Knowing the Truth with Pastor Kevin Bowling is a live call-in radio program providing doctrinal dialogue, cultural commentary, and insightful interviews with some of today's foremost Christian authors and leaders. Knowing the Truth is the outreach ministry of the Mountain Bridge Bible Fellowship located on Highway 25 in Traveler's Rest. The goal of the church and the radio program is to seek the glory of God in the salvation of sinners and the sanctification of the saints. by the Ministry of the Word. For more information, go to www.knowingthetruth.org. Here with today's edition of Knowing the Truth is Pastor Kevin Bowling. Hey, welcome into this edition of the Knowing the Truth radio program. This is Pastor Kevin Bowling, so glad that you joined us on the broadcast today. Let me ask you a question right here at the top of the broadcast. Is John Calvin to blame for fewer baptisms in the SBC? Well, that seemed to be the indication that was, or the question that was being asked in a recent article that came out about some of the happenings at the latest SBC conference that took place. An article that appeared out in ChristianPost.com the other day, it says this, Calvinism not to blame for Southern Baptist decline, says J.D. Greer. The article then goes on to say this, J.D. Greer, who was a strong contender for president at the recent Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting, says it's unfair to blame declining baptism numbers in the SBC on a resurgence of five-point Calvinism in Southern Baptist life. Greer graciously stepped aside in a razor-close race with Steve Gaines, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, and a more moderate Calvinist. a contest that many say rested on how five-point Calvinism affects church growth. Well, I don't particularly want to talk about, you know, the inner workings of the SBC. I'm not Southern Baptist, and the church that I pastor is not Southern Baptist, and so I think that would be probably better left to those that are within the Southern Baptist Convention to talk about those things. But what I do want to talk about on the broadcast today is I want to talk about the idea of the sovereignty of God and evangelism, or, you know, does Calvinism, or better yet, the doctrines of grace that are taught in the Scripture, Do they really impede the idea of evangelism, or is there a completely different way to look at that subject? And I think that that's probably a better discussion that we can have on the program here today. Who better to do that with than John Sampson? John has been with me on the program before, and we have talked about his book that he wrote about the Twelve Whatabouts, dealing with questions, dealing with Calvinism. So this is a question dealing with Calvinism, so I thought John would be the best resource for us to turn to to talk about these things. John, welcome back to the Knowing the Truth radio program. Oh, it's great to be with you, Pastor Kevin. Well, what's your first take here, John, as you think about this subject and the way that it's mentioned? I sent you a copy of the news story. Just your general perception of what's talked about in this article. I thought it displayed with great precision a lot of ignorance, to be honest, because biblically, We could spend a lot of time, I'd love to, on the Scriptures in this, but historically it really misses the point of John Calvin. It's just a rumor that is unsubstantiated to talk of John Calvin as this person who had no interest in missions. It's absolutely the opposite. He was preoccupied with missions, and it stemmed out of his theology. And so, if we were to go to the biblical text, or if we were to just look at the historical record, The article fails on both counts. Let me tell our listening audience, too, that if you want to find out more about John as we continue with our discussion, and you want to look up some of the other things that John has written about, you can find him and those writings out at his blog or his website, which is www.affectualgrace.com. That's www.affectualgrace.com. Well, let's talk about that a little bit, about the whole concept of evangelism and Calvinism, or the doctrines of grace. The reason why we make that distinction is we don't believe that what Calvin taught originated with Calvin. He was restating what is found in the scriptures itself. The term, the doctrines of grace, emphasizes that when we talk about Calvinism, we're talking about specifically what Calvin taught about those things, and so that's why we make that distinction. Let me just start there, John, or have you start there. This notion that somehow Calvinism is going to, you know, people just aren't going to share the gospel as a result of it, if they did that, if that was actually true, it would actually belie a misunderstanding about what's taught in Calvinism, right? Absolutely right. And, you know, the question often is asked if divine election is true, what's the point of evangelism? Putting different glasses on, biblical glasses, I would say the question is, since God elects certain people to salvation, which is what the Bible clearly teaches, why are we told to evangelize? And the answer is because God tells us to, but it's also the means by which his elect are converted. God ordains both the ends and the means And the end is His elect people coming to saving faith, and the means is the proclamation of the gospel. And this understanding is driven by the text of Scripture. I'm not a Calvinist because I'm a follower of Calvin. Not at all. I just believe Jesus on the subject, and Peter and Paul and John, and it's Jesus who said words like