What the Five Points Have Meant for Me: A personal Testimony
These ten points are my personal testimony to the effects of believing in the five points of Calvinism—the doctrines of grace.
1. These truths make me stand in awe of God and lead me into the depth of true God-centered worship.
I recall the time I first saw, while teaching Ephesians at Bethel College in the late 1970s, the threefold statement of the goal of all God’s work, namely, “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Eph. 1:6, 12, 14).
It has led me to see that we cannot enrich God and that therefore his glory shines most brightly not when we try to meet his needs but when we are satisfied in him as the essence of our deeds. “From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36). Worship becomes an end in itself.
It has made me feel how low and inadequate are my affections, so that the psalms of longing come alive and make worship intense.
2. These truths help protect me from trifling with divine things. One of the curses of our culture is banality, cuteness, cleverness. Television is one of the main sustainers of our addiction to superficiality and triviality. God is swept into this. Hence we tend to trifle with divine things.
Earnestness is not excessive in our day. It might have been once. And, yes, there are imbalances in certain people today who don’t seem to be able to relax and talk about the weather. But it seems to me that the far greater sadness in our day is people who are simply unable to be reverent. They seem to have never been awed by the greatness of God. They only know one mode of relationship: casual. This is a tragic and impoverishing incapacity.
Robertson Nicole said of Spurgeon,
Evangelism of the humorous type [we might say, church growth of the hip, cool, clever, funny, market-savvy type] may attract multitudes, but it lays the soul in ashes and destroys the very germs of religion. Mr. Spurgeon is often thought by those who do not know his sermons to have been a humorous preacher. As a matter of fact there was no preacher whose tone was more uniformly earnest, reverent and solemn. 1
The greatness of God that stands forth from the doctrines of grace has been a weighty ballast in my boat. It gives me great joy, and guards my heart from the plague of silliness.
3. These truths make me marvel at my own salvation.
After laying out the great, God-wrought salvation in Ephesians 1, Paul prays, in the last part of that chapter, that the effect of that theology will be the enlightenment of our hearts so that we marvel at “the hope to which he has called you ... the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and ... the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:18-19). In other words, he prayed that we would experience what he had just taught. That our hearts would be able to grasp what had really happened to us.
Every ground of boasting is removed. Brokenhearted joy and gratitude abound.
The piety of Jonathan Edwards begins to grow. When God has given us a taste of his own majesty and our own wickedness, then the Christian life becomes a thing very different than conventional piety. Edwards describes it beautifully when he says,
The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires: their hope is a humble hope, and their joy, even when it is unspeakable, and full of glory, is humble, brokenhearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behavior. 2
4. These truths make me alert to man-centered substitutes that pose as good news.
In my book, The Pleasures of God,3 I show that in the 18th century in New England the slide from the sovereignty of God led to Arminianism and thence to universalism and thence to Unitarianism. The same thing happened in England in the 19th century after Spurgeon.
Iain Murray’s Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography documents the same thing: “Calvinistic convictions waned in North America. In the progress of the decline which Edwards had rightly anticipated, those Congregational churches of New England which had embraced Arminianism after the Great Awakening gradually moved into Unitarianism and universalism, led by Charles Chauncy.” 4
You can also read in J. I. Packer’s Quest for Godliness how Richard Baxter forsook these teachings and how the following gener-ations reaped a grim harvest in the Baxter church in Kidderminster. 5
These doctrines are a bulwark against man-centered teachings in many forms that gradually corrupt the church and make her weak from the inside, all the while looking strong or popular. The church of the living God, rightly taught, is to be “a pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). That is what these truths have proved to be for me.
5. These truths make me groan over the indescribable disease of our secular, God-belittling culture.
I can hardly read the newspaper or a Google news article or look at a TV ad or a billboard without feeling the burden that God is missing. When God is the main reality in the universe and is treated as a non-reality, I tremble at the wrath that is being stored up. I am still able to be shocked. Are you? Many Christians are sedated with the same God-ignoring drug as the world. Some think it is a virtue that God be neglected, and invent cynical names for people who speak of God in relation to everything. These teachings are a great antidote against that neglect and that cynicism.
Christians exist to reassert the reality of God and the supremacy of God in all of life. We are therefore in need of a great awakening. These truths keep me aware of that and impel me to pray toward it. For only a sovereign work of God can make it happen.
6. These truths make me confident that the work which God planned and began, he will finish—both globally and personally.
The truth that God will use all his sovereign power to keep me for himself is supremely precious. I know my heart. Left to itself my heart is proud and self-centered and an idol factory. Few prayers are more needful for me than this:
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
Yes, I need—and I want—him to chain me to himself everyday. To seal me. Capture me. Keep me. Hold on to me. And the doctrines of grace are the perfect satisfaction for these desires. This is exactly what God has promised to do for me. “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me” (Jer. 32:40). “I will uphold you with my righteous right hand” (Isa. 41:10). I go to bed at night quietly confident that I will be a secure believer in the morning not because of my free will, but because of God’s free grace. This is worth more than millions of dollars.
