Welcome back to the podcast on this Monday. Today in our Bible reading we read

Jeremiah 23 to 25 together and included a beautiful new covenant text that one listener wants you to

explain more. The listener is Matthew. He wrote this, Pastor John hello to you.

I find myself often in debates with friends and family over Calvinism and Armenian

they're all Armenian I try to represent the other side with clarity and charity

one of the arguments that I come back to repeatedly is about free will and what I see in

Jeremiah 24-7.

I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord and they shall be my people and I will be their God for they shall

return to me with their whole heart."

What I see in this text is that of course we all have free will, the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire.

So what we need are new desires that want the right things.

God must act to give us new desires or we are hopeless.

This is sovereign grace in the miracle of regeneration.

How much of your discussions over free will centers on this fact that we all have free will and we all need a new heart, a new will.

First, let me commend Matthew for defining what he means by free will.

That's really unusual. I appreciate it very much because in most discussions people use the phrase as though it were clear

when in fact most people have very different views of what free will means so

he's defined it so that I can answer his free will is

he's defined it so that I can answer his question with more precision.

He says that free will is the ability for our hearts to do and believe what we most desire.

That's a pretty shrewd and careful definition.

Freedom of the will, he says, is the freedom to do and believe what we most desire.

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