Salvation and Godly Rule

Effectual Calling

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Works

Lesson: Effectual Calling

Genre: Speech

Track: 35

Dictation Name: RR136T35

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Our scripture is from the Gospel of St. John 15:16. Our subject: Effectual Calling. We began last week with the subject of forgiveness of sins. We shall now examine some of the things that precede it, and in the next few weeks, deal with justification, the forgiven, the forgiver, the fact of forgiveness, and various other aspects of the forgiveness of sins, and today, Effectual Calling. John 15:16. “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you.”

The doctrine of effectual calling asserts the priority of God in our redemption. What the doctrine asserts is we do not save ourselves. It is the work of God.

The words of our text were addressed primarily to the disciples, but also to all believers throughout all ages. Over and over again, in all of scripture, we encounter the same declaration, that God chose us, that His choice was behind our coming to him. Thus, St. Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 2:13-14, “God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth: whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” From the beginning, St. Paul declares in this passage, and from the beginning means before the foundation of world, as in Ephesians 1:4. Before time. In 2 Timothy 1:9. In other words, in our salvation, the initiative, the power, is entirely God’s. Now, man wants salvation. This is a need in the heart of every man, salvation, but man wants it on his own terms, and he wants to be his own savior.

As a result, whether he calls his salvation by a pagan name, or whether very often, he calls it Christian, this aspect of original sin will often come in, so that even an ostensibly Christian doctrine of salvation is often implicitly pagan. It is pagan when the power, the element of power in salvation, is reserved to man. An effectual calling, the doctrine asserts that it is the power of God unto salvation that redeems us, that it is God who chooses us, that God who alone is capable of saving us.

Now, to understand this subject of power, power and initiative, let us examine it in as sinful a context as possible so that we can see what is involved in it. The cynic man was, and this is the original sin in all of us, submission to Satan’s temptation. “Ye shall be as gods,” every man his own God, “knowing,” and the Hebrew word knowing has the force of determining, “determining for yourself,” choosing for yourself in terms of your own ideas, what constitutes good and evil. Ultimate power, therefore, ultimate decision is reserved by man. This is original sin. If man can have salvation on those terms, then he’s ready to say to God, “You’re a partner. I’ll let you in on the act.”

Now, let us examine the idea of power in very open, very obvious sin, and then trace it in its workings in man as it moved into religion. Not too long ago, very recently, a woman sociologist made a study of prostitution, and she turned up some very obvious facts as she tape recorded many conversations with prostitutes and studied the situation very carefully, and as a woman, she had more insight into the matter than other sociologists have had, and she summed up the matter thus: “It is not sex the prostitute is really made to sell. It is degradation, and the buyer, the John, is not buying sexuality but power, power over another human being, the dizzy ambition of being a lord of another’s will for a stated period of time. The euphoric ability to direct and command an activity presumably least subject to coercion and unquestionably most subject to shame and taboo. This is a very considerable consideration of power to purchase for a few dollars.”

In the tape recordings of the prostitutes, there were comments like this of one prostitute that what men wanted to buy was power, that you could go into a bar, she said, where there were any number of lonely women who were not prostitutes waiting for a pick-up, far more attractive than she was and they would be passed over by the men to take her whom they could buy. So she said, “It’s more than sex they’re interested in. It’s power. They command you absolutely when they pay money, and so she said what they’re buying is power. You’re supposed to please them. They can tell you what to do and you’re supposed to please them, follow orders. Even in the case of masochists who like to follow orders themselves, you’re still following his orders to give him orders. Prostitution not only puts down women, but it puts down sex. It really puts down sex.”

And then it’s ironic this same woman admitted that what kept her there was the same thing: power, because while they were buying her, she was playing games with them and enjoying the power over them, and while she had had opportunities for marriage and to become a kept mistress, to live under very good circumstances, she didn’t like it because it established a personal tie, a bond of affection which gave someone power over her, and so she said, “I felt I was the boss because I could say ‘no’ to the deal. I didn’t want even the involvement of being a kept woman because then it’s control again. When you’re living with someone, when I was living with someone, that’s when I really felt controlled. Then you can’t refuse. People I’ve lived with, I really felt that they had power because I couldn’t say ‘no’ to them, because then I could lose them and if I did, I would lose my whole life, lose my whole reason for living. I felt freer of men as a prostitute than I would as a wife or as a mistress, or a beloved. Power, then, is the key.