7. These truths make me see everything in the light of God’s sovereign purposes—that from him and through him and to him are all things, to him be glory forever and ever.
Through the lens of these doctrines I see that all of life relates to God and that he is the beginning, the middle, and the end of it all. There’s no compartment where he is not all-important. He is the one who gives meaning to everything (1 Cor. 10:31).
Seeing God’s sovereign purpose worked out in Scripture, and hearing Paul say that “[he] works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11) make me see the world this way. Reality becomes supercharged with God. He is the all-pervading glory in all that is. Everything is from him and for him. The words of Jonathan Edwards thrill me because they represent so beautifully the implication of the doctrines of grace:
In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged; his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again to their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning, and the middle, and the end. 6
8. These truths make me hopeful that God has the will, the right, and the power to answer prayer that people be changed.
The warrant for prayer is that God may break in and change things—including the human heart. He can turn the will around. “Hallowed be your name” (Matt. 6:9) means: cause people who are not hallowing your name to hallow your name. “May your word run and be glorified” (2 Thess. 3:1) means: cause hearts to be opened to the gospel. This is what God did for me in answer to my parents’ prayers. It is what I now gladly do for others.
I take the new covenant promises and plead with God to bring them to pass in people’s lives and among all the mission frontiers of the world. And the reason I pray this way is that God has the right and the power to do these things. No human autonomy stands in the way.
“God, take out of their flesh their heart of stone and give them a new heart of flesh.” (Ezek. 11:19)
“Lord, circumcise their hearts so that they love you.” (Deut. 30:6)
“Father, put your spirit within them and cause them to walk in your statutes.” (Ezek. 36:27)
“Lord, grant them repentance and the knowledge of the truth that they may escape from the snare of the devil.” (2 Tim. 2:25-26)
“Father, open their hearts so that they believe the gospel.” (Acts 16:14)
Prayer is where most Christians sound like Calvinists. Most sincere Christians pray with the assumption that he has the right and power not only to heal human bodies and alter natural circumstances, but also to sovereignly transform human hearts. In other words prayer is based on God’s ability to overcome human resistance. That is what we ask him to do. Which means that the doctrine of irresistible grace is the great hope of answered prayer in the lives of people for whose salvation I plead.
9. These truths remind me that evangelism is absolutely essential for people to come to Christ and be saved, and that there is great hope for success in leading people to faith, but that conversion is not finally dependent on me or limited by the hardness of the unbeliever. The doctrines of grace make evangelism among spiritually dead sinners possible. Without the sovereign grace of God we may as well be preaching in a cemetery. Because we are preaching in a cemetery. That is what this world is. The truth of total depravity means that the preaching of the cross is foolishness to the natural man, and “he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). So evangelism only makes sense in the light of the doctrines of grace. We really believe God can raise the dead.
And we know he uses the human means to do it. “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Pet. 1:23). The sovereign work of God in giving new life to the dead human heart is “through the word of God.” And Peter adds, “This word is the good news that was preached to you” (1 Pet. 1:25). It’s the gospel. This is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).
Therefore the doctrines of grace give hope for evangelism in the hardest places. Dead is dead. Muslims or Hindus or hardened European post- Christian secularists are not more dead than any other “natural man.” And God does the impossible. He raises the dead (Eph. 2:1-6). When faced with the hardheartedness of the rich young ruler Jesus said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26).
As I look out on the remaining task of world missions I do not despair. Rather I hear Jesus say, “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also and they will listen to my voice” (John 10:16). Not: they may. But: they will. So I say: this cannot fail. The doctrines of grace enflamed world missions in the lives of William Carey and David Livingston and Adoniram Judson and Henry Martyn and John Paton and thousands of others. And that is the effect it has had on me, as I have tried to do my part in promoting the great work of frontier missions.
10. These truths make me sure that God will triumph in the end. “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” (Isa. 46:9-10).
The sum of the matter is that God is God. He is absolutely sovereign. And he is gracious beyond all human analogy. He has not left the world to perish in its sin. He has planned, is performing, and will complete a great salvation for his people and his creation. He has done this with infinite wisdom and love. Which means he has done it so that he gets the glory in us and we get the joy in him. And it cannot fail. “The counsel of the Lord stands forever” (Ps. 33:11).
1 Quoted in Iain Murray, The Forgotten Spurgeon (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1973), p. 38. 2 Religious Affections, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, pp. 339-40.
3 John Piper, The Pleasures of God, (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books), p. 129 in the 2012 revised edition.
4 Iain Murray, Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), p. 454. 5 J. I. Packer, Quest for Godliness (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990), p. 160.
6 Jonathan Edwards, The End for Which God Created the World, p. 275, in John Piper’s, God’s Passion for His Glory, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1998), p. 248.