How to Answer Arminianism and Pelagianism

The One Question Underneath

When a sinner is saved, who makes the difference between him and the man beside him who stays lost? Pelagianism and Arminianism give one answer. Scripture gives another.

This is not a quarrel for scholars. It shapes how you pray for your children, how you tell a friend about Christ, what you trust in when you doubt, and who gets the praise on the last day. Paul put the whole question in one line.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?

1 Corinthians 4:7 (KJV)

Paul wrote those words to humble Corinthians who were puffed up over their favorite teachers (1 Corinthians 4:6). He was not settling the debate this page is about. But the principle he lays down reaches further than Corinth. Whatever we have, we received. This page applies that principle to the greatest gift of all.

This page sets out each view fairly, answers it from Scripture and the Westminster Standards, and then turns to practice. How to talk with a brother who disagrees, what not to overcorrect into, where these errors hide in churches today, and where they hide in your own heart.

What Pelagius Taught

Pelagius was a British monk who came to Rome around the year 400. He was grieved by the loose living of professing Christians, and he blamed it on teaching that made men think they could not obey. When he heard a bishop quote Augustine’s prayer, Give what thou commandest, and command what thou wilt, he could not bear it. To him that prayer made men lazy. If God commands it, he reasoned, man must be able to do it.

From there he and his followers, Celestius and later Julian of Eclanum, taught these things.

1. Adam’s sin hurt only Adam, and his children only by a bad example. No guilt and no corruption pass down to us.
2. Every baby is born as Adam was made, innocent and able to choose good or evil.
3. A man can keep God’s law by his own will if he will only try. Some have lived without sin.
4. Grace means outward helps. The gift of free will, the law, the teaching and example of Christ, and the pardon of past sins. It is not a power within that changes the heart.

Augustine answered him in book after book. The church condemned Pelagianism at the Council of Carthage in 418 and again at the general Council of Ephesus in 431. It is one of the oldest heresies the church has named, and it has never stayed buried.

Answering Pelagianism

We fell in Adam, not only like him

Paul does not say we sin because we copy Adam. He says Adam’s one sin made us sinners.

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

Romans 5:19 (KJV)

Look at the two halves together. If Adam only set a bad example, then Christ only set a good one, and we are saved by copying him. Pelagius loses the gospel the moment he loses the fall. Paul also says death reigned even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression (Romans 5:14). Infants die. They have copied no one. David confessed that his sin went back further than his choices. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity (Psalm 51:5).

They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed; and the same death in sin, and corrupted nature, conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.

Westminster Confession of Faith 6.3

A dead man needs life, not an example

Scripture does not say we are weak or sick. It speaks of those who were dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1). Pelagius offers a drowning man a book on how to swim. Christ goes down into the water and brings up the body and breathes into it. The carnal mind is enmity against God, Paul says, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8:7-8).

Ought does not mean can

This was Pelagius’s strongest argument, so answer it carefully. God commands every man to love him with all his heart. Does that prove every man is able? No. A man who has wasted his master’s money still owes the debt, though he cannot pay it. His inability is his own fault, so it does not cancel his duty.

Our inability is not like a man with no legs who wants to walk and cannot. It is like a man who hates the road and will not walk it. Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life (John 5:40). Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil (Jeremiah 13:23). God gives the law to stop every mouth and to show us our sin, for by the law is the knowledge of sin (Romans 3:20). The law sends us to Christ. It was never a ladder.

If we could, Christ died for nothing

For if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain (Galatians 2:21). If a man can keep the law by trying, the cross was a tragedy and not a rescue. Augustine’s prayer was right after all. God commands what we cannot do so that we will ask him for it, and then he gives what he commands. It is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure (Philippians 2:13).

The Halfway House

After Pelagius was condemned, some monks in southern France tried a middle road. John Cassian and others taught that man is not dead in sin but badly sick. Grace is needed to finish salvation, but a sinner can often take the first step on his own. He can want to be healed, and God then helps him. Later writers called this Semi-Pelagianism.

The Council of Orange in 529 rejected it. The council taught that even the beginning of faith, and the very desire to believe, is a gift of grace and not something in us by nature. Scripture agrees. No man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father (John 6:65). Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, Jesus told Peter, but my Father which is in heaven (Matthew 16:17).

Most people who have never heard the word live in this halfway house. You will hear it in sayings like these. God has done ninety nine percent and you must do the last one. God votes for you, the devil votes against you, and you cast the deciding vote. They sound humble, but they leave the hinge of salvation in the sinner’s hand.

