It is no accident that Paul’s epistles always begin with doctrine. He does not appeal for a right response until he first gives a clear and convincing reason for demanding that response. In other words, doctrine precedes duty as the essential foundation for the duty. Duty is urged as the only logical response to the doctrine set forth. 1 Corinthians 6:19, 20 is the typical Pauline method of appealing to believers to be holy.

What? know ye not that…ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. (1 Cor. 6:19, 20)

Do you see the force of the argument? The appeal to glorify God in all things is based on a logical and doctrinal therefore. Why do I owe God perfect obedience in all that I do? Because I am not my own but belong entirely to him, and I belong to him simply because he bought me with the blood of his Son. 

Does the object purchased choose its purchaser, or does the one who pays the price choose what he wants to buy? The purchaser is the one acting, and the object being purchased is passive. Did you choose God and ask him to purchase you, or did God purchase you because he first chose you to be purchased? How can a believer not want to glorify God? It would be insane for a true child of God not to sincerely want to please the one who purchased him out of sin, shame, guilt, and death! And, I might add, God has given all of his sheep, without a single exception, a “sound mind” (cf. 2 Tim. 1:7).

A careful study of all of Paul’s epistles will find this principle to be the norm: first doctrine and then appeal to personal behavior. To say, as many sincere sentimentalists today say, “Never mind doctrine; let’s just have practical living,” is to miss Paul’s message. The message of Paul is this: “It is impossible to have godly practical living without first laying a foundation of sovereign grace where the only possible response can be holy living. Look at two examples.

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called. (Eph. 4:1)

This appeal for a worthy walk is the first such exhortation in the epistle. The first three chapters talk about doctrine. The truth of sovereign election is set forth in chapter one; the depths of depravity out of which we have been raised in regeneration is laid out in chapter two; and the amazing grace of God and its attendant blessings which have been freely given to every believer is explained in chapter three. All of this is through our union with Christ. Ephesians 4:1 is Paul’s first use of the word therefore in the “doctrine/response” sense. Paul did use the word therefore previously in Ephesians 2:19, but that was not as the basis of an appeal but to establish a point of doctrine. Chapters one through three are pure theology. They show the great blessings a child of God has just because of being joined to Christ. The therefore in Ephesians 4:1 is the same as saying, “Now because everything I said in the three previous chapters is true, the only possible logical and sane response is for you to walk in your daily life in a way that brings glory to the one who lavished all these aforementioned blessings on you.”

Paul does the same thing in Romans. Romans chapters 1 through 11 is doctrine, doctrine, and more doctrine. The first appeal of any kind whatever does not appear until 6:11. The exhortation in Romans 12:1 can only be understood by seeing that “the mercies of God” are referring back to the first eleven chapters.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. (Rom. 12:1)

Notice Paul’s appeal to reason. It is only reasonable that a child of God should present himself, and all that he is, to God because of God’s sovereign electing grace (Rom. 1–11). Anything else is insane and irrational, and I repeat, God has given all of his true saints a “sane mind.”

Is doctrine important? According to Paul, it is if you want to earnestly appeal to believers to live a holy life. Have you ever noticed that the hymns that glorify God’s amazing grace are the ones that inspire you to be “lost in wonder and praise”? The more a hymn exalts God’s amazing grace, the more it moves us to want to love and serve our great God and Savior. That is Paul’s approach.

Let me quickly say a word about some of the specific effects the doctrine of election should have on us as individuals. It must make us humble and make us grateful for special grace. This was Paul’s goal in writing to the Corinthians.

For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh…But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world …God hath chosen the weak things of the world…That no flesh should glory in his presence.…That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. (1 Cor. 1:26, 27, 29, 31)

For just a moment, imagine that you are responsible—because of your free will—for your faith in Christ. You are saved only because you were willing to believe the gospel with your so-called free will. You could not in honesty utter the above words. You would have to say, as some Arminians are quite willing to do, “I, with my own free will, am the decisive factor that enabled God to save me. The only reason his eternal plan of salvation worked in my case, and not in another case, is the simple fact that I, with my free will, was willing to repent and believe the gospel.” If that is the case, then what specific thing do you owe to God any more than any other person? Put another way, did God do everything for every lost man that he did for you? If not, then exactly what has God done for you that he did not also do for every lost person in this world? 

You may be saying, God loved the whole world just as much as me, “But I…I alone made the difference between myself and other people. The difference has nothing at all to do with the electing love of God. It has to do with my free will.”

You may be saying, Christ died for every person in this world in the same sense in which he died for me, “But I…I took advantage of what Christ equally provided for everyone. I accepted the redemption that was made for me and all other sinners. Christ redeemed all men in the identical same sense that he redeemed me, but I took advantage of it and believed. The only real difference between me and the man in hell is that I, with my free will, enabled the atonement of Christ to be effective and actually save me.”

