Theological term
Prevenient Grace
4 sermons · All terms
Ask FGBC #59: What is Faith?
Faith is defined in two senses in Scripture: as the objective content of the Christian religion (the propositions of the gospel to be believed) and as the subjective act of believing. In its saving sense, faith is the Spirit-given, empty-handed instrument by which a sinner rests upon and receives the Lord Jesus Christ and all the redemptive benefits secured by His obedient life, atoning death, and resurrection. Because regeneration precedes faith and faith itself is a divine gift, the strength of one's faith — or the feelings accompanying it — is never the ground of salvation; Christ alone is that ground. The discussion warns against distortions that load faith with feelings, smuggle faithfulness or love into its definition, or ground justification in evangelical obedience rather than in Christ received through faith alone.
2LCF Chapter 10 - Of Effectual Calling
Effectual calling is the sovereign, gracious act by which God brings those predestinated unto eternal life from spiritual death to faith in Christ, through His word and Spirit, with no contribution from the creature. This lesson works through all four paragraphs of 2LCF Chapter 10, tracing the definition and character of the effectual call, its Trinitarian foundation, the two-fold nature of outward word and inward Spirit, the extraordinary provision for elect infants and those incapable of hearing the word, and the fixed inability of the reprobate. The session closes by pressing the doctrine against Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, Arminian, Socinian, and Roman Catholic errors, and by insisting that there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ for those who receive not the Christian religion.
2LCF Chapter 9 - Of Free Will
2LCF Chapter 9 ('Of Free Will') presents the doctrine of human will through four covenantal states: innocency, sin, grace, and glory. Reformed Christianity does not deny free will but insists that the will is conditioned entirely by the state in which man finds himself — created upright yet mutable, fallen into total inability, sovereignly freed by effectual grace, and finally made perfectly and immutably free to good alone in glory. The session traces this framework against the errors of Pelagius, Arminius, the Socinians, and the Jesuits, grounding the Reformed Baptist rejection of paedobaptism in the same biblical anthropology: there are only two states for man, dead in Adam or alive in Christ, leaving no room for an external covenant category for the children of believers.
2LCF Chapter 10 - Of Effectual Calling
Effectual calling is the first step in the application of redemption — the sovereign act by which God, through His Word and Spirit, brings the elect from a state of total spiritual death into union with Christ. This session works through 1689 London Baptist Confession chapter 10, situating effectual calling within the broader ordo salutis and showing how it alone accounts for the biblical data on God's absolute sovereignty, the total spiritual inability of fallen man, and the uncoerced freedom of the believer's response. The result guards against both the Arminian error of grounding salvation in the foreseen decisions of the creature and the hyper-Calvinist error of denying man's responsibility to repent and believe, while grounding evangelism in confidence that God can revive the deadest of hearts.