It's easy to look at our Day Camp kids at play and think we're probably all born good - a concept easier to imagine when they're laughing together than when they're tired, moody and angry because they didn't get their way. However, imagining doesn't make it so. The truth is, we're born broken; we're born tainted; we're born corrupted by sin.
Read Wesley's Standard Sermons. At least read the first fourteen, though all fifty-two merit the time and interest of those longing to understand the most important aspects of right thinking and good theology. In his work on original sin, Wesley avowed a corruption of humanity so thorough he included the bondage of the will as a condition of our depravity. But Wesley emphasized the work of the Holy Spirit to awaken the lost, drawing those unable to respond to God into the light where they can see and respond to the Truth.
Prevenient grace pulls the human race out of its depravity.
Prevenient grace grants us the capacity to respond further to God’s grace.
Prevenient Grace prompts our awareness of God and awakens a desire for deliverance from sin.
Jesus declared that “no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” The fact that sinners are enabled to respond to the Gospel has nothing to do with lofty views of our human condition (or how we appear when we're happy children at play). Instead, the fact that we're able to believe the Gospel and desire salvation has everything to do with an optimism of grace and a trust in the Holy Spirit's prevenient work.
By God's grace sinners are reconciled to God and empowered to live holy lives.
Fred Sanders (associate professor at the Torrey Honors Institute of Biola University, and a Wesleyan) writes, "...the mystery of the atonement is the mystery of how the holiness of God can be reconciled with the unholiness of sinners, so that we can be brought home to God." And permeating that entire process, from beginning to end, is God's activity on a sinners behalf.
Really. Seriously. We're born in sin but God loves us too much to leave us there.
Romans 5:8 - God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
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Mark:
Thanks so much for the reminder of both our inborn corruption (a "slap-in-the-face" reality) and the incredible grace of God! I love the Sanders quote; it's the reality of what God has done and continues to do on my behalf that keeps me going. Now off to feed deeply on Wesley's Sermons!
Matt Brookes, WEst Ohio UMC
Posted by: Mlej690 | June 28, 2012 at 10:37 AM