Not too long ago, very recently in fact, some studies were made here in Los Angeles of a number of people who are in mental institutions. In particular, this study was a study of older people, and again, this was the key. There was a surprisingly high ratio of women whose children had married and gone, and who now had no one to exercise power over. One woman patient boasted to the sociologists, again in this case, a woman, that she and her daughter were inseparable, and said, “She wouldn’t buy a pair of stockings without me.” Well, that was precisely the problem. That’s why the daughter and the son had moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and the mother had followed them out, and they’d had to shut the door on her and she fell apart. She wouldn’t allow the daughter to do anything, to buy a pair of stockings without her. She wanted that power over her. The same woman who did the interviewing found that it was a real problem to interview these women, and she commented on the problem, “The interview dispelled any of my doubts about the validity of inferences from the hospital charts that these women were overprotective, conventional martyrs. Even though they were patients and I was the interviewer and a stranger, one Jewish woman forced me to eat candy before she would go on with the interview, saying, ‘Don’t say no to me.’ Another gave me unsolicited advice on whether I should remarry and to whom, and a third said she would make a party for me when she left the hospital, and so on and on. They were ready when she walked into their room to interview them, to plan her life for her, to find a husband for her, to decorate her home, to move in and take over. Power was what they wanted.

Now it is interesting that these studies were carried on by sociologists without any faith, dealing with people without any faith, and the fact that came through was the very naked lust for power that characterized these people. The desire to be as gods, and to make everyone jump and to be totally dependent on them, to boast that “my husband” or “my wife” or “my children can’t do a thing without me. They’re absolutely helpless without me,” and to try to make them helpless. Now this power hunger is very much a part of our world today. Look around and see the very extensive use of the word “power.” Black power, gay power, Indian power, woman power, student power. Just about wherever you turn, you have the same thing, and in every instance, it’s equally irrational, equally insane. In every case, a naked and obvious expression of the lust for power, but we have this same lust for power masquerading as Christian. The neo-orthodox theology, that is, in existentialist theology which pretends to be a seeming orthodoxy while denying all the basic doctrines of the faith, this is very open and obvious. Karl Barth who, perhaps more than any other figure, has had a decisive influence on the church of this century. As an existentialist philosopher, went so far as to say that the Almighty is not God but the Devil, and to write, “God and power in itself are mutually exclusive. God is the essence of the possible, but power in itself is the essence of the impossible.” In other words, through a lot of mental gymnastics, he separated the idea of power from God, and it’s not surprising that power ultimately in Barth’s system centered on man and the state. It’s not surprising that Barth was very kindly in his opinions of the Soviet Union. He was ready to believe in power for the state, but to him, it was blasphemous to talk about God being Almighty and powerful, and omnipotent, but again, it is not necessary to go to Karl Barth and the existentialist theologians, because revivalism is full of it. It places sovereignty in the hands of man, and allows man’s vote to be decisive as to whether God can enter his life of not.

I know that in many churches, there is always problems connected with the hymns. So many people like a certain type of gospel hymn to which the clergy are opposed, and with good reason, because the essence of those hymns is very often self-salvation. Oh, Christ has a part in it, a secondary part, but man really saves himself. Man says “yes” to the Lord. For example, the gospel hymn, “Jesus is Calling.”

“Jesus is pleading, O list to His voice!

  Hear Him today! hear Him today!

They who believe on His name shall rejoice:

  Quickly arise, and away!

Calling, calling today! Today, Calling, calling today! Today!

  Jesus is tendering calling today, is tenderly calling today!”

In other words, it portrays, very nakedly, man as the Lord and Jesus in effect, on His knees, pleading, is the word, “Accept me, let me in.” Another hymn says,

“Jesus is tendering calling thee home.”

Another, “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling.”

And another portrays Jesus holding out promises for you and for me if we will only come home. Instead of Lord, he’s a salesman, begging us, offering us bribes and promises. It is blasphemy in terms of scripture, and it’s not surprising that such blasphemous evangelism is very successful. What is says, in effect, is you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can submit to Satan’s temptation, but you are God, that the ultimate choice is yours, that power is in your hands, and at the same time, call yourself a Christian. You’ve made Jesus now answer to your beckon call. You shut the door on him or you open the door to him. When the incarnate God, maker of heaven and earth, is seen as begging man to accept his bribes, holding out promises for you and for me, then there is no true surrender to a sovereign God, but rather an exploitation of another resource by sovereign man.

