"So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy." -Romans 9:16
If you don't know me, you can't fully appreciate the irony of the situation. Not only did I previously disagree with the "Calvinist" (for lack of a better term) view of biblical election/predestination, but for several years, I hated it. I thought it was disgusting, unthinkable, and utterly beneath the dignity of the biblical God.
Seven and a half years later, I finally waved the white flag of surrender before an army of indomitable passages of Scripture. My philosophical arguments had held their ground longer than those of most people I knew. But as verse after verse relentlessly stormed the beach of my small but fortified view of God, I was eventually undone. God was fully sovereign over the salvation of men's souls. And this He says is His right, His glory, and the sturdiest foundation of my rejoicing in Him.
It was really weird.
Fast forward two years, and I'm actually in a pulpit, open Bible in hand, preaching a sermon entitled Rejoicing in Election: the third sermon in a series through 1 Thessalonians. One of the best and most difficult things about expository (verse-by-verse) preaching is that it forces you to deal with texts that are really hard and really controversial. So I preached the text.
And the next week (yesterday,) not surprisingly, about half as many people showed up. Of course, it's a smaller church, one family was travelling, and it was raining pretty hard that morning. So I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet. God's Word will not return to Him void. But sometimes that means God's Word dwindles the crowd from 5,000 to 11, as in John 6. We'll see what happens here.
