Some imagine that the doctrine of election will lead to pride. Quite the contrary!
The truth of God's sovereign electing grace is the very instrument which cuts pride at its root:
"For who makes you different from anyone else?
What do you have that you did not receive?
And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?" (1 Corinthians 4:7)
Christian! Look around you and see many of your own family hastening down the broad way that leads to eternal destruction; perhaps wrapped in religious traditions, and slaves of sin and Satan.
Now, I ask you:
Who made you to differ from them?
Are you by nature, any better than they are?
Look around your town, and see the drunkenness, profanity, degeneracy, prisons, and broken homes and then tell me:
Who made you to differ from them?
Are you by nature, any better than they are?
Look around the world, and see nine-tenths of it bound in sin, superstition, decadence, and spiritual darkness and then ask yourself:
Who made you to differ from them?
Are you by nature, any better than they are?
How can a sinner saved by sovereign grace, be proud?
Look down into the realms of darkness and damnation, and see the angels that fell, bound in everlasting chains. Look at whole nations who, like the fallen angels, have been passed by in God's wisdom and sovereignty and tell me:
Who made you to differ from them?
A proud believer would be totally inconsistent with free grace salvation!
"Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." (1 Corinthians 6:9–11)
Every true believer will say with the apostle Paul, "By the grace of God I am what I am!" (1 Corinthians 15:10) "Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord!" (2 Corinthians 10:17) Oh, how sweet it is to believe our names were on Jehovah's heart and engraved on Jesus' hands before the universe had a being!
[Charles H. Spurgeon]
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