Not surprisingly, such revivalistic additions to churches are proud, contentious, and self-righteous sinners, who expect the church, other members, the pastor, the boards to submit to their will and to gratify them as they have been taught that God and Christ supposedly have gratified them already. The kind of salvation peddled by such humanistic hucksters is not of God. St. Paul, St. John, all of scripture emphatically speak against it. St. John says in John 1:13, that all who of born of Christ were born not of the blood, not of ancestor, not of the will of the flesh, not because their human nature choose the Lord, nor of the will of man, not as the result of the work of any man, but of God. It is the act of God, not of man, that saves man. Biblical salvation is not self-salvation.

Regeneration is entirely the act of God. Conversion is our response to that act, impelled by the Holy Spirit. Effectual calling thus, means that it is God who saves us, that it is God who, before the beginning of the world chose us, and in his own time, works in our hearts so that we come to him. Our Lord said, “Ye had not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.”

Our Lord also went on to compare himself to the vine and us to the branches, and a century ago, C.J. Ellicott, in commenting on that, pointed out, “Each one as a branch, ever joined to Christ, was to grow away from him in the development of his own work, and was to bring forth his own fruit. A branch is anchored into the vine, and then it grows out in terms of its own direction, in terms of its own calling and work, and brings forth fruit, the vine, and so our Lord says, ‘I have chosen you and ordained you that ye should go forth, grow out in terms of your own calling, your own vocation, your aptitudes, and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain.’” The word “ordained” there modifies not only us, ordained you, but ordained that you should bring forth fruit, and ordained that your fruit should remain, so what the doctrine of effectual calling says is that not only does God call us effectually, but it is also a call to effectual living.

It isn’t that God saves us and then there’s a big gap and we go to heaven, and it’s a kind of sink or swim proposition in between. We are on a battlefield, true, and life is never easy, but effectual calling is followed by effectual living, and when we believe in effectual calling, we are required also to believe in effectual living. This is why St. Paul declared that we know that our labor is not in vain in the Lord. He has ordained us, chosen us, and ordained that we go forth and bring forth fruit, but this is not all that this passage tells us.

Your fruit should remain. This is his ordaining, that whatsoever ye ask of the Father in my name, He may give it to you. This is again a very startling statement. It is inseparable from the first part of the passage, “Ye have not chosen me.” Therefore, this makes a difference. If you chose me, it would be your decision and would only stand as much as man’s will stands. You would bear no fruit and your prayers would have no answer. You would not be of me. What you would do in the way of salvation would be self-salvation. Your work would be your own work, not my work through you. Your prayer would get no further than your own mind because you are, in effect, praying to yourself with your own power, but since I have chosen you and I have ordained you to effectual living, I also ordain you to effectual prayer. When you pray in my name, as my representatives on earth, as persons doing my work, living in my spirit, seeking as I have sought to do the will of the Father. {26:00}

Thus, the doctrine of effectual calling is a very far-reaching one. It has to do not simply with our salvation, but with our living, with our praying, with the totality of our life. When we believe the doctrine of effectual calling therefore, we need to say, it is much more than once saved, always saved. That indeed is true. That is a cardinal doctrine of the faith, but unfortunately people have stopped there. Indeed, once saved, always saved is central to what this teaches, but one saved, always saved, and once saved, saved for effectual living, and for effectual prayer, and we are called to work and to pray in that confidence. This is what the doctrine of effectual calling means. It means that we are now redeemed from the ineffectuality of our own lust for power, of our silly and idiotic attempts to play God, and we are grafted into the power of God unto salvation, effectual living and effectual prayer. This is why, when we are indeed the Lord’s, “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that our salvation was thy work, that our living and our working is thy work, and our praying is the work of the Holy Spirit within us. Teach us, therefore, to do all things unto thee and of thee, that even as our calling was effectual, our living and our praying may be increasingly more and more effectual in thee and unto thee. In Jesus name. Amen.

Are there any questions now, first of all, with respect to our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. True. He came unto His own, Israel, and Israel received him not, but this in itself was prophesied of old and it was a part of the sovereign, predestinating counsel of God, so that even with regard to Judas, who rejected him, betrayed him, we are told in scripture that this was ordained by God for His purpose, that even the High Priest, in the sentence he passed, was fulfilling the purpose and plan of God. Yes?

