Before a person exercises saving faith, God must do something for them and in them.

Jesus said, nobody can come to me unless the Father draws him.

I remember when I was a seminary student, we had a professor who was teaching New Testament,

and the man was also the president of this Presbyterian seminary, and in class one day, one of the

students raised his hand and said, do you believe in the doctrine of election? And the professor

exhibited a little bit of irritation at that question, and he said emphatically that he did not,

because he did not believe that God dragged people kicking and screaming

against their will into the kingdom of God, people who didn't want to be there, and at the same

time prevented others from coming who desperately wanted to be in the kingdom. And I was astonished

not only that this was such

a serious distortion and caricature of historic reform theology, but that it would be uttered by

a man who should have known better, a man who had been steeped in the confessional standards of the

church, and so on. But I thought, if a person of this status in the church and this experience and this education

has this misconception about irresistible grace, then how many other people must labor under

the same misconception? The idea of irresistible conjures up that one cannot

possibly offer any resistance to the grace of God. Now, beloved, the history of the human race is

the history of relentless resistance by human beings to the sweetness of the grace of God.

And what is meant by irresistible grace is not what the word suggests, that it's incapable of being resisted.

Indeed, we are capable of resisting God's grace, and we do resist God's

grace. But the idea here is that in spite of our natural resistance to the grace of God,

that God's grace is so powerful, that it has the capacity to overcome our natural resistance

to it.

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