Jesus said, no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

And what Jesus is saying here is that no human being has the power or the ability to do something.

These are strong words coming from the lips of our Lord, saying something about man's ability.

No man has the power to do what?

To come to me.

Well, those are strong words from Jesus, and they have sparked heated debate among Christians regarding the human will.

At the center of the debate is this question.

When Adam fell, did we lose our ability to make free choices, particularly when it comes to our salvation?

Today and all this week on Renewing Your Mind, we're focusing on RC Sproul series What Is Reformed Theology.

And today's topic is right at the core of this theological system.

When we get to the concern of the doctrine of total depravity or the T in tulip,

invariably, we are catapulted into the arena of the debate over free will.

In fact, the historic controversy over the degree of original sin that infects us really focuses on that question of free will.

You can't have a five-minute conversation on the doctrines of grace or on the doctrine of election without somebody raising the question, what about free will?

And so often that the debate or the discussion over free will is placed in two different frameworks.

On the one hand, the question of human freedom is struggled with vis-a-vis the relationship between God's sovereignty and our responsibility and our power to act as volitional creatures.

But the other place in which the discussion of free will is framed has to do with the question of the relationship between the fall and original sin and the power of human freedom.

Let me take a moment to read a confessional summary of this dispute as we find it in the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the 17th century British Statement of Reformation Theology, where we read these words, quote,

man by his fall into a state of sin, half holy, that's WHOLY, half holy lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation.

So as a natural man, being altogether a verse from that good and dead in sin is not able by his own strength to convert himself or to prepare himself there unto.

Now, what this confession is saying points to the radical character of this doctrine in that it affirms that man's freedom in a certain area has been wholly or completely lost by the fall.

Not that man has completely lost his power of choosing or of making decisions, but his moral power to do certain things has been completely lost.

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