How can a person believe in the sovereignty of God and despise the mandate of a sovereign God?

God's not only sovereign in His grace, he is sovereign in his commands.

Well, I remember a most discomforting experience I had when I was a seminary student,

and I was in a seminar, and we were studying Jonathan Edwards' work, The Freedom of the Will.

And I believe there were 22 of us in that

class, and the professor had us arranged in a semi-circle in front of his desk. And he enjoyed the

Socratic method of teaching. He called it Dialecture. We said he lectured we died because he would constantly

grill us and put us on the spot and ask us difficult questions. And on this one day, he said

to us, all right, gentlemen, if it is true that God, from all eternity, has chosen to save certain people

and not others, why then should we be busily involved in the task of evangelism?

And I breathed a great sigh of relief because I happened to be sitting at the extreme right

end of this semicircle of students and he asked the person on the extreme left end and

his custom would be to go right down the line.

So I knew that there were 21 people who would have to wrestle with this question before

he would ever get to me.

And I was delighted that I had that safety cushion.

And so he started with the first student, and he said, Mr. So-and-so, if divine election is true, why should we be involved in evangelism?

And the student just candidly replied immediately, and he said, well,

Professor, I don't know. I've always wondered about that myself. Then he went to the next

fellow in the line. He said, well, what do you think? And that fellow shrugged his shoulder and

said, beats me. And all of a sudden, it was getting more and more scary as he went down

the line, asking each student and each one of them said they had no earthly idea how to answer

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