Sovereign Grace

From Mark A. Snoeberger, Sharper Iron Forums:

"I believe fervently in the free offer of the gospel. [My church and I believe] fervently that 'whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.' And for that reason we all actively call on everyone and anyone to call on the Lord for salvation and we all avidly teach this in the church and seminary. But we also remain convinced that this is a promise that all who call on the Lord shall be saved, not a statement that all have the native ability to call on the Lord to be saved. This we believe because 'no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father' (John 6:65). And because we believe that God must 'open the heart to respond to [God's] message' (Acts 16:14).

We don't pray in order to change God's mind or will (or worse, to convince an open God to write a world history of our own choosing). We don't evangelize to force God's hand or to strengthen enfeebled minds to call on God's name. We don't call people to faith and repentance because their weak wills need our prompting. We pray because we know that God has ordered our prayers as a means to the ends that he has declared from the beginning. We evangelize because we know that God has chosen to awaken dead sinners in conjunction with the Word preached. We call people to faith and repentance because God 'commands all men everywhere to repent.'

We also operate under the realization that God will not 'open the heart' of everyone. We recognize that not everyone is 'appointed by God for eternal life' (Acts 13:48). And in answer to your question, no amount of prayer or evangelism will change that fact. Whether or not we like it, God sometimes uses the compounding of our prayers and evangelism not as a means by which his saving mercy is made known, but as a means of heightening the manifestation of his wrath and power against the 'objects of his wrath prepared for destruction' (Rom 9:22-23).

But we also glory in the fact that God does open hearts and does indeed appoint men for eternal life. And so we labor, not because our feeble efforts can save people, but because the all-powerful, all-wise God has made us agents of his grace. And so we preach our unpersuasive message with the hope that God will attend it with his saving power, so that the faith of 'our' converts does not rest on man's wisdom but on God's power, leaving us no room to boast (1 Cor 1:262:5)."

The Effectual Call, by George Whitefield

Come, ye dead, Christless, unconverted sinner, come and see the place where they laid the body of the deceased Lazarus; behold him laid out, bound hand and foot with graveclothes, locked up and stinking in a dark cave, with a great stone placed on top of it. View him again and again; go nearer to him; be not afraid; smell him, Ah! how he stinketh. Stop there now, pause a while; and whilst thou art gazing upon the corpse of Lazarus, give me leave to tell thee with great plainness, but greater love, that this dead, bound, entombed, stinking carcase, is but a faint representation of thy poor soul in it natural state;...thy spirit which thou bearest about with thee, sepulchered in flesh and blood, is literally dead to God, and as truly dead in trespasses and sins, as the body of Lazarus was in the cave. Was he bound hand and foot with graveclothes? So art thou bound hand and foot with thy corruptions; and as a stone was laid on the sepulchre, so there is a stone of unbelief upon thy stupid heart. Perhaps thou has lain in this estate, not only four days, but many years, stinking in God’s nostrils. And, what is still more effecting, thou art as unable to raise thyself out of this loathsome, dead state, to a life of righteousness and true holiness, as ever Lazarus was to raise himself from the cave in which he lay so long. Thou mayest try the power of thy boasted free will, and the force and energy of moral persuasion and rational arguments (which, without doubt, have their proper place in religion); but all thy efforts, exerted with never so much vigor, will prove quite fruitless and abortive, till that same Jesus, who said "take away the stone" and cried “Lazarus, come forth," also quicken you. This is grace, graciously offered, and grace graciously applied.

Amen!