Election, Obedience, and the Christian Life
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Five items.
The five questions
16. “If God chose Jacob over Esau before they were born, is this Calvinist predestination? Do Lutherans believe that?”
Genesis, Session Nineteen
Do say: We believe in election. What we don’t do is complete the symmetry. Scripture teaches that everyone who is saved is saved by God’s choice alone, and it teaches that God desires all to be saved and that Christ will never cast out anyone who comes. We hold both without building the bridge, because Scripture didn’t build it.
Then the pastoral point, which matters more: If you’re asking because you’re afraid you might not be chosen — that fear is answered, and not by speculation. He has already spoken to you by name at the font, and he does not say one thing at the water and something else in secret.
Cross-reference: Part One, item 9.
17. “If election is all God’s choice, how can Esau be blamed?”
Genesis, Session Nineteen
Do not solve it. Any solution costs one of the two halves.
Do say: That’s the point where I stop, and I want you to see me stop rather than watch me invent something. Scripture holds a man responsible for his own rejection of God and gives God all the credit for anyone’s salvation. Every attempt to make those tidy has dropped one of them, and the one that gets dropped is always the comforting one.
18. “If I can’t repay God, doesn’t that make obedience pointless? Why serve Him at all?”
Psalms, Session Twenty-Six
Do say: Because your neighbor needs it and God doesn’t. That’s the whole answer. Everything you do for God, he could do without — but the man down the road actually needs a ride to the doctor. Good works were never a payment scheme running upward. They were always deliveries running sideways.
19. “What’s the difference between obedience and passivity?”
Isaiah, Session Twenty-One
Do say: Passivity waits to feel something before it moves. Obedience does the next thing whether or not the feeling arrives. And notice that neither of them is the source of anything — the Christian who obeys isn’t generating his standing, he’s living in it. The opposite of passivity isn’t striving. It’s being carried, and walking anyway.
20. “What does ‘are being sanctified’ actually look like?”
Hebrews, Session Ten
Do say, concretely, because the question deserves a real answer: It looks like growing love for God and for the people around you. Increasing freedom from patterns of sin that used to run your life. Prayer becoming more regular. Scripture becoming more nourishing than it used to be. Worship meaning more than it did. The ordinary Christian virtues — patience, kindness, honesty — gradually becoming more natural rather than forced.
Then the guard, in one sentence: it is slow, it is mostly visible to other people rather than to you, and the people furthest along are typically the ones most aware of what is left. None of your standing rests on it.
Cross-reference: entry 7, carnal and spiritual Christians.