Whenever God pleases, he overcomes your resistance. He can let you resist him as long as he wants.

But when he decides no longer, he triumphs.

Is it for me?

If you're a Christian he did it for you, he gets all the praise for overcoming

our rebellion. We didn't overcome our deadness and our rebellion and our blindness. He triumphed in our lives. We want him to get our that the spirit's work in the new birth is irresistible.

That's the question John Piper answers from John 3,

1 to 10 in this episode of Light and Truth.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on April 26, 2009.

The main effect of the wind, the spirit, is that we are made spiritually alive.

We're born again. And now our wills move with that life. Move with life because we're made alive. That's what living things do. They move.

They move to receive Christ. they move to believe on Christ.

But God, the Spirit is the decisive mover and moves our will.

We call this, let me put some names on this. We're talking

about doctrine here, okay? You don't need names on doctrine in order to understand them, but sometimes it helps.

What we're talking about here is a term like sovereign grace or irresistible grace,

if you ever heard those terms, that's what we're talking about here.

Sovereign grace or irresistible grace. Far better to learn your theology from

texts without knowing names than to learn names from theology books without knowing texts.

So I'm just this is kind of incidental, the names I'm putting on this here.

This is sovereign grace.

What I mean by that is the Holy Spirit spoken of here is God's Spirit and God is

omnipotent. He is sovereign. He does what he pleases. Nothing can stay his hand or say to him,

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