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Sep, 01, 2020 0
Almost three decades ago, I had not understood God’s grace the way I recognize its power on my life now. The pursuing, transforming, enduring, yet mysterious and hovering presence of this unmerited favor of God is both capturing and captivating. In addition to the Word of God being the primary…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
My wife, Debbie, gave her life to Christ on the second Sunday of November in 1988. She had just graduated with a degree in communications, was working an exciting new television job in Seattle, and was preparing to marry her college boyfriend. For a 22-year-old, the pieces of life were falling into…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
God’s grace, and only this grace, can offer salvation to humanity. “So God created mankind in his own image…male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Humankind disobeyed and corrupted their original relationship with God. In our fallen state, we can do nothing by ourselves to recover this…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
Is “Prevenient Grace” Biblical?
The task of establishing the idea of “prevenient grace” from a New Testament perspective may be challenging because the term itself does not appear in the New Testament or in the whole Bible for that matter. The term is theological and presents a Wesleyan…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
Interwoven throughout the fabric of the Old Testament is the life-giving and hope-filled confession of faith: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 145:8, ESV). From narratives (Exodus 34:6-7; Numbers 14:18) to prophets (Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2),…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
Prevenient grace has a foundational place in John Wesley’s theology. Why is this so? Because salvation is central to the Christian faith. Wesley stated, “salvation begins with what is usually termed (and very properly) ‘preventing grace.’”1 Prevenient grace, as a crucial aspect of Wesley’s doctrine…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
The term “prevenient grace” is not in the Bible. Indeed, this whole way of speaking of different kinds of “graces”—“prevenient grace,” “saving grace,” “sanctifying grace”—is not the way the biblical writers speak of grace. Where then did this language and phraseology come from?
The answer…
Sep, 01, 2020 0
There is a difference between providential grace and prevenient grace. Providence is how God provides for the sustenance and provision of his creation.1 God “sees to” (Gen. 22:8, 14) what is needed to sustain the world and to provide for individual persons. How God’s providence affects each person’…
Aug, 10, 2020 0
I once received a gift for Christmas with some assembly required. It was packed in twist ties and styrofoam inside a glued and stapled box, inside wrapping paper, inside decorative (evidently steel-belted) ribbon, with a list of instructions in four languages, none of which used words commonly…
Aug, 10, 2020 0
The opening line of John Wesley’s sermon, “On the Fall of Man,” poses a question nearly as old as humankind and proposes an answer that would have sparked no controversy in his day and great controversy in ours. “Why is there pain in the world; seeing God is ‘loving to every man, and his mercy is…