Understanding Effectual Grace in Reformed Theology

The idea of irresistible conjures up that one cannot possibly offer any resistance to the grace of God. Now beloved, the history of the human race is the history of relentless resistance by human beings to the sweetness of the grace of God. What is meant by irresistible grace is not what the word suggests, that it's incapable of being resisted. Indeed, we are capable of resisting God's grace, and we do resist God's grace. But the idea here is that in spite of our natural resistance to the grace of God that God's grace is so powerful that it has the capacity to overcome our natural resistance to it. [00:03:00]

In historic Reformation thought the notion is this: That regeneratio precedes faith. Now let me take a moment to explain a subtle nuance of this word. When we use the term precede, we're usually talking about something that comes before something else in time. That is, if something precedes something else in time, we say it has temporal priority. One thing comes and then after or later on the other thing follows from it. But when theologians talk with this language, you know we always have to make excuses for we theologians that are confusing to people, what is in view here in this formula with respect to what's called the order of salvation is what we call logical priority--logical priority. [00:04:53]

So when we talk about regeneration preceding faith, what this means is this: That before a person exercises saving faith, before they believe in Christ, before they exercise their wills to embrace Christ, God must do something for them and in them so that faith can be exercised. Now it's common in our culture and in our religious circles to say this: That in order for a person to be regenerated or to be reborn that all it takes in order to be reborn is to believe. [00:07:06]

John tells us the words of Jesus in the 6th chapter of John's Gospel where Jesus said, "Nobody can come to Me unless the Father draws him." And the way many Christians interpret that text is to say that the drawing has to do with God's external wooing, persuading, enticing, luring, whatever; and that God gives this drawing influence to many, many people. Some respond positively to this drawing; others say no to the drawing. So God draws everybody presumably with an equal persuasive power, and in the final analysis those who acquiesce to the drawing are saved, and those who do not acquiesce are lost. [00:09:20]

I said, "But how do you get water from a well. Do you stand up at the top of the well and call down, 'Here, water, water, water?' Do you try to woo it, entice it, or lure it, or do you have to go down with a bucket and pull it out?" I said, "I'm perfectly happy with the illusion to getting water out of a well, because that's what God does with us. We're buried in the water, and we need to be drawn out by somebody else's power, not by our own." [00:12:19]

Is our condition of bondage to sin so serious and the fall so severe that we have no more moral desire for God unless God plants that desire in our hearts? Now, Jesus put it this way to Nicodemus. "Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." He cannot enter the kingdom of God. What we hear our Lord saying in that discussion with Nicodemus where he says, "That which is born of the flesh is flesh," and that "the flesh profits nothing." [00:13:14]

But God who is rich in mercy because of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in trespasses made us alive together with Christ." And then parenthetically, "By grace you have been saved, and raised up together and made to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ." And then again in verse 8, "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves." Again the immediate antecedent of the "that" is faith. "It is the gift of God." [00:15:02]

It is not that the Holy Spirit drags people kicking and screaming against their will to come to Christ, but what the Holy Spirit does do is change the inclination and disposition of our hearts so that when we were previously unwilling to embrace Christ, now we are willing, and more than willing. Indeed, we aren't dragged to Christ, we run to Christ, and we embrace Him joyfully because the Spirit has changed our hearts. [00:16:06]

And that heart is no longer a heart of stone that is impervious to the commands of God and to the invitations of the Gospel, but God melts the hardness of our hearts when He makes us new creatures that when we're dead, the Holy Spirit resurrects us from spiritual death, so that I come to Christ because I want to come to Christ. But the reason I want to come to Christ is that because God has already done a work of grace in my soul. [00:16:44]

We also believe in Reformation thought that regeneration is monergistic. Now that word's a three-dollar word--monergistic. And what it means essentially is this, that in this divine operation called rebirth or regeneration, it is the work of God in the human soul and the work of God alone. Erg is a unit of labor, a unit of work. The word energy comes from that idea. Mono means one. And so monergism means one working--that the work of regeneration in my heart is something that God does by His power, not by 50% His power and 50% my power or 99% His power and 1% my power, but by 100% the work of God. [00:17:30]

He, and He alone, has the power to change the disposition of the soul and of the human heart to bring us to faith. And when He exercises this grace in the soul, He brings about the effect that He intends to bring about by it. When God creates you in the first place He brought you into existence. You didn't help Him. It was His sovereign work that brought you to life biologically. When He brings you to spiritual life salvifically it is His work, and His alone, that brings you into that state of rebirth and of renewed creation. [00:18:31]

Is our salvation wholly of God, or does it ultimately depend on something that we do for ourselves? Those who say the latter as the Arminians later did thereby deny man's utter helplessness in sin and affirm that a form of semi-Pelagianism is true after all. It is no wonder, then, the authors say, that later Reformed theology condemned Arminianism as being in principle a return to Rome--because in effect it turned faith into a meritorious work--and a betrayal of the Reformation because it denied the sovereignty of God in saving sinners, which was the deepest religious and theological principle of the Reformers' thought. [00:20:01]