Is there Room in Modern Evangelicalism for the Effectual Call?

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He opens the whole sermon with discussing the fact that man's unwillingness to take what is so freely offered by God and so desperately needed is one of the clearest demonstrations of the depth of our sin.

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You know, when we think of the the sinfulness of humanity, you think about how, you know, you can kind of go to church on Sunday, and if there have been some pretty horrific things in the news, you often hear church folks say, you know, things are just getting worse and worse, and, you know,

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I never thought I would live to see a day like this. That's understandable, but it's good to remind ourselves that the, that one of the greatest displays of the heinousness and the depth and the stain of our sin is not the atrocious things that happen outwardly, but it's the fact that we reject the gospel, the good news that's brought to us.

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So he points out that we're the most needy of all people. We're guilty. We're stained.

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We're enslaved, and we're helpless, and we are surrounded by what seems to be our endless array of needs.

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You know, we just, everywhere we look, we're needy. We are offered everything we need, custom -designed by God in eternity past, for our rescue, and we will not embrace this, no matter how sweet the invitations.

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And so he concludes this introductory section by saying, mankind's understandings are so fatally blinded by the

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God of this world, their wills so madly bent upon the gratification of their inclinations, we want to do what we want to do, and their affections are so fondly engaged to the defiling pleasures of sin that they will not come to Christ in order to have life, and this is the disposition of humanity without exception.

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Did not God miraculously show mercy and, notice this, conquer us, effectively inclining or bending us to embrace the mercies of the gospel?

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So that's all of it in a nutshell. That's a picture of the depth of our sin, that God has to not only conquer our enemies to rescue us, but then he enters our dungeon and conquers us.

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This is a thing, effectual calling, that I don't know that I ever heard, maybe until seminary, and maybe not even in seminary.

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So one question I have, Chuck, is why isn't this a theme, a phrase, that evangelical churchers are well acquainted with in our day?

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I would agree that, I don't remember the first time I heard it, but it had to be seminary or later, and surely there's been a shift from the time that Ebenezer Pemberton wrote to today, and one place we can see that shift in history, of course, is with Finney and his new methods.

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You know, he believed that if you did the right— if you did A and B, then C would happen, that sort of idea, that you could use persuasion in a way that the

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Bible doesn't talk about. I mean, Paul talks about persuading men, but he doesn't mean that it is our words of persuasion that actually changes a person's mind.

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But today, I think that there are many people who do believe that, and so we have a an outsized view of our ability regarding salvation.

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We choose it, you know, and we are able to to look and to see things as they are, our sin as it is, and salvation as it is, and make a rational choice, forgetting that we are depraved and that we love our sin.

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You know, light has come to the world. We hate the light. We don't want our deeds exposed as evil.

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We'd rather have the darkness. And so there needs to be something that occurs in us that is beyond our ability, and if we have become a

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Christian, then it is because God has done something in us that's beyond our ability to perform.

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Yeah, you know, we could say with a large view of our strength and our good intentions, there really just isn't room in modern evangelical thinking for the biblical category of an effectual call.