Everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never cast out.(John 6:37 CSB)
If you are a Christian, someone who claims to follow Jesus, then you likely have a story of this moment or time in your life where you decided you were going to follow Jesus. In the church world we often call these stories of our conversion our “testimony.” Like a witness in a courtroom, these stories are our testomonies, are accounts of how God saved us from whatever our life was before.
For me, I grew up in church, I was a church kid at the fullest. And in that raising up in the church throughout my childhood I felt the reality that people who claim to follow Jesus do not always do a good job at that. as a church kid, this was hard for me to wrap my mind around. I knew that no one was perfect. Even Hannah Montana knew that. But the contradictions I seen in people’s lives who claimed to follow Jesus yet treated their neighbors horribly, really grinded my childhood faith down to the bones and left me with a question for God.
“How can these people who keep saying you are working through them, be so horrible to others unless you are also causing them to be horrible? In which case, I am done.”
There was two Christians who really stood out to me during that time as prime examples of people trying to follow Jesus to their best ability, falling short, but still chasing after him in a way that was attractive to me.
The first was my Youth Pastor(the first Calvinist I really knew). who loved his wife and kids well. A man who had flaws but everyday was working to overcome them by the power of Jesus.
The second person was my dad. My dad was and is not a Calvinist. But he was actually the deciding factor in me coming to the faith. It was on that Sunday morning where. I gave God an ultimatum that if he did not reveal himself to me thatmroning by the time church was over, then I would have called. it quits on trying o fugue this whole Christian thing out.It was in that last hour of the service that God, revealing that He is the true God showed me the gre3atest evidence I had ever seen. God told me to look to my right, at the end of the pew, a man(my father) who had struggled with years. of anger, addiction, trials. of his own kind, that had had such a radical shift in direction when he encountered Jesus that my dad was not the man he was at all 20 years prior. too that moment. The change in my dad’s life was so profound that it was the evidence God used to call me to Himself.
The question we are wrestling with in this writing though is: what happens when God calls people to Himself?
The reality I believe is that my dad would have never chosen to follow Jesus on his own accord. Something must have happened to change the course of this man’s life. Plenty of people overcome addiction, but my dad was not one to just stop for anything. Plenty of people work on their anger in some kind of management class, but my dad has spent his life undoing the bad habits his fathered raised him up in any reasonable person should ask: why? Why did my dad change? How did he change?
The Doctrine of Irresistible Grace(Effectual Call)
As we have already established in this series, Calvinism starts off with this idea that mankind being so incredibly broken that no one has the ability within themselves to know, want or do good.
“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”(Romans 3:10-18 ESV)
What a passage like this is communicating is that as humans we are so incredibly broken that we have to understand everything we touch, think, or do is also broken. We are incapable of doing anything truly good.
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.(Isaiah 64:6 ESV)
Even the good things you right now are thinking of in defense of what I just previously said are like “polluted garments”. Now, to really help paint the picture of what your most righteous deeds are in a holy God’s sight; its important to understand that the word for “polluted garment” has this imagery imbedded in it of what we today would think of as a “bloody tampon.” Your most righteous acts are like a “bloody tampon” in the face of a holy God. They are disgusting, they are worthless, they should not be held up in front of a holy God as anything of value.
The reason why even our most righteous acts are considered so worthless in the face of a holy God though is because our acts are not just wrong. In fact, some times are acts are incredibly good. The problem lies at the heart of it all. Our hearts, the source of everything we are doing is flawed and broken. The sin in our hearts has infected everything that we have done and will do. Which by nature means “no one seeks God.” Our hearts do not even crave him, we just crave the evil we can do. We are like the picture of a vampire. A vampire is a dead creature, feasting on the blood of others. And we are like that. We are like vampires, dead men walking feasting on the destruction of those around us.
So, how does a dead man choose to not be dead anymore?
Notice I said “choose.” Because for many of us who have been in church for some time we have been sold this idea that we needed to make a decision. Arguably the best decision of our lives. We need to choose Jesus.
Calvinist’s would offer valuable pushback to this line of thinking. How can someone who is so totally corrupted by sin, ever choose something as good as following Jesus? They cannot on their own free will.
This is where the doctrine of irresistible grace comes into play.
