I think some people confuse faith with what The Bible talks about when the word "faith" is used. Believing is an important initial step toward faith, but if it's just something you know, it's just as irrelevant as knowing that Abraham Lincoln is the 16th president. You have to be willing to bank on it. Because if you truly grasp even a surface understanding of what God has done for people, you know that there's nothing to do but respond. And you also know that no response - no matter how extreme - is ever going to be enough to make up for your sorry existence.
People in the Calvinist camp tend to combine "faith is a gift" with "you were dead in your trespasses", and assume by "dead ", that God means incapable of anything good. If a person is incapable of anything good, then God has no reason whatsoever to have mercy on them. No person can come to father unless The Father draws him to Himself. God has to see at least some inkling of potential in you in order to empower you for service to His kingdom. To believe anything else is to assume there's some factor in God's decision making that we're completely clueless about, which I suppose is possible. Granted, we should not assume that we know all of the ins and outs of God's decision making. We don't know ourselves as well as we presumably should and so how can we know what exactly led God to show compassion on us? More so, we should not take any credit for the good that is in us, because we didn't put it there. Good comes from external influences. We have the capacity to respond to those influences but without the influences, we are hopeless. And even with a treasure trove of good influence we are still prone to amplify whatever negative influences come upon us. We need Jesus' intercession. Woe to those who reject it.
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