Effectual Calling (Ebenezer Pemberton) | The Whole Counsel

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me is Chuck Baggett, and we're looking again at the book, Salvation in Full Color, 20 Sermons by Great Awakening Preachers. It's been edited and compiled by Richard Owen Roberts.

If you remember, it's been a while since we've been together, but this is a book that has 20 sermons on the theme of salvation, and they're laid out in a very specific order. And the purpose is so that each truth builds on the previous truth or leads to the next truth.

And if these truths are taken in their biblical and appropriate order, then the impact that these sermons has is cumulative. In other words, it's not just that we're reading a sermon about repentance or faith or the death of Christ on the cross.

And in reading these in the biblical order, they carry much more weight and bring much more benefit to our souls than if we took them in an isolated way. This week we're looking at the chapter called The Effectual Calling, and this is a sermon by a man named Ebenezer Pemberton.

And really, he's actually Ebenezer Pemberton Jr., because his father of the same name was a pastor in New England. But our Ebenezer Pemberton was born in 1705. He graduated from Harvard 1721 and became the pastor of a Congregationalist Church in New York City.

It was a small congregation, and yet he continued to grow in godliness and in wisdom as a pastor. And when George Whitefield visited 1739 and forward, he was the only pastor in the area to allow Whitefield to use his pulpit.

At that time there was some suspicion over Whitefield. After all, Whitefield was an Anglican, and they were hearing astonishing events, the occurrences back in England. And so he trusted Whitefield, and I'm glad he did, because Whitefield visited many times and always came to his church when he was in the area.

And the church, you know, the enormous crowds that visited to hear Whitefield, many of them stayed and became shepherded people under Pemberton. Now as the church grew, and he was there for a couple of decades, they had to add a second pastor.

And when they did, sadly, a faction grew up in the church that preferred the newer pastor over Pemberton. Pemberton and the new pastor were godly men, and they wanted to avoid any kind of division in the church.

So actually, they both resigned. And the Synod, the authority in that area over that church, asked Pemberton to consider staying on, even though he had offered to resign. And he did for a month, and he felt that it was just clear that his usefulness there was ended.

Ebenezer Pemberton then went to Boston, where he pastored for a couple of decades, dying in 1777 after 51 years of ministry. During this time he was involved with the missionary efforts among the American Indians.

The original title of this was, The Method of Divine Grace in Conversion, published in 1741. Chuck, why don't you run us through the basic outline of the sermon? Sure, it's.

Pretty simple. Two major points. How does God actually make us willing? And he gives several ways in which he does that, and argues that point. We'll get to that in a few moments. And then, how it is a work of his power to make us willing.

It's not just persuasion, if you will, or argument, but he makes us willing, and then he improves upon that. Some applications. We probably should say.

Right off at the beginning that effectual calling is a theological category in what we call soteriology, the study of salvation. Sometimes in the older writers, effectual calling and regeneration are treated synonymously, and really, biblically, they are so closely aligned.

You know, they're so interwoven, so much overlap, that I think that it would be fine if you use them synonymously. Effectual calling is really just describing that impact upon our souls of regeneration with regard to drawing us to the gospel.

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.

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, I never thought I would live to see a day like this.

That's understandable, but it's good to remind ourselves 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.

So he points out that we're the most needy of all people, we're guilty, we're stained, we're enslaved, and we're helpless, and we are surrounded by what seems to be our endless array of needs. 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. And so he concludes this introductory section by saying, mankind's understandings are so fatally blinded by the 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. Did not God miraculously show mercy and, notice this, conquer us, effectively inclining or bending us to embrace the mercies of the gospel? 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. This is a thing, effectual calling, that I don't know that I ever heard, maybe until seminary, and maybe not even in seminary.

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? 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.

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 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.

But today, I think that there are many people who do believe that. And so we have an outsized view of our ability regarding salvation. We choose it, you know, and we are able 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.

You know, light has come to the world. We hate the light. We don't want our deeds exposed as evil. 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 Christian, then it is because God has done something in us that's beyond our ability to perform.

The External Call and the Internal Call

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. The old writers used to talk about the external call and the internal call, the external call being the preaching of the gospel, the explaining of truth, you know, to our children, to the churches, to your co-worker, your neighbor.

And that is an essential part. But there is also another aspect, the Godward aspect, what God is doing inside a person when the gospel is being preached. You know, you think of the book of Acts with Lydia, and God opens her heart, her eyes, opens her mind to the gospel so that she could receive that.

And that is God's work in evangelism, in a sense, while we're doing the outward call. Even John Wesley believed that there had to be this aspect of grace. There had to be something that God did in you before you would ever be willing to choose Christ above yourself.

