[0:00] Well, in our last study, ours was the melancholy task of assessing the scriptural state and prospects of those sons of Adam and daughters of Eve who God's loving grace encounters in the invitation of the gospel.
[0:18] And we discovered that as to our spiritual condition, we have become and are by nature morally bankrupt.
[0:30] Thank you. How kind of you. Indeed, of a terrible turpitude, inveterate transgressors of God's laws and mortal enemies of his person.
[0:44] And as to our spiritual prospects of any ability to alter our condition for the good, even through a simple responsiveness to God's gracious gospel overtures.
[0:58] Look and live. Numbers 21. Come, everyone who thirsts. Isaiah 55. Are absolutely nil. Absolutely nil.
[1:08] We have no more capacity for a spiritual response, let alone overture, than a valley of dry bones. The image is Ezekiel's from 37, chapter 37.
[1:24] As to the spiritual realm, the scriptures call us deaf, blind, and dead. Deaf is an adder to the call of the gospel. Blind as a bat to our own decrepitude and the beauties of the Savior.
[1:40] Dead as a doornail to any spiritual motions of the soul. Such is our perverse and prospectless condition when God's grace meets us.
[1:54] So the question for us this morning is how God's grace, meeting us thus, masters us out of such an estate.
[2:06] How does God's all-prevailing, quenchless, deathless love, born in his ancient choice, prevail to rescue us from out of such a spiritual miry pit, yea, slumbering tomb?
[2:26] The answer is only by his own almighty unaided arm. That it is so, and how it is accomplished, are the delightful contemplations of this hour.
[2:44] So let us first consider the proposition that it is God who accomplishes our salvation, and that he does so unfailingly.
[2:56] So first, one that God prevailingly calls his elect. Let us embark on a brief tour of Scripture's testimony to this great truth, that it is God who prevailingly draws his elect savingly to himself.
[3:17] And we've already argued and illustrated at length our utter incapacity to lend a hand to our own rescue, other than the hand of active opposition. If we are to be rescued, God must do it and do it all.
[3:32] But we need not rest on inference, for direct statements of this truth abound in Scripture. As the Apostle assures the Corinthians, no one can say Jesus is Lord, that is, confess faith in Christ, except by the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 12.3.
[3:56] To clarify, Paul is not claiming that none of us can spout those syllables on our own. Rather, affirm them with conviction of faith.
[4:09] And we may also take a stab at following religion's rules, but apart from God's Spirit breathing spiritual life into us, we remain spiritually dead.
[4:21] And our rituals and rule following will only confirm the verdict of Scripture that the written code kills. Only the Spirit gives life.
[4:34] 2 Corinthians 3.6. This giving of spiritual life by the Spirit, regeneration, is so radical, it is called a new birth.
[4:48] There is no spiritual life without it, and only God's Spirit can give it. As Jesus told Dicadibus, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, they cannot see the kingdom of God.
[5:02] Do not marvel that I say to you, you must be born anew of the Spirit. John 3. Such are born, quote, not of blood, nor of flesh, nor of the will of man, that is, not through any human means, but born of God.
[5:21] John 1.13. And this was the prophetic hope and promise. As God promised through Ezekiel, a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will take out the old heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
[5:41] Ezekiel 36.26. Did you catch that? No hope for us without an organ transplant by God himself.
[5:55] No wonder the apostle calls believers God's workmanship. Ephesians 2.10. And this divine workmanship of a new heart transplant is spiritually speaking, life from the dead.
[6:12] As the apostle tells the Ephesian believers, you, God made alive when you were dead through your trespasses and sins. Ephesians 2.1.
[6:22] So the divine spirit is the sole operative agent in this life-giving work.
[6:34] What is the instrument? I have some, Mom. I have some. Thank you. The instrument is the divine word of the gospel.
[6:50] As Peter asserts of believers, you have been born anew through the living and abiding word of God. 1 Peter 1.23. As to this gospel word, it comes as an outward call in the ears of hearers.
[7:10] But this outward call has no prevailing efficacy on its own against the heart of stone it encounters in the hearers.
[7:22] A hard heart, writes Jeremiah Burroughs, gives the rebound to God's word. Our hearts are like the blacksmith's anvil, which can endure many blows, or like the blacksmith's dog that lies under the anvil.
