Cheryl Schatz

Mark,
You said:

I have agreed with you all along that we are all called to seek after God. But how can we as sinners.

God gives us all common grace to seek after God. He has promised everyone that if we seek for Him with all of our heart we will find Him. If this was impossible then it would make God a liar. The fact is that God wants all to seek Him so He enables all who will fear God and seek Him.

Again Romans 3 says none seeks after God.

But again I mentioned that Romans 3 is a quote from the OT where the context is the fool who says there is no God. Paul would not illegally use an OT quote to mean the opposite of what God inspired as Paul supported Scripture. He did not twist Scripture to his own use.

God demands that we seek him, but in our sinfulness we don’t.

There is a huge difference between we “don’t” and we “can’t”. The fact is that God enables us to do what He longs us to do and if we don’t it isn’t because we can’t. Many have repented and feared God and went on seeking Him. That is God’s empowerment. Otherwise it really makes God out to be one who really doesn’t mean what He says.

Joh 6:65 And he said,…

We will get to this shortly as we will be going through John 6 so I will leave it for now.

Matt 13:11-17 is very similar to John 6 so I will deal with that shortly when we start talking about John 6 verse by verse.

A few important things here. He spoke in parables so people WOULD NOT understand, lest they turn.

Again this all relates to John 6. Just hold on a little bit longer and we will deal with this together.

Here is my conviction because you seem confused. Saving faith is a gift therefore faith is not a work. When we deny that saving faith is a gift, then we make it into a work. See the difference? Faith becomes a work for those who reject it as a gift of God.

We could say that a house is a dwelling place therefore it is a gift. I would say that a house is not a gift and you say that if I deny that a house is a gift then I must be denying it is a dwelling place. Your words are not logical and using this kind of reasoning doesn’t convince anyone. How about we stick to the Scriptures and use it to defend our view.

So here is the deal. Calvin said that there would be those who would be given faith but not saving faith and God gives them this faith in order to condemn them. So please show me this kind of “faith” in the Scriptures that is not saving faith and since it is apparently not saving faith, please show me where the Scriptures calls faith as “works”. I will be waiting with baited breath.

Semi-pelagianism was condemned, that is reality. It denied that our salvation was fully the work of God. It denied that faith, repentance etc are the gracious gifts of God. It maintained that we as fallen people still have the capacity (with a little bit of God’s help but not all) to come after and seek God. It is the same old problem that the church has faced.

Pelagianism said that people can come to God on their own without God. They were able to work their way to God and it is considered a heresy. You have been sold a bill of goods that “semi-pelagianism” is what all non-Calvinists believe. Hog wash.

In Semipelagian thought, man doesn’t have such an unrestrained capacity, but man and God could cooperate to a certain degree in this salvation effort: man can (unaided by grace) make the first move toward God, and God then increases and guards that faith, completing the work of salvation. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Pelagianism

However the Scriptures never say that man can make the first move toward God without God drawing him. Salvation is not a work between God and man. Salvation is a full work by God alone and man believes God after God has drawn Him and revealed truth to Him. Do you not see the difference? It is a real insult to call a Christian a semi-pelagian and I won’t let that kind of insult be committed on my blog. If this is not understandable, then perhaps do some reading on the internet and educate yourself on the difference between the heresy and orthodox Christian faith.

How free-will and God’s sovereignty go hand in hand.

They do not go hand in hand in works. Saving faith is not a work.

Maybe you can clearly outline how you see salvation works?

This is a very simplistic version: God draws the sinner to Himself and the sinner responds. When a person then comes to the place of repentance after God’s Holy Spirit has been working on his heart, he responds to God in faith and God then works the miracle of salvation in his heart. The miracle is done by God alone and is a work that could only be attributed by God. It is a miracle that takes a blackened heart of sin and cleans the heart and creates a brand new spirit within that person that is from God Himself. The person then is born from above as a child of God and God lives within him/her. The person has responded with faith but none of the work that takes to make the person a new creation, a clean heart or a new spirit, with the person as a child of God can be attributed to the person. We have no power or ability to do these things. They are done by God alone. All we can to is respond to the work of the Holy Spirit and repent and believe God. God says that this is faith and He says it is not a work. Mark, if you didn’t understand any of this before you became a Calvinist, it is no wonder that you went onto that pathway. You just didn’t understand the process of Salvation from the Scriptures.

That is all I can do right now. Time for me to work on a few more things before I head off to bed. I’ll see what I can finish and whatever I can’t finish tomorrow, I’ll just leave for now as we work on John 6. Okay?