Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

This morning, I wanted to start a new series of messages that looks at some of the core truths of Christianity as taught by Jesus himself.

The reasoning behind this series is the fact that some Christians today either don’t know the foundational truths of the Christian faith or they have not wrestled with them enough.

We are called to work out our salvation with fear and trembling

for good reason.

You need to know with certainty what you believe because these things may have eternal consequences.

In my personal experience there is nothing that has created more awe and terror in my own heart than the doctrine of unconditional grace or what is traditionally known as unconditional election.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with those terms, it simply means that God sovereignly chooses who will be saved irrespective of any merit or foreknowledge of future choices.

When I first heard Christians talk about this, I could not believe people were okay with a God who chooses some people to be saved and failed to give that same opportunity to everyone.

I’m all about fairness and that seemed patently unfair.

So as a young Christian, I dove into the Bible and I was shocked to find that the root of this doctrine is found in the teachings of Christ not from some systematic theologian or the apostle Paul but from my beloved Jesus.

I recently heard this very interesting conversation between two young pastors and they were talking about the letters of Paul and one of them said, “I hate Paul and the things that he wrote because it’s created so much hurt and division in our world.”

Mind you, these were seminary grads, working in ministry who decided that they were above the teachings of one of the great apostles of the church.

What surprised me was the fact that they were unable to see the continuity between the teachings of Jesus Christ in the gospels and what is written in the rest of the New Testament.

Many people assume that these are doctrines that originated from Paul but as we’ll see today, the root of his teaching comes directly from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Body

We are going to focus in on verse 44.

There are two essential points to the doctrine of unconditional grace:

People are unable to come to Jesus of their own free will.

We are saved solely by the grace of God.

Over the centuries, there has been considerable debate over this topic and most of the arguments against this view try to preserve the freedom that people have to choose God by their own will and protect the fairness of God in dispensing equally the opportunity to respond to His offer of salvation.

So generally their argument boils down to the notion that God uses the preaching of the Gospel to give everyone a fair chance to exercise their free will so that people can then choose to be saved.

This all sounds great except for the fact that so much of what is written in the Scriptures is diametrically opposed to this view.

When you look at the setting of this passage, Jesus had just spent the entire day teaching and preaching and had just performed one of his greatest miracles, the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves of bread and two fish.

If there was ever a situation and a set of circumstances and the right preacher to give this crowd the optimal chance to exercise their free will and make a choice to put their faith in Christ, it would have been this very moment.

It doesn’t get any better than this.

Jesus has just given irrefutable proof that He is the bread of life, that whoever comes to him will never hunger and delivers this miracle as substantial evidence of that claim.

It’s a perfect setup for people to respond en mass expect for the fact that very few respond.

Jesus goes as far to tell the crowds, “You have seen me but yet you do not believe.”

From a ministry standpoint, Jesus had a very bad day which is something I can relate to.

I became a pastor during a time when altar calls were the thing.

Well one Easter Sunday, I got our church in San Diego all hyped up for a big evangelistic service.

We had a pretty large turnout and I had prepared what I thought was the best message of my young life and I delivered it perfectly and I was thinking in the back of my mind, there is going to be like 50 people running down to receive Jesus.

I gave the first invitation, and nothing.

I gave another invitation, nothing.

Later that night, one of our students called me and shared excitedly that he was able to lead his mother to Christ and I had to fake being happy because I was so disappointed that 49 other people didn’t do the same.

In stark contrast to my reaction, Jesus says calmly and confidently, “All that the Father gives me will come to me.

I have come not to do my will but the will of him who sent me.”

I’m sure that Jesus could have lightened up his message so that there would have been a much better response but He was confident that those with true faith would come to him regardless of how hard and difficult His message was.

He had the utmost confidence in the will of His Father.

When we say that people are unable to come to God of their own will what we are saying isn’t the fact that they don’t have the capacity or the potential to make that decision, what we are saying is that it is not within our human nature to choose eternal life in Christ.

Physically, cognitively, even intellectually, we have the ability to make that choice but there is something deeper within us that will not allow us to authentically make that choice.

Our very nature keeps us from receiving the bread of life because it’s something that we have no appetite for.

To give you an illustration, we know that in the animal kingdom there are carnivores and herbivores.

Lions and tigers can eat vegetables and fruit but they won’t even when it means death because by their nature, they have no appetite for these foods in the wild.