Because we are unable to choose God according to our own freewill. that has been totally corrupted by sin, we need to first be chosen by God. Our previous post about the doctrine of unconditional election should help you in understanding the nature in which God chooses.
But once we moved past the fact that God does choose us, the next domino to fall is what happens after he chooses. Once we are chosen by God, something within us will need to change. Something will need to happen to miraculously mend that connection between corrupted us and the Holy God.
Calvnists believe that what mends this broken connection is God’s. divine calling that not just extends an invitation to us to follow him, but that actually awakens the dead part of us to a new life.
The best imagery in the Bible that we have of what Calvinists are describing is in the story of Lazarus.
Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it.“Remove the stone,” Jesus said. Martha, the dead man’s sister, told him, “Lord, there is already a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”
So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you heard me. I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd standing here I said this, so that they may believe you sent me.” After he said this, he shouted with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out bound hand and foot with linen strips and with his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unwrap him and let him go.” (Luke 11:38-44 CSB)
Like Lazarus we were dead in our sin, yet when Jesus calls out to Lazarus, Lazarus is given the breath of life to get up and walk out of the tomb to Jesus. The miracle of salvation is what happens when Jesus calls us. The Spirit breathes life inside of us, awakening us to a new life found only in Christ. Because this breath of life, this call is fueled by the Spirit, we are now given the ability to choose what is good and thankfully according to the Calvinist, because the Spirit is now inside of us, we now also want to choose Jesus.
God unilaterally and monergistically does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
R.C. Sproul(What is Reformed Theology)
This calling from God is effective, which is why many Calvinists prefer this doctrine to be calling “effectual calling” not “irresistible grace”.
Now you may thinking: doesn’t everyone have the ability/oppurtunity to be saved?
The Calvinist would answer yes. The gospel call is extended to everyone. But the call is only effective to those who have been chosen by God before the foundation of the world to be saved. For those who have been chosen by God, when the call is extended to them to follow Jesus, the Spirit works within that call to awaken the dead and breathe new life in them sparking the new birth. This is why those chosen by God are able to “make the good decision to follow Jesus”.
But Do We Actually Have a Choice?
The greatest(maybe just most common) pushback to this idea of effectual calling is the pushback: “But then does that mean we do not actually have a choice?”
My immediate thought process leads me to ask the question: “who’s complaining about not having the choice?” In my experience the pushback usually comes from Christians who have already made that profession of faith. All the Calvinists are saying is that that choice you made to publicly profess faith in Jesus Christ was not the work of your own freewill. It is the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. There is absolutely nothing you contributed to your salvation except for the sin that made in necessary as (fill in whoever’s. quote this is) says as well as there is nothing profession of faith you made except for the one the Holy Spirit empowered you to make. I feel like a Christian complaining about this is the equivalent to a child who has been given a cookie complaining because they were given the cookie and they did not in their own free will go to the jar and grab it themselves. One demonstrates grace, the other demonstrates work. And the reality is, that child would have never been able to grab a cookie out of the jar on their own. They could’ve tried, but they would have failed. If it were not for the fact that the cookie jar was hidden, and they needed the mystery to be made know. Or the fact that the jar was too high for them to reach, and no matter how tall they made themselves by standing on their tippy toes they would still fall short. In order to accept the gift, we need the Spirit’s work in our life to make us willing and able to accept the gift.
Now, if there is pushback from the non-christian, the reality is for the Calvinist’s framework that at the end of the day, someone who has not been chosen by God will not ultimately care too much about whether they actually had choice in the matter because the mystery of the gospel will remain hidden from them. They will never be granted the ability to see or understand what one of the elect(those chosen by God) have experienced. Therefore, they may have concerns or critiques but this ultimately will die out because they have wills opposed to the will of God.
Where Do I Fall?
In this series, I have found myself falling back in love with Calvinism and still keeping my distance from this mindset. There are good and bad portions of it. The system of Calvinism is a man made system and its purpose is to help give us grips to grab ahold of and understand the gospel.
What I have felt like is missing from this conversation over the years is more so a need to be less black and white about it all.
God’s calling on our lives is not always this overnight change. I remember in my highschool Sunday class the teacher telling us that if we did not remember the exact day and time we gave our lives to Christ then something is wrong and we probably did not have anything really change.
I remember hearing that then and thinking: my life was so radically changed the last thing I thought about was what day it was. I had just been saved from hell, I had no interest at all in marking it on the calendar. I had every motivation other than go and share this news with my friends though.
Along with that, salvation does not play out the same way in everyone’s life. It’s easy to notice the change in a drug addict turned sober/clean Christian. It’s not as easy to pin point the change in a kid who grew up in Sunday school every week turned christian. Likewise there are some people, regardless of background that simply are called to Jesus over a period of time. There is no one single moment, rather its a long list of moments over a period of time that bring about this change in a person’s life.
Speaking of Change
In all my years of being an outspoken Calvinist, we harped a lot on the work of God on our behalf manifested in Jesus. What we did not speak a lot about though was what faith looked like after we were born again.
Being born again in a theological terms is this idea of regeneration. Regernation is the doctrine that God through the power of the Holy Spirit brings us to new life. But with all the talk about what God does, in my days of being a Calvinist I often struggled to know what I was supposed to be doing.
Jesus saves, but after he saves what is the role a person plays in their faith? Paul the Apostle says this:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.(Ephesians 2:8-10 ESV)
We were created for good works. We have a role to play in this world. We are not just mere robots who only act when God moves within us. He created us as living, breathing beings, with our own wills and as our wills are transformed from darkness to light, our lives should then reflect this.
This is where the work of John Mark Comer, a Dallas Williard, the Desert Fathers and Mothers has really come in handy for me over the years. Jesus saves yes, but he saves us and that changes us in ways that have to be worked out.
The Point of Discipleship
When Jesus saves us and we are born again; what do we do?
John Mark Comer has broken down the life of a follower of Jesus into three pieces that I believe can help our good Calvinists understand what it is they should be doing after God miraculously saves us.
- Be With Jesus: In the life a of a Jewish disciple(student) there first step in following their Rabbi was just to be present with him. You cannot follow someone that you have no proximity too. And so for the life of a disciple of Jesus our first step is just to be in the room with Him. Now obviously, in 2025 we are not gonna be able to track Jesus down and corner him into a conversation. Rather this is where the practical tools of reading your Bible and prayer come in. Are you creating space in your life that draws you into the presence of God? Are you creating places in your life that are holy places for you to just sit in silence and solitude as a way to get closer to Jesus’ Spirit? To be a follower of Jesus means orienting your life around being near Him. Are you near Jesus?
- Become Like Jesus- We will never be God, but we are called to reflect his Image. We are created in His image to reflect Him out into the world. Likewise, discipleship is the process of becoming a person who properly reflects who Jesus is and what He does. As you are with Jesus you will notice He is slow to speak, He is quick to listen, He is slow to get angry. He is compassionate and gracious. becoming like Jesus means shedding off the “fleshy” parts of us. The parts of us that act more like animal than the humans we were designed to be. This is where practicing taking on the Spirit of God deeply matters. We are not called to just preach about Jesus to people we are called to resemble him in our personalities, in our tones when we speak, in our pacing of life. Does your personality look like Jesus? Does how you carry yourself look like Jesus?
- Do As He Did: Lastly, as you make room to be near Jesus and you begin taking on his personality and pacing the question you have to ask is: Are you living life like Jesus? Are you doing what He did? Jesus saved people, He healed them of various diseases and illnesses. He made disciples of the Way, and He lived a life of restoring what was broken in this world. Are you doing that? Are you practicing the spiritual disciplines that he practiced? Are you raising up students of Jesus the way He did? Are you eating dinner with people far from God?
My faith when I solely looked at it from this perspective that Jesus saved me and I can do nothing apart from him made me feel trapped in my faith. I had no idea what to do and when fruit was not showing up in my life or when I read the Scriptures and the way Jesus lived did not seem familiar to me based on how I was living; my faith was rocked. I fell into serious questions about the validity of this gospel story we’ve been told.
The gospel was not wrong, Jesus was more than enough. I just had failed to understand what I was supposed to be doing. I misunderstood God’s calling on my life by believing it was to know all the right things instead of becoming the type of person that so emulates Jesus that people could see Jesus through me.
This doctrine of irresistible grace is beautiful in capturing how we are made alive, but the danger is in believing it explains discipleship to Jesus. These need to be held together. This is orthodoxy and orthopraxy in union.
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