Unasked Questions Part 1
Copied from the sermon notes of Pastor Don Elmore
September 16, 2018
Scripture Reading: Lamentations 3:32 and Ephesians 2:11, 12
There is a whole host of different options that a person hears from the Judeo-Christian churches regarding how a person is saved. Does God save you, or do you save yourself, or is it a partnership? If God saves an individual, what individuals does He save?
Most Judeo-Christian churches today would say that salvation is a partnership. I have heard in my past, many sermons that said, “Jesus votes for you, Satan votes against you, and you have the deciding vote. Come up here at the end of my sermon and say the sinner’s prayer and be saved.”
In the country’s early history, almost all the Christian churches were Calvinistic in their theology. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Puritans, Pilgrims were a major part of the churches who taught that God was sovereign; that it was He, alone, that saved individuals. If God elected you, you were saved. If God rejected you, you were condemned to hell. You were born totally depraved, meaning you were going to hell, until the Holy Spirit came and saved you.
It is like the hymn that says: “Born a child of hell, comforted by the Holy Spirit.”
The churches of America taught that every individual of the world was born a child of hell. They had to be turned into a person who was “born again.” Whether God did it alone, or it was done in partnership, it had to be done. In the early days of our nation, it was God who “saved” an individual. The person didn’t do anything. God elected who was going to be saved before the foundation of the world. Their mistake? They ignored the blood of the covenant. They preached that God could save any one of any race. They were universalists.
But by the early 1800s, the process changed completely. Instead of God being sovereign, the individual was sovereign. It was up to man to choose to be saved. God elected those who were going to be saved? It followed the theology of a man and they called it Arminianism.