[7:42] Though the sparks fly about his ears, yet he can lie and sleep securely. And so, we may preach the word with all the fervor of Savanarola, yet hard-hearted hearers will remain insensate and unmoved.
[8:01] The gospel will have no more effect than, as Spurgeon puts it, dew upon a rock. How fatefully terrible is this?
[8:16] Oh, how dreadful are the shriekings of men who have a stone in the bladder or the kidneys, writes Burroughs. But, oh, to have a stone in the heart.
[8:32] The outer call of the gospel would be hopeless against those who have made their hearts as an adamant stone. Zechariah 7.12.
[8:44] Recall Stephen's hearers. They cried out with a loud voice, stopped their ears, and rushed together at him and stoned him.
[8:54] Acts 7.57. Yes, hearts are hard as stone and they're as slippery as fish. The heart, writes Spurgeon, is a fish that troubles all gospel fishermen to hold.
[9:10] You may sometimes pull it almost out of the water, but slimy as an eel, it slippeth between your fingers, and you have not captured it after all.
[9:25] So much for the efficacy of the outer call alone. God adds to this outer call, an inward call, which operates upon the heart directly.
[9:44] And as we have seen, the operation is a heart transplant. God's spirit goes in and opens the heart from the inside. As it was said of Lydia, hearing the outer call in Paul's preaching the gospel, quote, the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.
[10:07] Acts 16, 14. This inner call is a personal inward illumination or revelation by God.
[10:20] Peter received this inner revelation of Jesus' identity as Savior. When the penny dropped, or should we say denarius maybe in his case, it was God who dropped it in his heart.
[10:34] Peter's epiphany, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus' explanation, blessed are you, Simon, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
[10:54] Matthew 16. And Peter's case of divine inner illumination is every believer's case. I thank you, Father, that you have hidden these things from the wise, that is, the inhabitants of the rejecting cities Jesus had just been preaching in, and revealed them to little children, that is, his disciples.
[11:18] For such was your gracious will. No one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
[11:30] Matthew 11. 25. It was thus his disciples to whom, quote, it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom. Blessed are your eyes, Jesus told them, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.
[11:50] Matthew 13. 11. In other words, apart from heaven's blessing, they would be eyes that could never see, or ears that could never hear. The prayer of the apostle that he offers for the Ephesians asked what would simply be a continuation of what had transpired to bring them to faith.
[12:15] The inward call of divine enlightenment. that, quote, God may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know the hope to which he has called you.
[12:37] Ephesians 1.17. Apart from the spirit's inward revelatory work, we just wouldn't get it on our own.
[12:47] God the apostle testifies the natural person, that is without the divine heart transplant, does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he's not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
[13:04] 1 Corinthians 2.14. As John the Baptist echoes, a person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given to him by heaven.
[13:17] John 3.27. And what is given from heaven is the very means of reception, faith, and repentance. And the scriptures make this abundantly clear.
[13:30] As to the Jews, Peter testified, God exalted Jesus at his right hand as leader and savior to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.
[13:42] Acts 5.31. So also the Gentiles, quote, to the Gentiles also, attests Paul, God has granted repentance that leads to life.
[13:55] Acts 11.18. And so believers are described as those who through grace have believed. Acts 18.27.
[14:06] So really, the picture scripture gives us of God's rescue is of a dramatic divine intervention, even a jailbreak, if you will, to break us out of our captivity in the devil's penal colony.
[14:26] Speaking to Timothy concerning those opposed to the gospel, he encourages him to hope that, quote, God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth, and that they may come to their senses, the intervention, and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.
[14:49] 2 Timothy 2.25. And this inner calling, this calling out, is an expression of grace. And when we reiterate this again, aware that were it not so marvelous a truth, it would be monotonous in its incessant repetition through Scripture.
[15:12] But let us hear it again anyway. God, Paul reminds Timothy, saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works, but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.
[15:31] 2 Timothy 1.9. So, it is God, by his spirit, through the outer call of his word, joined to an inner illuminating call, which regenerates the heart, from which, thus renewed, spring faith and repentance.
[15:54] presence. By this drawing us to himself, God accomplishes unfailingly. This inner call is all prevailing.