You may be saying, the Holy Spirit convicted others in the same sense and to the same degree that he convicted me, “But I…I allowed, with my free will, the Holy Spirit to give me a new heart. I was not, as others, unwilling to cooperate with Holy Spirit in regeneration. I wanted, with my free will, to be born again.”

My sincere question is this: which approach leads to glory in self and the power of free will, and which approach leads to worship and praise of both the grace and the power of the triune God? Does the clear answer to that question possibly explain why there is so little genuine amazement and praise in the life and worship of believers today? How can we expect believers to fall flat on their faces in worship and praise to God for any kind of special grace when we constantly tell them, “God has done all he can do; it is now entirely up to you and your free will”? The depth of your gratitude to God will be in direct proportion to the depth of your understanding of what you really owe to him in salvation. The But I theology of free will can only have a shallow gratitude because it has a shallow view of debtorship.

My dear reader, you may approach the throne of mercy and say, “Sovereign Lord, I am so happy that I decided to give you a chance to save me. I’m so delighted that my free will allowed you to do what you longed to do but could not do until I agreed to allow you to do it.” I say, you may speak thus, but as for me and my house, we will sing the following hymn:

Why was I made to hear thy voice,
And enter while there’s room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?

‘Twas the same love that spread the feast
That sweetly drew us in;
Else we had still refused to taste,
And perished in our sin.

It is an undeniable fact that God chooses some sinners to be saved and leaves others to perish. However, we know that none are chosen because of either their own goodness or their willingness to be chosen. “But,” says an objector, “the Bible specifically says that God is not a respecter of persons” (Rom. 2:11). If God, as an objector will assert, looked down through history and saw that some sinners would be willing to be chosen, then God could say, “I have found some sinners with a willing heart, and I now have a basis upon which to choose them to be saved.” In such a scenario, God is a respecter of man’s foreseen faith. Such a view truly makes God a respecter of persons. 

Romans 2:11 does not mean that God cannot or does not show grace to only some men but not all men, since the Bible clearly teaches that he does that very thing. It means that there is nothing about any man’s person or personage, especially foreseen faith, which makes him different in God’s sight from any other sinner. There is nothing that any man has ever done or will do that God can respect and reward. Therefore when God chooses a particular sinner to be saved, it must be purely on the basis of sovereign grace and not foreseen faith.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough what we said in the first chapter. There is both a sovereign election of some unto salvation, and there is a sincere and universal proclamation of the gospel to all men without exception or distinction (cf. John 6:37 and Matt. 11:20–28). 

Ah, my dear reader, may I say a pointed word to you? If you perish in hell, your lips will never accuse God of being unjust or unfair. You will never blame God’s election for your eternal destruction. If you have read this far, or if you have been in meetings where I have preached, then you have heard the gospel. You have been urged to trust Christ. If you refuse to repent and believe the gospel, you will perish with that gospel in your ears. You will plead guilty and will never even think of accusing the most high God or his sovereign electing grace as the reason you are in hell.

However, just the opposite is true of the saint who makes it to heaven. In that land of glory, no one will even know how to spell the words free will. No saint will talk about “giving God a chance” or “allowing God to save him.” All boasting in the free will of man will be left behind. Let the saints come down from heaven and testify, and their theme will be sovereign grace. They will, without exception, cry, “Salvation is of the Lord, from beginning to end.”

Imagine you are a four-legged sheep caught in a thicket from which you cannot free yourself. You are cold, hungry, thirsty, and your throat is sore from bleating. The more you struggle to get free, the more the briars dig into your flesh and cause the blood to flow. Finally, in utter despair, you resign yourself to your pitiful situation, quit struggling, and prepare to die. If, in that most hopeless situation, you heard the familiar voice of a shepherd calling your name, what would you do? You would cry, “Baaaa! Baaaa!” as loudly as you could. 

Well, let me tell you that if you are a two-legged sheep in the same condition, you will react exactly the same way. If you are caught in a thicket of sin and cannot get loose, and the harder you try to get free the more you fail because the bonds of sin get stronger, and you are hungry, tired, and thirsty, then I have good news. There is a gracious shepherd calling your name. Cry out to him. Cry, “Baaaa! Baaaa!” as loudly as you can. Tell him how sick you are of sin and its awful consequences. Tell him how totally helpless you are and how desperately you need his grace and power. He will be at your side in a moment. He will free you from the thicket of sin, bind up your wounds, give you bread and water, and put you on his shoulder and carry you safely back to the fold.

The only person who will not cry out, “Baaa! Baaa!” is the person who either does not believe he is caught in a thicket of sin but imagines he is totally free, or the person who loves the sin despite the misery it brings.

If you are a chosen sheep, you know what it is to be set free from the thicket. You have tasted the Bread of Heaven and have drunk the Water of Life. You will praise forever him who loved you with an everlasting love and washed you in his own precious blood.