So even in Arminianism, there is that that provenient grace, you know, that grace that preceded everything else. The difference between Wesley and Pemberton would be that Wesley felt that it was kind of like God giving you a ticket that you would get on a train, and you could use the ticket or not.

Pemberton, I believe much more biblically, shows that when God begins to deal with the person in this way, it is effectual. It will have the effect God desires. It will bring men and women and young people to the gospel, to God through the gospel.

Effectual Calling and Regeneration as Humbling Truths

Yeah, and this.

Truth, along with regeneration, which you've said are kind of twin truths, both of them are terribly humbling to a person. Our pride rises up against it. Who wants to think that they are not able to choose what's best, or, you know, best for me?

And yet experience shows us that we're not. We look at ourselves, we can look around us at a world that rejects Christ. So it is humbling to think that there needs to be this work applied to me. Yeah, and I think that this is one of.

The most practical areas for the application of what often gets called Calvinism or Reformed theology, because it's one thing to talk about God's choices in eternity past, you know, in this just kind of a fog of mystery, and we can say, well, I believe God is sovereign.

Well, that's good, but it really becomes practical when you think about how God sovereignly deals in souls while you're laboring to bring the truths to bear on their lives. You know, you're wanting to say it in a way that is the most clear, the most attractive.

So as you're doing that, what is God doing? It's so practical to have a good understanding of that, so as to avoid kind of the wrong idea that, you know, the two different edges that we want to avoid.

One cliff edge is that if I just said it more convincingly, it would have saved him. The other cliff edge is, I don't have to say it at all, God will just do it all, and, you know, a fatalistic Calvinism, which is very unbiblical.

So Pemberton guides us.

Between those. I think this is a good place, too, to add that what we're talking about in many of these doctrines is not something that we can necessarily lay out in our experience and say, well, I can check that off.

I see that that has occurred, but it is what God is doing from his perspective, and it happens, but we don't necessarily say that this happened in this order, and so I can check that off now, and it's time to move to the next step.

Made Willing in the Day of His Power

Yeah, so the sermon.

Here is going to investigate exactly how God, in the effectual call, deals with us so as to make us willing in the day of his power, and that was the verse, you know, he used from Psalm 110. In the day of God's power, his people be made willing.

In the day when God exercises his extraordinary spiritual influence upon our souls, making us alive to him, waking us up from that death, how exactly does that result in us embracing Christ? One of the things he starts with is that God makes us willing as rational creatures, and that's the old way of saying God does not deal with us as kind of in a mechanical way, a robotic way.

God does not turn us into a pawn on the chessboard, but as Hosea says, God draws us with the cords of a man, with the bands of love. That is what we talked about in Regeneration. God opens our mind, you know, he takes away the lie from our eyes so that we can see the truth.

He frees our heart from that enslaving desire for self so that we can love what's true, and then he frees the will in this new nature to choose the truth. But then, having done that, we are enabled to respond, and we are responsive.

We do make the choice. We believe. We turn to him. We turn away from the emptiness of sin and the emptiness of our own righteousness, and we embrace Christ, or we choose Christ. We put the hand to the plow forever.

So God is dealing with us as rational creatures, convincing, enticing, drawing, and we are then responsive with our whole being.

So it is a bit of a corrective to the view that when God calls us, he just moves us from one kingdom to another, that there's no willingness on our part. That's not what he's arguing. He's arguing that God does make us willing.

We willingly choose him now, where before we willingly did not.

One of the things he says that God does to make us willing is that he, in the work of conviction, he begins by showing us the depth of our need. So, you know, we all know that we have some needs. We would say, well, okay, I'm not perfect, but it's not until God opens our understanding to see exactly how desperately needy our situation is that we really begin to think of the gospel as something that's valuable.

And, you know, that's just human nature. If we have it all together and someone adds a little extra to our life, like, well, I know you've got everything a person could want, but would you like this as well?

You say, well, that's a nice gesture. I don't really need it. But if a man is dying of starvation, you know, or thirst, and a man comes by with a plate of food or a cup of water, you know, there is such a desperation in us.

We wouldn't let that man pass us by. We would plead with him. We would grab him. We would say, you know, I can't live another day without this. And that's an evidence of God at work, not just admitting biblical truths like, well, yes, we're sinners.

We're all sinners. But when a man or a woman or a young person begins to feel those truths in a way that is unbearable, we know that God is.

At work. You see this in the Philippian jailer who cries out, what must I do to be saved? Or as Peter preaches on the day of Pentecost, you know, he doesn't open up a traditional kind of invitation and say, now, here's what you need to do.

The people cry out to him, what do we need to do? Yeah, in a sense, interrupting. You.