[16:06] And again, given our inveterate resistance, if any are rescued, God's saving action prevailed, as it always does with his elect.
[16:19] As Jesus tells us, all that the Father gives me will come to me. Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father, that is that inner call, comes to me.
[16:32] John 6, 37. We're speaking in a metaphor that has always been cherished by his people.
[16:43] I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and they know me. I have other sheep, not of this fold, that's us.
[16:54] I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me.
[17:05] I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will pluck them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, given them to me, is greater than all, and no one, no one, is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand.
[17:23] John 10. As Thomas Brooks assures us, Christ is to be answerable for all those that are given to him at the last day.
[17:36] And therefore, we need not doubt, but that he will certainly employ all the power of his Godhead to secure and save all those that he must be accountable for.
[17:53] Taking in this scriptural panorama of testimony, little wonder that God is called the God of all grace, 1 Peter 5 10.
[18:05] And Christ's gospel described as grace upon grace. John 1 16. Yes, little wonder that he and his gospel are so called.
[18:20] Ah, but great wonder that it is so. So we have seen that it is God who overcomes our resistance to his saving purpose and that he does so infallibly.
[18:35] let us now consider our second question, how does he do so? How is it that he prevailingly draws his elect?
[18:50] Well, we note in passing, though it is the inner call that is decisive, God does not dispense with the outer call of the gospel. He brings the message of Christ to all that he saves.
[19:05] Because salvation exalts the Son. And God, it would seem, will save no one apart from their confession of faith in Christ.
[19:16] Jesus is Lord. That exalts the Son. God the Father will not forgo that means. God will direct Philip into the desert at noon to reach the Ethiopian.
[19:27] God will push Peter to overcome ethnic prejudice to reach the Gentile Cornelius. He will send his disciples to the uttermost parts of the end of the earth to declare the gospel and gather in every last one of his elect.
[19:49] But the how of our attention is the how of the inner call. And it is animated, our question is animated, not by petulant curiosity, but by a puzzling concern.
[20:04] For if our natural sinful wills are, as we have seen, inveterately and intransigently set against God and his gospel, how could they ever freely come to choose Christ?
[20:23] Do you see the paradox here, the tension? does God's prevailing drawing prevail only by forcing us against our will?
[20:38] Overpowering us in a way that does violence to our freedom? No, not at all.
[20:49] as Spurgeon assures, Christ never compelled any man to come to him against his will. If a man be unwilling to be saved, Christ does not save him against his will.
[21:04] Well, how then does God draw us? As Scotsman Ralph Erskine paradoxically put it, we are saved with full consent against our will.
[21:20] Full consent against our wills. What is meant is that a choice of Christ will always be against our old unrenewed will.
[21:36] But God by his spirit, his spirit's work, renews our wills. Or gives us a new will, such that they freely choose Christ with full consent.
[21:53] As Psalm 110.3 expresses it, your people will offer themselves freely on the day of your power. So we wrongly picture this process of drawing as dragging.
[22:11] Do not imagine, writes Spurgeon, that any man will go to heaven kicking and struggling all the way against the hand that draws him. Do not conceive that any man will be plunged in the bath of the Savior's blood while he is striving to run away from the Savior.
[22:30] As Richard Sibbes puts it, the Spirit does not force the soul, but strongly persuades the soul so that for all the world he would not be of any other mind.
[22:46] We might say the Spirit's drawing is compelling but not compulsion. Compelling but not compulsion.
[22:58] how the Spirit secretly works in our hidden inmost being to bring us from abhorring to adoring, we can neither see nor know.
[23:13] For, as Deuteronomy 29, 29 tells us, the secret things belong to the Lord our God. It is a deep mystery. but how in the visible apparent sense we are drawn to Christ, we can see and describe.
[23:36] Because the nature of our sinful illusions and evasions often come in a patterned weave, so also is there a common pattern to the Spirit's unweaving of them.
[23:56] Many sinners, blithely heedless of their sinful condition and alienation from the Creator, naively imagine all is well. What trouble could there be between us and God?
[24:10] Surely I'm as moral as the next man, and I dare say likely a bit better than many. If any have to worry, I'm not among them.
[24:22] some would even put God in the dock, the seat of the arraigned. With the life God has given me and plenty of others, He is the one who better give some answers and clear His name.
