Before God opened my Heart to the truth about the doctrines of grace, I always assumed that I was saved because I decided to commit myself to Christ and accept Him as Lord and savior. Along with that, I also assumed that God rewarded that decision by saving me by the new birth. In other words, I was Born Again because I chose to believe. I mean, after all, don’t we have to choose to be saved? Don’t we preach that sinners must take that first step? If we take the first step then the savior will take the rest, etc. I believed that was how Christians became Christians for most of my life.
About 40 years ago, I was teaching a Sunday school class made up of 9th and 10th grade boys. I cannot remember what the lesson was about, but for some reason we were discussing salvation….
I started with the fall of Adam and how that imputed unrighteousness to humankind. Then I shared the verses from Romans about Man’s utter helplessness in coming to salvation. This led to a discussion of the processes each of has to go through in order to be saved. One of my wiseacre boys asked the following question, “If we are helpless to save ourselves then how can we take the first step?” I had never been asked that before. I stumbled around it for a few minutes and said that that first step was not what saved us; it was our acceptance of Jesus as Lord and savior that saved us. I could tell they did not buy it. I even came up with the following doozie, “God does it this way so He can be glorified.” They stared at me as if I had worms crawling out of my ears. My next statement did not make sense even to me. I said, “When we obey God on our own initiative like that, then He is glorified.” Even my own conscience was yelling, “baloney” to me. <Continue reading post>