What Arminianism Teaches

Be fair here, because many who hold this view love Christ. Jacob Arminius was a Dutch pastor and later a professor at Leiden. He had studied at Geneva under Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor. He died in 1609. The next year his followers set out their views in five articles called the Remonstrance.

1. Conditional election. God chose to save those he foresaw would believe in Christ and keep believing.
2. Universal atonement. Christ died for every man, gaining forgiveness for all, though only believers actually receive it.
3. Man needs grace. Fallen man cannot of himself think, will, or do any saving good. He must be born again by God in Christ through the Spirit.
4. Resistible grace. Grace begins, carries on, and finishes all good in us, but a man can refuse it to the end.
5. Uncertain perseverance. The Remonstrants first said it needed more study whether a true believer could fall away. Their followers soon said he could.

A century later John Wesley taught that God gives every person a prevenient grace, a grace that goes before. It does not save anyone, but it lifts the fallen will enough that each man can accept Christ or refuse him.

Arminians do not all say the same thing. Wesleyans make much of prevenient grace. Some, often called Reformed Arminians, hold that a believer can be lost only by turning from Christ in unbelief. Others hold that God chose the church as a body in Christ rather than choosing persons. Many Baptists believe in conditional election and still hold that a true believer cannot be lost. What follows answers what these views share, that the sinner’s response is what finally decides. It does not claim every one of them is built the same way.

Notice the third article. Arminians are not Pelagians. Most believe in the fall, in man’s need of grace, in Christ’s death in the place of sinners, and in justification by faith. Wesley preached Christ to coal miners in the open air. Do not paint an Arminian brother as a heretic.

But see where the hinge falls. In this view grace makes salvation possible for all, and the sinner’s own choice makes it actual for some. Grace is needed, but it does not decide. So when you ask why one man believed and his neighbor did not, the final answer is something in the man. That is where Paul’s principle in 1 Corinthians 4:7 presses hardest, and that is why the Reformed churches could not let it pass.

How the Church Answered

The Dutch churches called the Synod of Dort, which met in 1618 and 1619, with delegates from Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. It answered the five articles of the Remonstrance point by point. Those answers are what people now call the five points of Calvinism. They were never meant to be the whole Reformed faith. They are a reply to five errors about how God saves. A generation later the Westminster Confession taught the same things in its own words.

Here they are, answered from Scripture, in the order the Remonstrants raised them.

God chose freely, not by foreseen faith

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,

Ephesians 1:4-5 (KJV)

He chose us that we should be holy, not because he saw we would be. And the cause is the good pleasure of his will. Paul says the same of Jacob and Esau, chosen before they were born, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that calleth (Romans 9:11). So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy (Romans 9:16). If election hung on foreseen faith, Paul would have said so here. It would have answered every objection he raises in Romans 9 in one sentence.

Luke gives the order plainly. As many as were ordained to eternal life believed (Acts 13:48). He does not say as many as believed were ordained.

Arminians point to Romans 8:29, For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate. But notice the word whom. God foreknew persons, not their choices. In Scripture to know often means to set your love on someone. God said to Israel, You only have I known of all the families of the earth (Amos 3:2). He knew about every nation. He had chosen only one. And if God only looked ahead and saw who would believe, then he did not really choose anyone. He only noticed.

Faith itself is a gift

The Arminian says God chose those who would believe. But where does the believing come from? For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake (Philippians 1:29). Faith is given. If God gives the faith, he cannot have chosen us because of the faith he planned to give.

Christ died to save, not to make salvation possible

The angel did not say Jesus would make salvation available. He said, he shall save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). Christ said, I lay down my life for the sheep (John 10:15), and then he told some who stood there, ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep (John 10:26). On the night before he died he said, I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me (John 17:9).

That verse is about his prayer that night, so do not lean on it alone. But dying and praying are two parts of one priestly work. The high priest offered the sacrifice and then carried the names of the tribes in before God. Christ by his own blood entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12), and he ever liveth to make intercession for them that come unto God by him (Hebrews 7:25). He died that they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance (Hebrews 9:15). So it is a fair question, drawn from his whole work as priest. Would he shed his blood for those he would not bring by name before the Father?

Paul builds assurance on this very point. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died (Romans 8:34). If Christ died for every man, and many men are condemned, that argument falls apart. If Christ paid for the sins of a man who is in hell, then God punishes the same sins twice. If you answer that the man is punished for his unbelief, then ask whether Christ paid for that sin too. The Arminian cross makes salvation possible for everyone and certain for no one.