[24:40] This is often the self-righteous condition of the heart that the Holy Spirit encounters. And then, typically the first work of the Spirit is that of the conviction of sinfulness.
[24:58] The Spirit pulls back the concealing veil, revealing the cabinet of horrors that is the human heart.
[25:10] He rolls over the log, exposing beneath the defiling putrescence and rotting corruption of the heart's soil.
[25:22] Before this jarring revelation of our consuming cancer, we stand aghast. Suddenly, we feel the burden of sin, that it is such a load as could indeed sink us to hell.
[25:43] evil. This is often the first step of the Spirit's saving drawing. But it's only the first step in a longer journey, for it is characteristic of our remember Spurgeon's slippery fish, it is characteristic of our fallen race to respond to this revelation with moral resolution.
[26:08] I will reform my life. I will cease to do evil and commence to do good. And we set ourselves to self improvement and perhaps take up some moral cause, march for world peace, or even take up some religious devotion or deprivation.
[26:28] We pull up on our moral bootstraps determined to ascend. But soon we discover, very soon, if we have any perceptiveness, that goodness or the righteousness of God is not merely demanding, it is utterly out of reach.
[26:54] And this realization, the Holy Spirit imparts, implanting in the awakened, now demoralized heart, the sober clarity that we cannot save ourselves.
[27:07] us. As old Erskine rhymes it, rigid matter was the law, demanding brick, denying straw.
[27:18] Or good old John Barrage, sometimes missuscribed to John Bunyan, also named John. Run, John, work, the law commands, but finds me neither feet nor hands.
[27:31] And so by the illumination of the Spirit, the schooled heart confesses, not the labors of my hands can fulfill thy laws demands.
[27:49] Could my tears forever flow? Could my zeal no respite? No. All for sin could not atone. Thou must save.
[28:01] and thou alone. That was good toplity, as you well know. Ah, but where, where, for the convicted sinner, is there a fountain open for cleansing?
[28:18] Asks Zechariah 13. Now the Spirit sets forth Christ as the sinner's Savior, his death, as the sinner's substitute, his righteousness as the sinner's only robe.
[28:39] Spurgeon writes, echoing Bunyan's pilgrim, then comes the Holy Spirit and shows the sinner the cross of Christ, gives him eyes anointed with heavenly eye salve, and says, look yonder to the cross.
[29:01] That man died to save sinners. You feel you are a sinner. He died to save you. In this way, the Spirit gently draws the sinner to trust in Christ alone for her salvation.
[29:20] He brings the elect sinner to see the necessity, the reality, and the beauty of the Savior.
[29:32] And I think it plain to perceive that this is done compellingly, yet without compulsion. man is as much drawn willingly, writes Spurgeon, as if he were not drawn at all when he comes to Christ with full consent, with as much consent as if no secret influence had ever been exercised on his heart.
[30:02] Now, of course, apart from this all prevailing drawing, no woman or man would ever come at all. but he prevails. He prevails.
[30:14] So we've outlined a common pattern by which the Spirit draws the sinner to Christ. Now, we must be careful here not to rigidly insist that every sinner must be drawn in this very path, a misapprehension many good divines have made.
[30:36] Jonathan Edwards' experience of being drawn to Christ, for example, differed from this common path and typical Puritan morphology. And so rigidly had he been taught to expect God's saving dealings with sinners to proceed along these specific and precise lines that he long doubted the reality of his generation because it mismatched the prescribed pattern.
[31:03] pattern. He expected to hear first the stormy thunders of Mount Sinai and then hear in his heart the sweet consoling whispers of Calvary.
[31:17] But in his case, he was struck by a sense of the beauty and excellence of the Savior. A very different pattern in his case. So while the Holy Spirit's drawing of us often reflects a pattern, it is always particularized and personalized to our individual uniqueness.
[31:43] And just as with our sin, there is both commonality and uniqueness, all we like sheep have gone astray.
[31:55] Commonality. Each one has gone our own way. Uniqueness. But just with our sin, both commonality and uniqueness, so with our salvation.
[32:09] There is a common pattern, but also a unique particularity to the Holy Spirit's drawing. This particularization of the Spirit's drawing of each one of the elect should not be a surprise to us.