this in John 10. I have other sheep that are not of this fold, I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there'll be one flock, one shepherd. And the context here is Jesus already has the Jewish sheep, and he knows the other sheep not of this fold, referencing Gentiles, and they will listen to his voice. And again, that's Jesus saying, I have a people. They don't yet know me, but they will. And I must preach the gospel. I must preach the kingdom to them also. Matthew 11. I just love seeing this in the words of Jesus, where he grounds evangelism in election and sees no contradiction between the two things of evangelism and election. In other words, Christ has sheep scattered throughout the world. Evangelism is merely the roundup of the sheep. Hear this in Matthew 11. At that time, Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you've hidden these things, that's the truth that he was proclaiming, from the wise and understanding, and revealed them to little children. Now stop for a moment. That's the father being active. He's hiding some truth from some, revealing it to others. What's that except divine election? And he goes on, Jesus speaking, yes, father, for such was your gracious will. Jesus didn't see a problem with that. He was excited by it. He says, All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. What's the next verse? It's a verse we hear over and over and over and over again without normally hearing the context. But the next three words are, Come to me. And the next word after that is, All. Come to me, all who are heavy and are under the burden all who labor and are heavy burden and I will give you rest take my yoke upon you learn from me so that's the call of the gospel come to Jesus come to me all and it's in the context of the father electing a certain people and historically and the missionary movement was started by Calvinist William Carey and the great missionary movement outside of the United Kingdom it's It's historically inaccurate to say Calvinists have no interest in missions, and we could talk about Calvin himself if we would wish to, and his center in Geneva was a missionary sending center. It was known for that, and historically we're ignorant because we think Church history started with Billy Graham, and we don't go back far enough to understand exactly what has taken place. in history. So both the Bible and history is on the side of the Calvinists in this venture of evangelism and understanding biblical election. When we talk about those, we heard, you know, four and five point talked about in that article, we're talking about the five major tenets of Calvinism articulated under the acronym TULIP. And the T in TULIP deals with the subject of total depravity, meaning that every aspect of a person's being was ruined in the fall. So we don't think right about ourselves. We don't think right about others. We don't think right about God. Everything is tainted by the fall, our mind, our will, our emotion. Every aspect of our being has been ruined by the fall. And I stress that because don't you feel that if people really understood what has taken place in the fall, then the rest of the points of Calvinism would fall into line, and then they would realize that God has to do the first work in order to bring a person unto himself, Otherwise, that person could never—we could never be persuasive enough with the Gospel message, and that person could never come to Christ apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit of God. Absolutely. The T in the TULIP, as you rightly made clear, does not mean utter depravity. We're not as bad as we possibly could be, but every aspect of man has been corrupted since the fall of man in the garden there in Adam. And we do not want the God of the Bible. We do not want him. That's understood. But we also hate him with a vengeance. We love darkness rather than the light. And so the only hope is that God elects a people and brings them to himself by his means. Because, you know, what did dead people do except in terms of physicality, dead people have no interest in anything because they're dead, and we have no interest in the God of the Bible until God works in us and changes the disposition of our hearts so that we want what we didn't want before, which is the God of the Bible. So, absolutely right. If you understand our radical corruption, then we need the election of God to be unconditional, because dead spiritually dead people can fulfill no conditions. They have no desire. They have no desire for God and of the things of God. Romans 8, 7 and 8 says they are incapable. They will not, they cannot submit to the law of God. There's nothing in that nature, which the Bible calls the flesh, that wants the God of the Bible. That's why we need a heart transplant. That's why, as you rightly said, all of the other doctrines of the tulip come into into harmony, understanding the deadness of man in sin. I was in my doctor's office at one time. I've told this story on air before, but it's worth it again here at this point. And so I went in to see the doctor and we got in a conversation. He saw that I had a book. I think I had R.C. Sproul's book that I was reading. And we got talking about the gospel and so forth. He was a believer. And he said, well, the way I picture it is that there's this ship and the ship is the kingdom of God. And we're on the ship and we're throwing off life savers, you know, out into the water, life preservers. And people are in the water and they're swimming to try to get on the ship. And then we're telling them, just grab the life preserver. And as they grab it, then we can