The Reformed churches have never said Christ’s death is too small. It is of infinite worth, enough for the whole world. And Christ is to be freely offered to every sinner who hears. The question is not how much his blood is worth. It is what he meant to do when he shed it, and whether he did it.

The Spirit’s call raises the dead

Men do resist the Holy Ghost. Stephen said so (Acts 7:51). Every sinner resists the outward call of the gospel for as long as he is left to himself. But God promised more than an offer.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

Ezekiel 36:26-27 (KJV)

Read the verbs. I will give, I will take away, I will put, and cause you to walk. There is no perhaps in it. Jesus said the same.

No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:44 (KJV)

Everyone who is drawn in that verse is raised up at the end. So the drawing is not a grace given to all that many refuse. It brings the sinner all the way home.

Arminians answer with John 12:32, I will draw all men unto me. Read the verses before it. Greeks had just come asking to see Jesus (John 12:20-21). He says the cross will draw not only Jews but men of every nation. And Scripture never describes Wesley’s prevenient grace, a grace that lifts every man halfway and leaves the last step to him. It shows us Lydia, whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul (Acts 16:14).

This is not God dragging a man against his will. It is God giving him a new will. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power (Psalm 110:3).

Those he saves, he keeps

If salvation hung on my will at the start, it would hang on my will to the end, and I would fall. But Christ says of his sheep, they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand (John 10:28). He that hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6). Believers are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation (1 Peter 1:5).

Paul’s golden chain has no missing links.

Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.

Romans 8:30 (KJV)

No one drops out between called and glorified. The warnings in Hebrews are real, and they are one of the means God uses to keep his people running. They are not a sign that he will let go. See Kept to the End.

What Free Will Really Is

The Reformed faith does not say man has no will, or that he is a puppet. Every man chooses what he most wants. Nothing outside him forces him. The trouble is inside. His wants are bent away from God, so he will not choose God.

Man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so as, a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto.

Westminster Confession of Faith 9.3

The Confession traces the will through four estates. Adam in innocence was free to do good and able to fall. Fallen man still makes real choices, and he can do things that are outwardly good. He can love his children, keep his word, and serve his town. But apart from God’s grace he cannot choose any spiritual good that goes with salvation. Even his best deeds do not come from a heart made clean by faith, so they cannot please God or earn his favor (WCF 16.7). The converted man is freed to do good, though sin still clings to him. The saint in glory will be free to do good alone and never fall again (WCF 9.2-5). Notice that the freest will of all, in heaven, cannot choose evil. Freedom in Scripture is not standing in the middle of the road with equal power to go either way. It is being made what you were meant to be. Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed (John 8:34, 36).

The “All” and “World” Verses

Arminians lean on a handful of verses with the word all or world in them. Take them seriously. Every word in them is true. The question is what each word means where it stands, and you settle that the way you settle any word, by its context. This is not a question of literal or figurative. It is the plain meaning in its own setting. How to Read the Bible Rightly says more.

1. World does not always mean every person. When the Pharisees said, behold, the world is gone after him (John 12:19), they did not mean every human being. That only shows the word can be used more than one way. It does not settle what it means in a given verse. For that, look at the verses themselves.
2. Read John 3:16 with Nicodemus. Jesus was speaking to a teacher of Israel, and the Jews of that day looked for God’s mercy to rest on Israel. God so loved the world tells him it reaches past Israel to sinners of every people. The wonder is also in what the world is, a world in rebellion against its Maker. And the very next verses divide that world into two. He that believeth on him is not condemned, Jesus says, but he that believeth not is condemned already (John 3:18). Reformed teachers read this verse as God’s love for the world in its sin and in its breadth, and as a sincere call to whosoever believeth.
3. Read 1 John 2:2 with John 11. John says Christ is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. John used almost the same words once before. Caiaphas prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation, And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad (John 11:51-52). There the whole world beyond Israel means God’s children scattered among the nations.
4. Ask what propitiation means. A propitiation does not merely make it possible for God’s wrath to be turned away. It actually turns it away. If Christ was in that sense the propitiation for every person who ever lived, then wrath is turned away from people who will still bear it. Read the way John 11 suggests, the verse holds together. Christ’s death turns away God’s wrath from his people in every nation, not from John’s first readers only.
5. Look at who is addressed. 2 Peter 3:9 says God is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish. Peter wrote to them that have obtained like precious faith (2 Peter 1:1). God delays the end so that all his people will be brought in.
6. Look at the verses around it. 1 Timothy 2:4 says God will have all men to be saved. Paul had just told Timothy that prayers be made for all men, and then he named some of them. For kings, and for all that are in authority (1 Timothy 2:1-2). He means men of every rank, even the rulers who persecute the church.
7. Hold God’s sincere call as well. As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). Reformed teachers have always held that God’s plea to sinners is real, and that he takes no delight in their ruin. His command and his plea go out to all. His secret decree is his own (Deuteronomy 29:29). Do not let a system make you mute where Scripture pleads.