[32:27] Ah, but it should always be a wonder. Always a wonder. Each son of Adam and each daughter of Eve is their own unique person.
[32:40] And the entrance to their hearts has its singular lock. lock, a lock, the countless tumblers of which have fallen from the lathe of life's unique experiences, nurture, and hammered out upon their unique genetic inheritance, nature.
[33:04] Together, an unfathomably intricate creation. Such is the heart of each one of us.
[33:17] Who indeed could fathom to open its lock? Who could possess the knowledge to be the heart whisperer?
[33:30] Ah, the psalmist answers this question. Oh, Lord, you have searched me and know me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up, you discern my thoughts from afar.
[33:48] You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all of my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, oh, Lord, you know it all together.
[34:04] Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain to it. For you formed by inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb.
[34:18] My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance.
[34:32] In your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me. What is yet? There was none of them.
[34:44] Psalm 139. Not only does our creator know our heart, but he forms them. He forms them.
[34:55] As the psalmist marveled, God formed every one of our days that formed us. So, when God turns our hearts like channels of water in his hands, that's not simply at some critical culminating moment.
[35:15] That's all along life's way, in every detail. So, of course, the Spirit of God has the key to our heart's lock.
[35:31] He intimately fashioned the lock. He is the architect. many a saint has seen him pictured in the words of Solomon's song.
[35:44] My beloved put his hand to the latch and my heart was thrilled in me. Song of Solomon 5.4.
[35:57] And each saint has had their own latch, which, when the Spirit opens, their heart thrills. Boniface, after whom this church was once named, in the 8th century, stood and declared the gospel among Germanic warriors, claiming that Christ had more power than their deity Thor, the god of thunder and lightning.
[36:29] Boniface cutting down the mighty sacred oak to Thor in demonstration of that claim. And when Thor proved impotent to respond with lightning and thunder, their hearts melted and they turned to Christ.
[36:44] Christ. But for other warriors, it was not Christ's strength that won their hearts.
[36:55] It was his scars. For they had known and been forever scarred by the whore of the trenches of World War I. As one of them expressed, the other gods were strong, but thou wast weak.
[37:14] They rode, but thou didst stumble to a throne. But to our wounds only God's wounds can speak.
[37:27] And not a god has wounds, but thou alone. Edward Chilito, Jesus of the Scars. Sometimes saints are drawn by a drawing or a painting, as was the case with King Boris of the Bulgars.
[37:46] Missionary Methodius painted a picture of Christ and the Last Judgment, which brought the king to conviction and repentance. Similarly, Count Zinzendorf had his heart latch opened before a painting of Christ.
[38:03] Ece Homo, Behold the Man by Domenico Feti. His depiction of Christ in his compassionate, self-sacrificing agony, accessed the Count's heart and melted it toward the Savior.
[38:22] One thinks of the head-hunting Sowie cannibals of New Guinea, impervious to missionary appeal until it was cast in terms of a redemptive analogy from their own ancient mythology, the Peace Child.
[38:41] If you don't know that story, Don Richardson, booked by the same title, The Peace Child. Unbelievable. Similarly, attests the late great African missiologist here of Yale, Laman Sane, of the gospel's progress in Africa, where the water of life came to them received from their own cultural vessels.
[39:08] Africans sensed in their hearts, writes Sane, that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred or their clamor for an invincible Savior. And so, when the gospel came to them, they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies.
[39:30] And not dissimilarly, but with its own uniqueness, upon Addison's walk at Magdalen College, Oxford, C.S. Lewis had the latch of his heart opened by the seeded thought that the gospel of Christ was the true myth behind all the resonant myths that have stirred the longings of people across time and the And finally, in a remote South American tribe, it was the practice to give children a secret name known only to their parents to guard them against the threat of curses, witchcraft, and spells.
[40:19] To one such child, the missionaries tell, Jesus revealed himself. As the child reported, Jesus called me by my secret name.
[40:42] Ah, shall we not confess with the psalmist, O Lord, you know me. In all these and in every saint, the spirit is the divine locksmith of the human heart, the great drawer and wooer of the elect, each one of whom he infallibly knits to Christ through the inner call of the gospel.
[41:22] On what grounds can sinners be so knitted to a holy God? God's elect are brought because God's elect are bought.