pull them up and pull them onto the ship. And I said, well, that's a nice story. It's just not true. It's not the biblical representation. The biblical representation is there's people floating in the water, face down. They're dead in their trespasses and their sins. And then you're throwing out all these life preservers, and those life preservers are all in the water, but nobody's grabbing them because the first thing that has to take place is for God to make them alive. And then once they're made alive, two things will happen. Once they're regenerating power of the Holy Spirit of God, God doing the first work, what happens is they will see their condition for what it is, and then they will see Christ offered to them in the scriptures as their only hope of salvation. Then they'll be enabled by the Holy Spirit to reach out and choose Christ, grab that life preserver, and be enabled to be pulled up into the family of God. But I said it depends where you have that choosing. If you have it when they're still dead, And their trespasses and sins they could never choose. They're dead means dead. They can't do it So and what does this look like in the scriptures? Here's Paul in right after the Macedonian call and Acts chapter 16 and it says this and just a couple verses after the Macedonia call in verse 14 It says and a certain woman named Lydia a seller of purple of the city of Tyra Thyra Tyra which worshiped God heard us, whose heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul. And so the Lord opens her heart. She then is able to attend unto the preaching of the Apostle Paul. And that's what takes place in evangelism, right? Absolutely. And whether or not people classify themselves as Calvinists or so, They pray as a Calvinist. They pray for their friend, George, or for their friend, Mary. And they say, oh God, open up this man's heart, this lady's heart, as the word goes forth. Well, that's exactly what he did for Lydia. He opened up her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul. And the fact is, we don't know who the elect are. They're not walking around the countryside with the letter E stamped visibly on their foreheads, and we just go and preach the gospel to them. The Bible says, go into all the world, preach the gospel to everyone. Even though we know ahead of time, only God's elect will respond in faith to the preaching of the gospel. But without election, evangelism would be much like a salesman trying to sell his products in a graveyard, really. Mankind is spiritually dead, entrusted to sins, Ephesians 2.1. And our only hope is that God in his grace has elected people and the Bible says he has and the book of Revelation tells us that these people stem from every tongue every language group every ethnic group all around the world which gives us the hope of evangelism if there was an election evangelism would be an absolutely futile task but Christ has sheep in every corner of the world even in our backyard. Amen. Amen. And so as you pointed out about we don't know who the elect are, C.H. Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, who was a Calvinist himself and loved the doctrines of grace, He said that he preaches to everyone because the Lord has not revealed to us who the elect are, other than though we know that the elect are those that are coming to the saving knowledge of our wonderful Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But he said until the Lord had revealed to him who all the elect are, by going out and putting a big X on their forehead, then he would only preach to those people. But until then, he was going to scatter the seed of the gospel and preach to all men. And those that responded then, of course, would be the ones that were saved. We preach the gospel. We spread that seed abroad. We preach it with zeal, with an earnestness and an urgency, calling men to repentance of their sin and to come to Christ. It's just that behind the scenes we're saying God is doing the work of bringing his own people unto himself, right? So there should be in the actual carrying out of the task of the Great Commission maybe right in just that point, there shouldn't be a whole lot of difference between the two groups, between Arminian and Calvinist. We should all be preaching the Gospel. It's more about what is actually taking place behind the scenes, right? Yeah, and it's just a misunderstanding that because someone might believe God has this elect people, they'll be saved anyway. That's the falsehood. Yes. The falsehood is to believe that a Calvinist would only believe Romans 9 and not believe Romans 10, which follows straight afterwards. Romans 9, of course, is the real unfolding of unconditional election, where he chooses whom he wills. But Romans 10 follows after, saying, how shall they hear without a preacher? And the two go together. There was no contradiction in Paul's mind whatsoever. He wasn't contradicting what he'd just written with his quill. moments before, he understood that these elect people will come through the means of evangelism and the preaching of the Word, and it's that Word that has to be proclaimed, where you're born again of incorruptible seed by the Word of God, and that's the means. And so we believe in ends and means, and the means is prayer and praying for people and evangelism, and those two means are central to to understand the heart of God in the heart of a believer. We want to have God's heart for people, God's disposition towards people, and there is that sense in which we say, like Jesus, come to me, all, everyone, come to Christ. And yet we know that ahead of time, God is the one who reveals