Know, I'm so desperate, you know, you're reading the Bible, and you just stop halfway through a verse, and you get on your knees, and you say, God, I need you, and I'm not willing to live another day without you.

This brings us to one question, and that is, you know, what's the difference between the normal convicting work of the Bible, where a person reads and their conscience is bothered, and they say, you know, I kind of feel bad about myself, and the effectual call.

And the difference is that the effectual call is effective. It actually ends up, ultimately results in the person embracing Christ, whereas what we would call kind of a common work of conviction, it fizzles out.

You know, I feel bad, I go home, and then I forget all about it. More like a New Year's.

Resolution to join the gym, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the first one. Chuck, what else does it goes into the effectual call? Well, God not only helps us to see our need, shows us our need as it is with weight, but God also shows us the sufficiency and the perfection of Christ as a Savior, and that he's fit to be that for us.

You would think that seeing our need would be enough to drive us to Christ, but it's not enough. He shows us that our need is not so great that Christ is unable to meet it, and that Christ is a sufficient Savior for.

Not just sinners in general, but for me. So he is willing, and he is able, and nobody goes to the offended king if we're not convinced of those things. You know, realizing your need is not enough. You've got to be convinced that there's someone who can meet that need.

The next couple things he mentions are that God actually uses the examples in Scripture, and of course, you know, we could also say he uses examples in history and the examples all around us, of how he has been merciful to other sinners.

Has he not saved countless people just as bad as us? Will he not save us if we come to him? You know, so the use of example to encourage our weak faith. And then finally, that God supernaturally strengthens the will that God actually enables a man or a woman, a young person, to turn away from, and to turn to, and to lay hold of, to grab hold of, to take to yourself all that Christ describes himself to be.

In a sense, to hand over all that you know of yourself. Ultimately, if you take all those things that we've just mentioned, this is a good summary of what the effectual call does. If this is the effectual call, these things he's mentioned, bringing us to a place where we are willing in the day of his power, how do we know that it's his power?

Not the evangelists, not the.

Individuals. I think this does go back to depravity, and the fact that we are fallen in Adam, and we've all inherited that. And because of that, we naturally choose self above everything else. It's not that we don't want a king, it's that we want to be king, and all the world should recognize that I'm significant and I'm king.

And every other person seems to think that also, which is a problem, right? So Pemberton asked the question, who would deny himself? And who would? I mean, we may have some goal that we were shooting for that we'll make a small denial for, for the attainment of that goal, but even that goal, it's not the goal of godliness, it's personal something, personal achievement, whatever.

But we're called to deny ourself everything, deny ourself every pleasure, deny ourself, just deny ourself, take up our cross and to deny ourself. And who would do that and hand ourselves over to a king that we cannot see, and you know, the world mocks that, scorns.

Who would go to God for righteousness and think that everything I do, all the, I don't know, there's some bad stuff, but the good things I do, they're not good enough. And the very best things are done with the wrong motive, and all of that is offensive to him.

Who would abandon all of that and turn to God for righteousness, except that God overcomes our pride and works in such a way that we gladly humble ourselves and turn to him. And it is that shift, our willingness to to come with nothing in our hands, nothing in my hands I bring, simply to that cross I cling.

That willingness that says something has occurred that is beyond myself. Pemberton says on page 166, we may then certainly conclude that nothing but the unconquerable arm of God can break the rocky hearts of sinners and bow their stubborn necks to the divine government.

And what else could? You see people sitting under powerful sermons, you know, they hear lots of Bible verses, maybe they've memorized lots of Bible verses, and it has not affected them. If anything, maybe it's hardened them.

And then some other person is converted. Yeah, I think.

That really is. You know, other than the fact that it ultimately does result in in every person that is called in this way, or as Christ says in John chapter 6, every person the Father gives me will come to me.

And you cannot come to me without the Father teaching you. So this, you know, John chapter 6 gives a good kind of full picture of that. The giving of the of the sinner to the Savior. Election. It's a mystery, but it's real.

But on the other side, the teaching of God that effectively brings us to do what you said, to do what we would never do on our own, to just turn our back on us and hope completely in another person.

Practically, this is very helpful in evangelism, or in talking to someone else about Christ. Because while I want to be careful, and I want to use words as best I can, I want my motives to be good, all those things, at the end of the day I cannot change anyone.

And if they walk away unchanged, I have the freedom, if you will, to look at myself and say, it wasn't me. I didn't. There's not one more thing I could have said, or said it in a slightly different way, that would have changed.

Them, because I can't change them. Yeah, I think one test of our Reformed theology is knowing the depth of man's need, his helplessness, knowing the height of God's authority, and his love and mercy to Adam's fallen race.