[Audience] {?} Do you see {?} scripture and {?} you’ve just got to believe {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, it isn’t their right, but the emphasis is not exactly right. The promises are there, and God declares He keeps His word. It’s not that we ourselves obligate God, but God himself of His own free will obligated Himself to fulfill these things so that if we meet the requirements of God’s word, He keeps His promises. But it’s God working in us.

[Audience] {?} to your sin {?} not allowed to receive Christ {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, of course they’re setting it in a false context. They’re making man’s choice ultimate, and this cannot be done, but we can believe in terms of the fact that we are called of God, that God has set before us certain promises which He keeps, that the sovereignty is of God, always. Yes?

[Audience] {?} idea that God loves you. Does God love everybody? I know scripture says {?} God, but it seems to me {?} to say that those who {?} those who {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. This gets into a rather difficult problem because our language doesn’t have quite the right terms for it. The idea of common grace has been invented to account for the one, and saving grace for the other fact. I don’t like the terminology, because I don’t like to call the one thing common grace, but our Lord emphatically said that God sends his rain upon the just and the unjust, so that there is a kind of common favor to all men. There is yet patience with God towards all men. On the other hand, there is also judgment. God says he sends the rain on the just and the unjust, but he also says that to rebuke and to punish them, he withholds the rain, and sends them disasters, so that there is a patience with God towards all men, but there is a particular love for His people. A general love towards mankind and the world, a particular love for you and for me and everyone who is His.

[Audience] I think that {?} believe in, more or less {?} on scriptural {?} Who art thou, O man, to tell God what to do? {?} humanist in its {?} doesn’t necessarily jive with God.

[Rushdoony] Yes, it’s the inclination of all of us to say, “It’s not right for God to pay no attention to what I want. He should sit up and take notice when I’ve made up my mind about something,” and it’s very distressing that God doesn’t sit up and take notice every time we make up our mind that this is what we need, and we’re very sure it’s the best possible thing for us, and it doesn’t seem to register with God. Sometimes it doesn’t even register with the rest of our family. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh, now this is trying then to guess what is God’s will about other people round about us, and that we have no right to do, because we have no way of knowing who the elect are. That is, as long as any man is alive, he is potentially one of the elect of God, and we have a responsibility towards him. We cannot withhold from them the word of God. Now, this doesn’t mean we try to ram it down their throats as though, if we don’t do it it’ll never be done, but we have an obligation all the same to recognize that the fact that they have not accepted Christ does not mean they will not accept him, and sometimes the acceptance comes very, very late, very late in life. Sometimes quite dramatically. I could tell you some very moving stories in that direction that still move me very profoundly when I think back on them, and yet humanly speaking, you would have said that such people are the last ones you would ever expect to become a Christian. Yes?

[Audience] {?} twenty years {?} last week before their death {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, very definitely. Did you have a question?

[Audience] Yes, could you give us a brief reconciliation between free will and predestination?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the question is a brief reconciliation between free will and predestination. I’ve mentioned this several times, and I want to state, before I start restating it, that it would require the mind of God to understand the workings of God, and this we do not have, so our understanding is limited. However, what the doctrine of predestination and the doctrine of human responsibility, or limited free will for man is this, that God is the first cause, we are secondary causes. Man cannot be a first cause because only God is. The reality of secondary causes is not removed but rather established by the fact of the first cause. There would be no secondary causes if there were no first cause. We would not exist if God did not exist. Now, ours is a secondary freedom, because we are secondary causes, and therefore, while our responsibility and real and our freedom within limitations is real, it is dependent on the primary freedom and primary determination of God. Yes?

[Audience] Could you explain {?}

[Rushdoony] John 15:6. “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” What he is speaking of here is the fact of those who are ostensibly of Christ, in the church, and fir example, Judas was at the Last Supper and was obviously not of the Lord, and St. Paul had, as an associate, a fellow missionary, Demas, who towards the last of St. Paul’s life, left him, when the persecutions began, had ostensibly been a believer, and so, “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered.” Here is someone who seemed to be of Christ, seemed to be growing, but he reveals that the life was not there. He’s a dead thing, and so he is cast into the fire. He is for the junk heap. Yes?

[Audience] Wasn’t Demas saved?

[Rushdoony] Not the Demas of . . .

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, there may have been others, the name was not an uncommon one, but not the Demas of Paul’s associate. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Titus 2:11, just a minute.