the truth to people. Amen. We should say a word, John, I think, too, about, you know, in this article is talking about blaming Calvin. At least somebody did in the article blame Calvin for the decrease in baptism. We should say that, you know, it's not up to us, though, to save people. We can't put together the right program that are going to suddenly or magically increase baptisms in any denomination, or in baptism, of course, being the sign and the seal here of true belief in Jesus Christ. We don't have the ability to do that. And so we certainly don't want to manipulate people to make some sort of a profession of faith, like what happened in the Second Great Awakening under Charles Finney, you know, to manipulate people to make some sort of profession of faith when there has not been true saving faith actually experienced in the heart. That would be an even greater tragedy than having, you know, bemoaning or lamenting the fact of low baptisms, right? Exactly. I can just add to that by saying, in my own heart and life and in my own ministry, knowing that it's God who saves, literally it is God who does the saving, allows me to preach the book, the whole book, and nothing but the book. I don't have to make it more palatable for people and not talk about the things that the Bible speaks of, but you can talk about the sovereignty of God and the justice of God, as well as, of course, the love of God You don't have to take anything out, knowing that Christ's sheep, as, again, Spurgeon said, Christ's sheep will hear Christ's voice, and they'll hear it through the Scriptures. So you can preach with boldness, knowing that it's God who saves. You don't have to manipulate, as you said. You don't have to use different means, but God will use the preached Word to save His elect, and He will save them, but He'll do so through means. And Calvin, you know, if we... He was an imperfect man, but he was preoccupied with missions. And if we were to study his life, we would see even in Geneva, this missionary sending church. He would take these men who had come in fear of their lives from France because of the gospel. He would train them and send them back because they still had this heart for the village they'd come from or the town they came from. And hundreds, even thousands went back. and planted churches, and many of them went knowing that they would probably be killed and martyred for the faith. But he trained them and sent them back and kept in contact with them constantly. Thousands of letters emerged of all that his correspondence with these people he sent back to their countries, and you can even look at the Geneva church. It had missionaries sent out to even as far away places as Brazil. So the facts are on Calvin's side when it comes to missions. Towards the end of the article, J.D. Greer says this, we have so much bandwidth as a convention, so we should seek to be known for the gospel and the great commission, not for a particular stance regarding Calvinism. What unites us is so much greater than what threatens to divide us. We are united by a gospel too great and a mission too urgent to let any lesser things stand in our way," Greer said. Well, I would agree to a point. I would say, though, that what we're talking about is the gospel. It is part of the gospel. And so we don't have to separate. I don't wear, you know, Calvinism on my shirt sleeve, per se, that I don't lead by talking about John Calvin, but I lead by talking about the gospel, and the doctrines of grace are part of that gospel. And so I wouldn't make such a clear definition or distinction between those two things. Your final thoughts? Yeah, in fact, I understand people's aversion because they might have heard different things about Mr. Calvin. I'm not a Calvinist because of Mr. Calvin. He was simply the one who systematized many of the thoughts of the reformers. Luther had said much the same thing before him. And when I wrote the book I wrote, I purposely didn't put the word Calvin or Calvinism in there, because we don't actually need John Calvin to embrace the truths of Scripture. I believe he's a very insightful Bible teacher, but I wanted to see what Jesus said, and what the Apostle John and Peter and Paul said and wrote, and that's what we have in the Scripture, and that's where we find these doctrines. And if they're not there, Let's run from these things as fast as we can. But if they are there, let's hold them as precious and dear. I want my people who hear me, the people who are under my ministry, to be biblicists. I want them to be people of the Bible. And we just happened to find the doctrines that Calvin espoused there in the scripture. Amen. Well, John, thanks so much for joining us today to talk about these things. We really appreciate your ministry and appreciate you doing this. I'll recommend your book here in just a second, but thanks so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Anytime, Pastor Kevin. All righty. That was John Sampson. Again, John, the website is www.affectualgrace.com. That's www.affectualgrace.com. His book is called Twelve Whatabouts. He's talking about Calvinism, and people say, yeah, well, what about this? Well, John has articulated twelve of those things together in his book. Then he looks at the answers and answers those things from the scriptures. You can find out about John's book 12 Whatabouts out there at that website and again one more time that website is www.effectualgrace.com You're listening to knowing the truth with pastor Kevin bowling for more information about today's program the radio ministry and the resources we offer go to www.knowingthetruth.org