Do we speak to the king about the rebel as much as we speak to the rebel about the king? We know that we have our theology in a biblical proportion, a biblical balance, if we are pleading with the king for the sinner as much as we plead with the sinner on behalf of the king.

You know, just a very simple test, and I find a very convicting test, because I really, I find that I spend more time pleading with the sinner, you know. There are a number of practical applications that he gives.

One of them is, it does give us an honest view of the of the depth of sin's impact, that we don't embrace the sweetest of gifts and the invitations that come to us from so many different angles. There is just no legitimate excuse for any sinner to despair and not embrace it, and yet every sinner refuses the invitation.

Unless God does this great drawing. Another is that it explains the variety of responses of the gospel, or to the gospel, in a group of people. So you hear, you have a group of people, they hear the same sermon from the same preacher at the same church, and some walk away completely unaffected.

Others hear it, and it's a fine sermon, and others are changed or converted. I was talking to a fellow at Christ Church recently whose son recently believes he's been converted, and the sermon he heard, he was just amazed by it.

And the father said it was a fine sermon, but I didn't come away with what he came away with. It gripped him in a way. Were you preaching? It was not me this time. Because my son, for.

Those who don't know, my youngest son that was converted, when he embraced Christ around age 16, he came back and he said, you know what, during Chuck's sermon, you know, it just, it's like, it was so wonderful.

That's the greatest sermon we.

Have ever heard at the church. That was obviously a work of God. There you go,.

Like Paul Washer, and Roberts, and like, nah, Chuck. So I'm like, thanks, thanks, Andrew.

But yeah, he didn't hear it the way the son heard it, and the difference was that God was at work and his son to bring him to Christ. Yeah, yeah. You can hear a.

Thousand sermons, and it's like, it's, you know, it's like, it's like rain on a windowpane, you know, just a little mist, and you know it's there. And then God comes, and in, you know, in a very plain way, maybe preached, and he shakes us to the core, and suddenly it's like everything makes sense.

Another application is, it's a good help for us in understanding the nature of true conversion. Our part in conversion is repentance and faith, but it is good for us to understand what God has revealed in Scripture about His part in conversion, and that is a real Christian has been so wonderfully altered by the powerful working of God that the mind, and the heart, and the will have been free to embrace Christ.

And if we are calling people Christians who don't have some evidence of that, if we're calling ourselves a Christian, and this has not occurred in some degree, you know, because we don't want to mistake our ability to understand it with its existence.

So it's there. It's happened. There's some evidence of it, and it may not be what we want to see, but if there is no evidence of this kind of change in a person, then we are not biblically right, not biblically, you know, validated in calling it conversion.

That's an.

Important distinction because there are, it seems like there are many people who have a cerebral understanding. You know, it's like, okay, I get it now. I understand that now, and they think that's conversion.

Yeah, it's not enough. You getting it is not.

Always the same as God getting you. You can't stop there. Yeah, and some people, you know, looking in the mirror spiritually, they say, well, if this mighty work occurred in me, surely I would be further along by now.

You know, surely I wouldn't still be tempted by the old sins. Surely I wouldn't still stumble, and that's a lie of the enemy. The great work of God in the soul does produce changes, but it does not make us perfect, and we are sadly still capable of great sin.

So we don't want to give a wrong measurement of a Christian and.

Bring despair. The next help that he gives or improvement is this. If you recognize your own stubbornness and rebellion today, and you recognize that you are not a believer and desire to be rescued, then go to the one who can rescue you.

Appeal to the King. He has made promises. He makes invitations to you to come. So come and ask Him, the one who has power, to make you willing. Yeah. We go to.

Christ to be made willing, even when we have to say to Him, I want to want. You know, so many times, even as a Christian, I've had to say to God, I'm afraid that I can't say to you, I want you, or I want to obey, but I can say, I want to want.

And we go to Him, and we find Him rescuing us, even in that weak expression, you know, that weak cry. Finally, he says, if you see that God has done this in your own soul, lay aside every aspect of pride and stir yourself to gratitude, which produces, you know, that happy life of consecration.

Think, you know, don't just be vague, but think about the very wonderful particulars of you being made willing in His day of power. What has He done? How deep was the stain? How hopeless was your condition until God Himself, the King, drew you with the bands of a man, with cords of love, to embrace Him, to conquer you, not just to conquer your enemies, and let gratitude, you know, flow out in a childlike obedience.

Wonderful realities in Scripture. The effectual call, or the divine method in conversion. If you haven't read it, you can find that in the show notes. You can get the book, Salvation in Full Color, and read it for yourself.