Questions People Ask

Doesn’t that make us robots?

No. A robot does not want anything. A believer comes to Christ wanting to come, more willingly than he ever did anything. God does not go around the will. He changes it. Paul tells you to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, and in the same breath says it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do (Philippians 2:12-13). Both are true at once.

Isn’t it unfair?

Fairness would send us all to hell. No one in hell will be there for want of being chosen. He will be there for sins he loved. God wrongs no one by showing mercy to some. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy (Romans 9:15). If God Chooses, Is He Fair? takes up this question at length.

Then why evangelize?

Because God saves through preaching. How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? (Romans 10:14). When Paul was afraid in Corinth, the Lord told him to keep speaking, for I have much people in this city (Acts 18:10). Election was the reason he stayed. If salvation hung on how persuasive you are, you would be crushed. Since it hangs on God, you can speak boldly and leave the result to him.

Then why pray?

Listen to an Arminian pray for his lost son. He does not ask God to make salvation possible for the boy. He asks God to save him, to open his eyes and change his heart. On his knees he prays like a Calvinist. Keep praying exactly that way. God has bound himself to work through the prayers of his people.

Is an Arminian My Brother?

How to Spot Real Heresy sorts disagreements into heresy, serious error, and differences among the faithful. Here is where these views fall.

1. Pelagianism is heresy. It denies original sin and our need of inward grace, and it makes Christ an example instead of a Savior. The church has condemned it for sixteen centuries. A man who teaches it, knowingly, after patient correction, is not preaching the gospel.
2. Semi-Pelagianism was condemned at Orange, because it puts the start of salvation in man. It is a deep error that leans hard toward the first.
3. Arminianism is a serious error. It touches the doctrine of grace itself, so it weighs more than a difference over church government. The Synod of Dort removed Remonstrant ministers from their pulpits, and the Westminster Confession denies its points one by one. But an Arminian who rests on Christ alone for his justification has not denied the gospel. He is inconsistent, and happily so. His heart and his prayers are often better than his system.

Some who began as Arminians have gone further. Open theism teaches that God does not know what men will freely choose tomorrow. That is no longer a question about grace. It is a different God from the one who declares the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10). Do not lump an ordinary Arminian believer in with that.

Remember the history. George Whitefield and John Wesley quarreled sharply over these very doctrines, and Whitefield did not back down. Yet he asked that Wesley preach his funeral sermon, and Wesley did. Charles Spurgeon could say Calvinism is the gospel and nothing else, and still honor Wesley’s holiness and count many Arminians as dear children of God.

How to Talk With an Arminian Friend

In 1784 a young Charles Simeon met the aged John Wesley. Simeon asked him whether he felt himself so depraved that he would never have turned to God if God had not first put it into his heart. Wesley said yes. Whether he looked for salvation only through the blood and righteousness of Christ. Yes, solely through Christ. Whether he was to save himself afterward by his own works. No, he must be saved by Christ from first to last. Whether he was upheld every moment by God, as an infant in its mother’s arms. Yes, altogether. Then Simeon said, in effect, that this was all his Calvinism, and that they should rejoice in what they shared.

Simeon did not give up the doctrine. He showed Wesley that his heart already held it. That is the best way to begin.

1. Find out what he means. Many Christians say free will and mean only that they really chose and were not forced. You agree. Ask before you argue.
2. Start with what you share. Christ’s deity, his death in our place, his rising, justification by faith. Say it out loud. It changes the temperature.
3. Ask Simeon’s questions. Would you have come to God if he had not first moved your heart? Will you keep yourself to the end, or must he keep you?
4. Ask how he prays. Do you thank God for your faith? If you supplied it, why thank him? When you pray for a lost friend, what exactly do you ask God to do?
5. Ask the hard question gently. You and your friend heard the same gospel. You believed and he did not. Why? Were you wiser, humbler, or more willing than he? Most believers will not say yes. That refusal is the doctrine of grace in seed form.
6. Open one passage together. John 6:35-65 is the best place to start. Read it slowly and ask what each verse says about who comes and why.
7. Be patient. Many Reformed believers were Arminians first, and it took them years. The servant of the Lord must not strive, Paul says, but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient (2 Timothy 2:24). He corrects in hope, if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth (2 Timothy 2:25). If you believe God opens hearts, you have no need to force one open.
8. Do not lead with it to an unbeliever. A lost man needs Christ crucified, not the five points. Tell him to come, and tell him Christ will not cast him out.

