2026-09-29
1 Kings 8:57-58 The Lord our God be with us, as he was with our fathers. May he not leave us nor forsake us, that he may incline our hearts to him, to walk in all his ways and to keep his commandments, his statutes, and his rules, which he commanded our fathers.
I affirm predestination, and actually rejoice to consider such great an act of love as prevenient grace. There are those who insist, even good-intentionedly, to see the soul’s act of choosing God as purely unaided human effort. My own experience of salvation (if its worth anything), my frustrated intentions to obey God’s commandments, and now my attentive and careful reading of the Bible, of course with so much help from such men as Charles Spurgeon, have led me to the conviction that sin so marred my constitution, put me in great disorder, and corrupted my heart so much that never could I really ever choose what I wanted, and ought to have chosen.
It then is exceedingly encouraging to read in Scripture that my act of choosing Christ was in fact a response to him having chosen me already. “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you…” Jesus tells his disciples in John 15:16, and “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44) and “those whom he predestined he also called…” (Romans 8:30). Prevenient grace refers to the working of God’s grace in an unbelievers life to lead him to the point where he turns to the Lord in surrender and repentance. Put simply, prevenient grace means that before any of us sought God, he had sought us first. In C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, when Jill attempts to explain that it was Scrubb and she who asked to be brought into Narnia, Aslan answers, “You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you.”
Left to my own will and purposes and wisdom, I am certain I could choose anything but that which is best and wholesome. Without God’s own help I could never have said “Yes, Jesus.” This isn’t meddling, it is love. And if it had been meddling, it is precisely of the sort that one is usually grateful for in retrospect. We have hated it when it seemed like people were meddling in our business, in our lives— our parents, teachers, mentors, pastors, friends— they just wouldn’t let us be. But looking back, one is always glad to think that they cared enough to meddle, especially insofar as they were successful in turning us away from the path that had been leading us to destruction and death. So indeed has God; he so inclined my heart, and helped me to see the futility of a life live outside him. He granted me the sense, if one would call it that, and the courage to give up a life of disobedience and sin, whose wages would be death, and helped me accept the free gift of life that he gave to the world through the sacrifice and righteousness of his only Son Jesus Christ.
Yet even now, in spite of my desire to do his will, I find myself unable to. Like Paul in Romans 7:15-20, I do what I do not want to do, and what I want to do, I do not do. Without God’s help and grace I cannot obey even one commandment, and so I too cry alongside Solomon: “incline my heart to you O Lord, so that I may walk in your ways and keep your commandments.”
I, however, do not so affirm grace to the degree that I reject free-will or human effort and responsibility. Every man who sins is guilty for his sin and must bear responsibility for it. He has rejected God and disobeyed his commandments. He indeed had the chance to choose God, but he spurned Him, His grace, and His love. Even after God had promised David that He would be as a father to Solomon, even after he had helped Solomon to choose rightly, that is, of all things, wisdom (for who indeed could really ever choose so exemplarily as Solomon did except he had had God’s help?), even after he had appeared to Solomon twice, Solomon in the end still turned away from God, and served other gods. If anything else, this is also a clear illustration of the diligence and hard-work and effort that we must put into following God, obeying his commandments, and doing his will.
And if we ever are successful in such an effort and commitment, it is because God granted all the help. The Apostle Paul in Philippian 2:12-13 says, “…work out your salvation with fear and trembling” and then immediately follows that up with “for it is God who works in you both to will and to do.” We are not urged to work out our salvation so devotedly and tremblingly so that we are made right with God, or put him in our debt, but because we are already made right with him, and because it is He in fact who is at work in us, causing us to will and to act for his own good pleasure. Apostle Paul, speaking in 2 Corinthians 10:15 of just how much harder he had worked than all the other apostles, he goes on to say “yet not I but the grace of God which was with me.”
None of us could get so far in obeying God, in doing his will, in working well and diligently, in serving him faithfully with a whole and upright heart, unless He Himself inclined our hearts to do so, and helped us by His grace. Seeing then that we need all the help we can get, let us not cease to cry out to him, and plead with him, saying: “incline our hearts to you O Lord, to walk in all your ways and to keep your commandments, your statutes, and your rules.”
Prayer:
Omnipotent God, merciful Father and good Lord, grant that we would know your commands, love them, and with readiness obey them. O Lord, may we always move forward with humility to that which is greater and never grow faint. And Lord, do not give us over to our own will nor human ignorance and infirmity, nor to what we deserve, nor to anything else other than your holy character. But according to your kindness do with us and all our thoughts and actions what is pleasing to you, so that by us, and in us, and through us your will alone might always be done. Deliver us from all evil, and lead us into eternal life. Amen. (taken from Anselm’s prayer to God)