[41:40] The spirit procures what the son has purchased. Christ. And it is this purchase with which we are bought which we shall take up our attention, which shall take up our attention in the next session when our good brother Tyler will address us on that topic.
[42:04] I'll end there and open it up for any questions or comments. We're praising Thanksgiving. Yes.
[42:21] Can you say it's the left, right? The left is all that also those things. yes. Well, the way we discover God's choice is we respond to the outer call of the gospel.
[42:39] So we don't, Judy, try to discern our election in terms of God's secret choice.
[42:51] So those are the secret things of the Lord. What we do, Judy, is when the gospel word comes to us, all the elect trust Christ and repent of their sins.
[43:03] So that's the outward manifestation of that inward work of the gospel. So our duty is not to discern our election. Our duty and delight and joy is to respond to the gospel and look to the Savior and come.
[43:18] I think what I'm thinking is that God wants none should perish. So I feel like all of us, He wants all to come to Him.
[43:30] That's what I want to do. Yes. Right. So there is, there are a couple of senses in which we can speak of God's desire or wanting.
[43:47] And there is a sense in which God wants all to come. In fact, He commands all to come. When Paul, in Acts 17, where he's talking to the Athenians, he says, God commands all everywhere to repent and come to Christ.
[44:11] So that is certainly the case. So there is God's desire and indeed God's command repent, that we all repent. So that is our duty.
[44:24] Alas, we find ourselves delectably devoted to our sinful ways. So apart from God working in our hearts to transform our desires from the delectable doings of darkness, for us delectable, to the love of the good, the true, the beautiful manifested in Christ, that's a work that He needs to do in our hearts.
[44:56] And He does for His elect, for those that He has chosen with an ancient, ancient love. Yeah, yeah, yes.
[45:08] I think it's really a divine history that you read out here. God is about the locksmith of our hearts and lumber in the parts.
[45:24] He knows the keys to our hearts, the very fabric of the shape of who we are and yet the scripture also describes in this process of searching our hearts, timing and on our thoughts, discerning the thoughts and attention to the heart.
[45:45] That's what the Word of God is doing in us. And so I just wanted to put these two together, I guess, in a way. So there's a process of Him transforming us and looking into our hearts and also knowing our hearts.
[46:02] I just wanted to hear what you want to say about that. So say a little bit more, Richard. Putting together the fact that He changes our hearts, but He's also asking us to look into them and join with Him in that process of having those hearts changed.
[46:21] Sorry, I meant He looks into our hearts, knows the searching. Yes, yes. And then there's also how to form our hearts.
[46:33] Yes, yes, yes. I think in Psalm 139, which you are making reference there too, when at the end you say, search me and know me and see if there be any harmful or wicked way in me.
[46:47] I think that it's based upon the psalmist's knowledge that I don't even really know myself. I don't know my own heart. You do.
[46:59] You know it intimately. so really for me to understand myself and my own heart, you need to reveal what is already clear to you because it's not clear to me.
[47:11] So it's an invitation to come and to search and to know and to convict. And it's something that is wonderfully fulfilled for each believer by the indwelling Holy Spirit.
[47:22] So the Spirit is able, indwelling in us, to have that ministry of both manifesting the character of Christ in us, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and all these things.
[47:35] But when we are wayward, then the Spirit changes his ministry of manifesting the image of Christ to convicting us that we are failing to do so.
[47:47] And he often uses scripture to do this. So he will, 2 Timothy 3.16 talks about scripture, and it's proper for instruction, reproof, correction, sorry, doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction, and righteousness.
[48:07] That kind of gives a pattern of how this doctrine. What's the way to go? Reproof, showing you if you've gotten of it, correction, getting you back on that path, and instruction of righteousness, keeping you on it.
[48:19] So then the Spirit then will work to do those things to make us aware of how we've gotten off the path, how to get back on, and how to stay on it. And that will then continue, then we go on walking in the light, and then that hopefully then will, that will, that as we respond, which ultimately we will as believers, that will continue to manifest.
[48:42] So that dynamic of searching us out and knowing and illuminating, I think it's fulfilled by the Holy Spirit in the New Covenant believers. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[48:53] I'm also, you mentioned this idea of it's compelling not compulsion, even Paul, I think, we seek to persuade men, like we seek to give reasons why you ought to come.
