call? The answer to that is no.
Turn to John chapter 6. John chapter 6 and verse 37. This is Jesus speaking. He said, "All that the Father gives me shall come to me. And the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out." Verse 39, "This is the will of Him who sent me, that all that He has given me I lose none, but they shall be raised up on the last day."
Jesus said this, everybody that is given to me is going to come. Just like when Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus, and Jesus said, "Lazarus, come forth," Lazarus had no choice. Just like God, as He began to create the universe...
When God said, "Let there be light," and light came forth, when God says in you and me through His Holy Spirit, "Let there be life," you and I have no choice. Our nature is changed. And all of a sudden, Edward's definition of what we want most comes into play.
See, prior to that, your nature was sin. All you wanted was sin. It's the picture of the vulture. If I have a vulture in the back of the room, and I have ten heads of lettuce and ten pieces of steak, and systematically I put out a head of lettuce and a piece of steak right next to each other, ten times out of ten, what's the vulture going to take? The steak. Because that's his nature.
He'll never go to the lettuce. Is he free to go to the lettuce? Well, he certainly has the freedom to go there. It's right there. The problem is, he has no desire for the lettuce. The lettuce is repugnant to him. If you put the lettuce around the meat, he'd pick the lettuce off, because he's not going to eat that lettuce, because he wants the meat.
Just like you and I, apart from God, prior to Him choosing us, all we want is sin. And when He comes into our life and changes our nature, He gives us a desire for Christ.
The Chain of God's Salvation
Here's the passage that I think begins to tie all of this together. It's in Romans 8:29-30. And we see a sequence here, and it's an important sequence: "For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified."
There's the chain of events. God got involved. Those that He predestined, those that He chose, all of them—the word "all" does not appear. But you've got a real problem if you don't put it there. Let's read it this way: "Some of those He foreknew, He also—some of them—predestined to become conformed. And some were called, and some were justified, and some were glorified." It certainly doesn't read that way. What it says is all that He knew, all that He called, all that He predestined, all of them came.
The Problem with Foreknowledge
See, now there's a word in here that's kind of a sticky word, though. It's an ugly word for me. It's the word "foreknew." What's that mean? Here's what one author says: "By election, we mean that the sovereign act of God, whereby He chooses in Christ for salvation, all those that He foreknew would accept Him." Oh, wait a minute. Now, that sounds good.
Election is the sovereign act of God, where He's under no obligation to elect anyone, since all have lost their standing before God. Even after Christ had died, God was not obligated to apply that salvation, except as He owed it to Christ to keep His agreement with Him. Election is a sovereign act because it's not due from God.
Here's what this guy says. See how this works. Those that He foreknew. Ah, that's the key. That's what I've been looking for. Those that He foreknew were going to choose Him. They say God looked down the corridor of time and God knew exactly who was going to choose Him, and those happened to be the ones that He went ahead and predestined.
Any problem with that? Just knowing what you know right now, based on what we've talked about today. You may say that's absolutely terrific. Anybody have a problem with that? What would be the problem with that? You're dead.
See, it doesn't matter. It becomes a circular argument. If you're going to tell me that God chose you because He knew you were going to, in an act of faith, choose Him, the question still comes back: who gave you the capacity to choose Him to start with?
What Foreknowledge Really Means
Obviously, God is going to predestine those that He foreknows. God can't even predestine something He doesn't know. He foreknows us, not who's going to choose Him or who's not. He certainly knows that, but that's not the basis for His choice. That's not at all what Paul is saying.
Paul is saying that He foreknew some, like Adam and Eve knew each other. There was a loving relationship that God knew from the beginning. Those people who God chose, He predestined, those are the ones that He called, those are the ones that He justified, those are the ones that He glorified, not based on anything that we could ever do.
The Impact on Our Faith
That's so much material in a very short period of time. Let me get back to the "so what" question because I think it's of paramount importance. If in fact it's true that God chose me and I didn't choose Him, what's that do to my faith?
So you talk about loving God, but here's the real attitude. If you think that God gave you some sort of ability and you chose Him, here's what you've got: a deflated view of God and an inflated view of yourself. You think God is something less than He really is, and you, with all due respect, think you're something special when you're not.
But if I think that God chose me according to His will, for His good pleasure, not based on anything that I did—in fact, if He gave me what I deserve and what I had earned, He gave me hell. But if I think that God chose me, then exactly what's going to happen is I am going to begin to have an accurate view of God, I'm going to have an accurate view of myself, and just like John the Baptist, my life becomes the mission of seeing Him increase and me decrease.
The Critical Importance of Doctrine
Now this may sound like a bunch of double talk to you, but it is critical. Doctrine is absolutely imperative to our life. I would submit to you that the problems you see in the church today, the vast majority of them are doctrinal problems because we don't understand who God is, and we're spending forever trying to read Kevin Lehman and Jim Dobson and all these guys to understand who we are instead of who God is. That's the problem.
See, now, when you go into worship, you're not worshiping a God that looked down and gave you the ability and you came, and you just kind of figured Him out. You're worshiping...
A God that chose you, a God that created the universe, the God who looked down and said, "You're going to be mine." You don't deserve it. You haven't earned it. In fact, right now you don't even want it, but I'm going to give you a new nature that's going to make you fall to your knees and come to me. What kind of response are you going to have to that? Holy, holy, holy.
What are you saying about the love of Jesus? How can you not love a God that died for you when you didn't want Him and you would never come to Him without Him? I beg you to think about this. There are some of you that you don't like what you heard, and that's fine, and we'll be available and you can talk to us afterwards until we're both blue, but I beg you to think about this.
You want a key to spiritual growth? You grasp the fact that God chose you when you were lost. That'll give you a key to spiritual growth.
Let's pray. Father, heavy stuff. We just pray today that what we heard is an accurate representation of Your word. Father, help us understand that there was nothing we did to earn our salvation, that we couldn't even muster up the gift of faith. Help us understand, Father, that You predestined before the earth that we would come to You in repentance and faith. God, I thank You so much for that.