How to Disagree With a Brother has more on doing this well.

Do Not Overcorrect

There is a ditch on the other side of the road. Hyper-Calvinism says we must not call every sinner to repent and believe, or that a man needs some sign he is chosen before he may come. That is not the Reformed faith. The Confession says God freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ (WCF 7.3). God now commandeth all men every where to repent (Acts 17:30). Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth (Isaiah 45:22). Spurgeon fought the hyper-Calvinists of his day as hard as he fought the Arminians.

There is another ditch, the proud Calvinist. Some men learn the doctrines of grace and become the least gracious men in the church. That is a sad contradiction. If you really believe you added nothing to your salvation, you have nothing to sneer about. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth (1 Corinthians 8:1). A man who boasts in sovereign grace has not yet understood it.

Where It Hides Today

Few churches today would call themselves Pelagian, but its ideas are everywhere.

1. Moralism. God helps those who help themselves. Good people go to heaven. Be a better person and God will be pleased. That first saying is not in the Bible. God is the one that justifieth the ungodly (Romans 4:5).
2. Revival by technique. Charles Finney, the great revivalist of the 1800s, denied that we inherit a sinful nature from Adam. He preached a sermon titled Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts, and he taught that a revival is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means. In plain words, use the right methods and you will get converts. Many of the methods he spread are still used, and so is the belief behind them.
3. Decisionism. Calling sinners to come to Christ now is right. Now is the day of salvation (2 Corinthians 6:2). But telling a man he is saved because he walked an aisle or repeated a prayer puts his assurance in his act, not in Christ. Point him to Christ, and let the fruit show over time.
4. Pressure. Pleading is biblical. We pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20). Working on people’s feelings with music and repetition until hands go up is not. If the Spirit gives new birth, you do not need to manufacture it.
5. Half truths. God has done all he can, and now it is up to you. Jesus is a gentleman and will not force himself on anyone. There is a grain of truth here, since God does not drag the unwilling. But he can make the unwilling willing, and he does.

When you hear these things, do not storm out. Test them by Scripture, speak to your elders, and remember that the people saying them often mean well. See How to Spot a False Teacher for when the problem goes deeper.

The Pelagian in Your Own Heart

Pelagianism is a system of doctrine, and no baby is born holding a system. But the fallen heart naturally wants to take credit for its own righteousness. Its religion is always do and live. Even a man who confesses sovereign grace can fall into Pelagian ways of thinking, and he can live as if his standing with God rose and fell with his performance. Watch for these signs in yourself.

1. Your assurance goes up on good days and down on bad ones. Then you are resting on yourself, not on Christ.
2. You look down on weaker believers. The Pharisee thanked God that I am not as other men are (Luke 18:11), and went home unjustified.
3. You secretly think you were wiser to believe. Go back to 1 Corinthians 4:7.
4. You pray little. A man who thinks he can manage does not cry for help.
5. You despair after a fall. If your salvation rested on you, despair would make sense. It does not, so get up and go to Christ again.

The cure is not to try less. It is to know where your strength comes from. Paul worked harder than all the apostles, and then he caught himself.

But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

1 Corinthians 15:10 (KJV)

Salvation Is of the Lord

Jonah learned it in the belly of a fish. Salvation is of the Lord (Jonah 2:9). Not mostly of the Lord with a little help. Of the Lord. That is why the doctrines of grace are not cold. They mean the Father chose you, the Son died for you by name, and the Spirit raised you when you were dead. They mean you will be kept, because the one who began the work does not quit. And they mean every crown in heaven gets thrown at his feet.

Charles Wesley, John’s brother and an Arminian too, could not help singing it. In his hymn And Can It Be, his spirit lay “fast bound in sin and nature’s night” until God’s eye shone into the cell. “I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.” Then “my chains fell off, my heart was free.” That is not a man who decided. That is a prisoner God set loose.

If you are not sure you are chosen, do not start there. Start with Christ’s open door.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

John 6:37 (KJV)

No one ever came to him and found the door shut. The gospel tells you how to come today, and How God Saves Sinners sets out the doctrines of grace in brief.