[49:08] And Jesus, I was talking this past week with Melissa, going for gentle and lowly, and the statement that Jesus makes, whoever comes to me, I will never pass by.
[49:19] Yeah. And it's like this emphatic, I will never, no, never, no, never cast out if you come to me. And it kind of eliminates all objections. Well, I'm too old. I will never cast you out.
[49:31] I've sinned against you. I will never cast you out. And so Jesus is giving an assurance that if you come to me, I'm not going to reject you. Yeah. And it's the same, it's this persuasion, persuasion that Jesus is giving us, but the spirit is also working it out.
[49:50] So it's a history, as what Richard described, that we're giving reasons, we're seeking to persuade, we're praying, Lord, would you draw your people out to yourself?
[50:02] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it's not that we don't give reasons, it's just that these things wouldn't be effectual apart from the working of the spirit to make them vivid and decisive in hearts.
[50:19] Yeah. John, can you open up a little bit more the difference, the way you contrast the petulant curiosity against Yeah.
[50:35] That was just, yeah. Yes, yes. So sometimes I think there is a very real question, it's not just, well, let's just try to figure this out because we're curious about this.
[50:46] There does seem to be a real challenge because the Bible addresses us as free individuals and yet if our wills are so adamantly set against God, how could we ever freely choose him.
[51:02] So that is genuinely puzzling and has been a difficulty for many. So that's that I wanted to explore. It's not that we're just trying to be curious about how these things are done.
[51:18] We are trying to preserve the coherence of two truths truths. That God unfailingly draws us and yet we have wills that are real and we make choices that are real.
[51:40] So those things I'm arguing can be held together and the Bible just juxtaposes these things together all the time.
[51:51] So we're confident that they can both be true and gloriously so simultaneously. what makes separate those things apart might be the presence or the actions of humility.
[52:08] Those two things in figuring out yes I think that that's good yeah that would be a good way to put it. Yeah. Yeah Richard.
[52:20] I was interested to hear what you have to say about Edwards because although I read in Murray's biography I didn't know that about Edwards.
[52:33] So Edwards so there was no lack in Edwards' day of preachers who had preached the law until the sinner felt the need for mercy and grace but that's not the way Edwards came to the Lord Jesus right.
[52:52] So what do you think what do you think of that should preachers preach the law until the sinner begs for mercy? Well I think that yes we certainly do preach the holiness of God the righteousness of God and his demands but along with that in one sense what we might call that is driving sinners to Christ by the terrors of the law God but I think alongside that you could also speak of the beauty of Christ his appeal the tenderness of his appeal why would you die come live choose life these sorts of things where there's along with the driving there's also a drawing so I think you could use those things simultaneously interestingly like Edwards you bring up Edwards we associate him with sinners in the hands of an angry
[53:53] God and rightly so as kind of a driving them to the terrors but probably the majority of his sermons are more of a drawing kind than a driving kind so I think that it should be a good mix and what will keep us faithful to that Richard I think is expositional preaching where we just preach the next three inches of the text whether that's drawing or driving or whatever and that'll be a good ratio that'll be a good ratio so I'm for all those because I think scripture is for all of those both the driving of the law and the drawing of the appeal does that make sense at all I think we'd probably best break team thanks so much and next week Tyler will be picking up and
[54:53] I wish that I could be there for that congratulations do!
[55:36] It was wonderful. It was wonderful. We didn't miss you.
[55:47] We had some really fun discussions. Good questions and that. And people had hung out for a long time. I said, we can dismiss.
[55:58] We can dismiss if we wanted. And a couple had to leave. But they hung out for a while. So it was a long time. And the food was good. Did I see if you didn't have a care earlier? Yes. Yes.
[56:09] She was at least here at some point. And you said, we'll be here for Thanksgiving. Or is this where you go on your couple's retreat?
[56:20] We will be here for Thanksgiving. Right after Thanksgiving. So the next Sunday, time with the other elder is going to just take my place. Because we're going to get away from here.
[56:32] Yes. All right. That's wild. Good to see you. I'm going to just need to move this back.
[57:08] And this will come along the side. She really knows how to do it. She sees it. Well, after about 25 minutes.
[57:22] Nick, I'm going to give this to you. Excellent. Great to meet you.