[Audience] And also in Revelation where it talks about {?}

[Rushdoony] Titus 2:11, “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope in the glorious appearing of the great God and our savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works.” Now, what the 11th verse simply says is that salvation hath been made manifest to the whole world, to all humanity, in Jesus Christ, so that it is not saying that all men are saved, or that all men have understood it and accepted the terms, but all men have been confronted with this. Now I believe very literally in the generation of the New Testament, that the whole world was confronted with it. We do have evidence that St. Thomas, for example, went to China twice and carried on work there, and we don’t know how far others got, but every little bit of indication as things are discovered here and there indicates that there was a world-wide proclamation of the faith, and this is what St. Paul is here declaring. Now, what was the other . . . ?

[Audience] It’s somewhere in Revelation {?}

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.” Now, what this is is a part of the Epistle to the church of the Laodiceans, a church that was lukewarm, and therefore, our Lord says earlier in the chapter, “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Now here was a church that was ostensibly a Christian church, but it really wasn’t for or against Christ. It was just lukewarm, straddling the fence on all issues, playing games at being ostensibly Christian when it was not, and yet not going out and openly opposing him, and so our Lord, in a sense, is saying, “Alright, here you are, a dead church, neither hot nor cold. I’m summoning you to a decision. Openly for or against me,” but it’s very clear what they are. He is taking them off the fence. By confronting them, he is making them aware of their unregenerate fact, and so they are being judged. Yes?

[Audience] {?} as a Christian?

[Rushdoony] Yes, the Laodicean church has always been a byword for a church that will not be Christian, but doesn’t want to be openly anti-Christian.

[Audience] Christ {?}

[Rushdoony] No, oh no. He is there as their judge. Yes?

[Audience] {?} billboard that said {?} going to Hell.

[Rushdoony] Yes, there was a famous painting on the subject of Christ knocking at the door in the Victorian Era by Holman Hunt, and it was ultra-Armenian, and Holman Hunt, I don’t believe, was even Christian. I may be wrong on that point about Holman Hunt, but certainly the circle he was with was rather peculiar one for him to have been so closely associated with, but the idea of the picture was there was no door knob or handle on the outside of the door, so there was no way you could get in unless they opened the door from the inside, and most people have the impression of that passage from the Holman Hunt painting, that the person inside has the power, and Christ can’t come in unless you open the door and let Him in, but our Lord begins the letter by saying He’s going to spew them out of his mouth, they’re distasteful to him. He is the judge, and he appears at the beginning of the seven letters, as the royal judge who is now passing sentence of these seven churches.

Now, the seven churches, the number seven meaning fullness, represent all kinds of churches in all ages, and so our Lord is saying, “This is how in every age I deal with the church. The Laodicean church will be so dealt with, the Philadelphian church will be so dealt with, and so on. So as the royal judge, pronouncing sentence, he issues these seven letters, but people read this now in terms of Holman Hunt’s painting. It’s interesting how sometimes a picture will change the thinking of men about an event. This has happened with regard to a number of historical events. Yes?

[Audience] {?} long hair {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, right. Christ is always thought of as having long hair, and all the evidence for the period is very contrary to that. Not only the statuary and the pictures, but the written evidence that hair was cut so short in those days that it could not be combed back. It was just brushed forward lightly. It was very short, that the old fashioned wore beards, but the majority were beardless. The first picture we have of our Lord in the catacombs shows him as a beardless young man. We don’t know whether it was true or not. We simply don’t know. Yes?

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, our time is just about up, but I felt that before conclusion, and incidentally, those of you who had ordered tapes of the Sennholz seminar, they are here and available. Just see Mr. Dave Graves afterwards.

I thought it would be good, now a days when there is so much bad news in the papers, to bring a little bit that is on the lighter side and slightly in the column of good news. There is a prize boner in Sergeant Shriver’s campaigning in Texas the other day. When he finished his speech, he urged everyone to vote for Nixon and Shriver. [laughter] I wonder if McGovern, after that, thought of another Eagleton affair.

But this especially pleased me. In Prague, Czechoslovakia, a woman, Mrs. Vera Czermak, living in an apartment building, had her husband come and give her the horrible news that he was leaving her for another woman. She thought about it for three or four minutes and decided life was just not worth living without her husband, so she jumped out of the window. She landed on her husband and killed him. [laughter] She was not badly hurt. [laughter]

Let us bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape