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Free Will or Free Grace?
The following is from Spurgeon’s sermon,
“A Promise for Us and for Our Children”
How did you become believers in Christ?
By any internal energy of your own?
Speak, believer, was it your free will that
brought
you to the Savior’s feet, or was it God’s
free grace?
Men may hold free-will doctrine as a matter of theory, but
you never find a believer hold it as a matter of experience.
We can all say-
“Oh! to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be.”
“It was all of your grace that I was brought to obey, while
others were allowed to go the downward road to destruction.”
About this you can have no difficulty, for your own
experience tells you that you were dead in trespasses
and sins, and it must have been something beyond any
power of yours that quickened you into spiritual life.
Men might as well claim the honors of creation or resurrection
as boast of commencing their own spiritual life.
The Lord alone shall have the glory of that opening hour of love!
Since that happy day what has sustained you?
Has your fire of piety been fed by internal, self-produced fuel?
Have you kept yourselves from the power of Satan?
My brethren, have you kept yourselves in communion with God?
You know that you have not.
You are debtors for your soul's daily bread to your Father who
is in heaven. Every good thing which you have, you have
received from him, the great Father of lights, with whom is no
variableness or shadow of turning. He has given you every
good and perfect gift which you have received.
You have profited in nothing by the flesh, but
in all things by the Spirit of the living God.
Taking you from your first conviction and tracking you to the
present moment, it has been all of God’s creating and forming.
In the womb of conviction he fashioned you,
and he has nurtured you until now.
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