but I will anyway. If you agree with the popular evangelical thought that God’s given man free will and would be unloving to take it away… Why do we ask for Him to change people’s hearts and save them? Wouldn’t that be unloving?
For the record, I think it is good to plead with God to show off His sovereignty and soften hardened hearts… He gets the most glory when He makes enemies into sons.
John 6:44 No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. (ESV)
I think it’s important to note that we do indeed have free
will…it is just in bondage to sin…which reminds me of Romans
8:1-11. The natural man is not even able to please God. The obvious
question, then, is how does one who is a slave to sin, become a
slave to righteousness?…only by His sovereign act of changing a
heart from stone to flesh. Most will say, why would God only save
some? I say, why does He save any at all…it’s not as if He owes
us something…we rebelled…remember?
We talked about that “God not owing us anything in Sunday
school”… That was an interesting topic. Yeah, it is important to
remember that we (humans) do have free will. I think forgetting
that leaves you missing or not understanding the power of sin, and
thus the grace and power of God… at least in some part.
i think the idea is that people are comfortable with God sort of
suspending the whole free will thing for other people, as long as
the result is their salvation–but it’s outrageous to them to
imagine their own salvation as not a direct repercussion of
something they chose by themselves. they want people to be saved
who don’t want to be saved… but then once that’s over and done
with, they want to have wanted to be saved all along.
That last sentence was very fun to read. I think that makes sense,
but it doesn’t make the problem go away… which I don’t suppose is
what you were trying to do.