We love Him because he first loved us

We often hear today about people “making a decision” for Christ, as if we are the ones to move towards Him; we are the ones who initiate the contact. Is that true?

We like to believe two things:

- that we are completely free to make a decision for Christ or against Christ - in other words that we have free will; that no one is in any sense determining our actions; and

- we have the power to choose Christ. No one likes to think that they are so depraved that their natural inclination is for evil. In fact, at the very least we want to believe that whatever our inclination, we retain the power to choose Christ.

What does the Bible say? Because it really does not matter what I believe or what you believe; what matters is what God says to us.

Let's take the first of those statements; that I have free will. This is usually stated as the alternative to God having chosen what will happen to me before the beginning of time; in other words, it is either the case that I am completely free to decide what I do, or God is deciding the outcome of my life.

Charles Spurgeon said, "I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes – that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens – that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence – the fall of . . . leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche."

There is something extremely disturbing about the thought that God is in control of everything. Yes, we might feel the reassurance of knowing that God is in control when we are afraid, but we also have to face the fact that God is as much in control of the bad things that happen - tsunamis, famines, genocide, etc. - as the good. How do we deal with that?

John Piper tells us to look to the cross (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSSLLpVChng)

. We know that everything that happened to Jesus, who was perfectly innocent, was God-ordained. We also know that the greatest evil the world has ever seen - the crucifixion of God the Son - was the means of the triumph over evil. In the cross we see how God uses terrible evil to his glory. If we keep our eyes fixed on the cross, we can celebrate the fact that God is in control.

Now, let's look at the second point. We want to believe that we freely chose Christ, but is that really so? Arminians would say "yes". Even though the Bible speaks of God predestining us to be in Christ (see, for example, Romans 8:29-30), Arminians say what this means is that God looked down the tunnel of history, saw who would respond to Christ, and wrote those people's names in the book of life; the first step came from the person making the decision for Christ. Arminians believe, even though all of us are affected by original sin, we still have the capacity to make that first step towards Christ.

Calvinists, though, say we are incapable of making that decision, so damaged are we by original sin. They say that God did indeed decide who would be saved before the beginning of time. God took the first step by regenerating our hearts by the Holy Spirit, enabling us to respond to the gospel, something we could never have initiated by ourselves. This we see in Romans 3:9b-11: "No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God." We do not seek God because we cannot, but God in his great mercy, by his Holy Spirit, opens the eyes of our heart to see the beauty and truth of the gospel. And because God initiated our justification and sanctification we can be assured that we can never lose our salvation.