In the same way, mankind does not naturally have an appetite for true spiritual food even in the face of death.

And the evidence of this can still be found partially within the nature of those of us who say we believe.

Charles Spurgeon does a great job of breaking down human nature into it’s components and shows us how deeply fallen and unwilling we are to come to God:

When we think of the will of man, how many of us are willing to freely and joyfully submit to the demands of the gospel?

Who among us would be happy about giving up everything for the sake of the cross?

Let’s consider our moral conscience, we all know that we have sin but when is the last time we felt like our sin was egregious enough to warrant the eternal separation and judgment of God? It’s probably been a while.

Finally, let’s think about our affections, the things we love.

Very few of us love to read the Scriptures or to come to the church to worship and we are certainly are not knocking down the doors on Friday morning to come into the house of God to pray.

Now mind you, I’m describing Christians here and if we have such a difficult time coming to God, what in the world would make us think that a non-believer could choose to follow Christ of their own free will.

It’s utterly impossible.

In a place like San Francisco, it’s fashionable to think that people can freely choose Christ out of the plethora of spiritual choices out there but in all my time of talking with people who are trying to decide between what they consider to be equally valid options (Christianity, New Ageism, Zen Buddhism).

I have yet to hear of someone who has chosen Christ because the bottom line is that you don’t choose Christ, He chooses you!

In fact he says as much in , You did not choose me, but I chose you.

How many of us joyfully and cheerfully subit

So this begs the larger question.

If you are a Christian, how were you saved?

And If you are not a Christian, how do you know that you being saved?

All true believers that I have ever known have one common experience in respect to their salvation even though their lives and journey of faith may be very different.

The common denominator is that we all felt drawn by God and at times seemingly against our will.

Like a moth attracted to a beautiful light, we were drawn in by the beauty of God’s love, helpless to fight against it’s power, overwhelmed by the marvelous light that pierced through the darkness of our lives.

The Christians of old would say, we were irresistibly drawn by the grace of God.

In our English language, the idea of God drawing us to himself seems benign enough and it seems to leave enough space for us to exercise our own free will.

We might even assume that God draws me but the final decision is mine.

The Greek word used in this verse does not give us that same latitude because it literally means to attract powerfully or to drag against resistance.

In the Scripture, the verb is used to describe the dragging in of a net full of fish.

It’s used to describe hauling people to jail or drawing a sword from its scabbard.

In each of these cases, resistance is implied.

Fish don’t want to be dragged in, people don’t want to be hauled to jail, and the force of gravity keeps a sword from being drawn readily but in each case, the resistance is overcome.

NT scholar Leon Morris tells us that, “There is not one example in the New Testament of the use of this verb where the resistance is successful.

Always the drawing power is triumphant, as here.”

If not for the unconditional grace of God, there is no way that we would have believed in the first place, there is no way that we could remain faithful to God, and for those of us who have ever strayed away, there is no way that we would ever come back.

The words of the old hymn ring true.

Oh, to grace how great a debtor

Daily I'm constrained to be

Let that goodness like a fetter

Bind my wandering heart to Thee

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it

Prone to leave the God I love

Here's my heart, oh, take and seal it

Seal it for Thy courts above

Conclusion

Being chosen of God gives us some concrete blessings that Christians today generally struggle with

It provides a strong sense of identity because I have been chosen by God and I belong to Him

It gives us a sense of purpose.

I have been chosen for a reason for a destiny, to be co-heirs with Christ, to reign with Him for all of eternity, to stand together as a royal priesthood

It deepens gratitude for our salvation.

God did not choose us out of a pool of equally deserving candidates, that would make God unfair.

He chose us from a pool of equally undeserving sinners, condemned to perish with this world.

This makes God merciful and makes salvation completely dependent on his unconditional grace.

It reveals the depth and the mystery of his love.

When the apostle Paul says nothing can separate us the love of God, neither height, nor depth, not even death itself.

That would be a lie if our salvation depended on our own will because we could be separated from God’s love by something as fickle and arbitrary as your decision.

When God chooses you, He never lets you go.

As Jesus assures us, those who have been chosen by His Father, he will never cast out and he will not lose one single individual soul that has been given to Him.

Less than a generation ago, we sang songs like “Why have you chosen me out of millions, your child to be?”