Today we have a guest post from our dear friend, and former member (who now lives in the great state of Texas), Gino LaPointe. 

"When John McArthur’s book, The Gospel According to Jesus, came out, an elder in the Bible church that I had just started attending, gave me a copy.  Before I finished the book, I had lost all confidence that I had really been saved in the first place. There was no way, in my understanding of what John McArthur was saying, that I could even have been remotely saved.  So, the next thought was, then, did I need to get saved, now?

Then, there was no way that I could get to the point where I felt that I could even ask him to save me.

All I kept seeing was how far my true heart was from “total” surrender. No matter what I confessed, and attempted to surrender to the Lordship of Jesus, I kept discovering deeper, darker, un-surrendered parts of my heart.  I finally realized that it would be absolutely impossible for me to maintain an Arminian view of salvation with John McArthur’s teaching.   The closer I looked at my relationship to Jesus’ Lordship, the more I realized how far away I really was.  Only a Calvinist view of salvation could work with John McArthur’s teaching.

There was no way possible for me to “fully” surrender simply by the power of my own free will – no child of Adam can.  “Total” surrender, while still lost, is something that a unregenerate, fallen man cannot do, at least not “fully”.  To “fully” surrender, while still lost and dead in trespasses and sins, would take the miraculous work of the Holy Ghost.  He would have to do it, he would have to break my will into submission.  Why? Simply because the closer I looked at my will, the more I realized that pride was controlling my will.  Pride won’t surrender, unless it is humbled or broken. And “full” surrender requires being “fully” humbled or “fully” broken.  A lost man cannot do that to himself. Pride doesn’t commit suicide like that. So, if John McArthur was to be right, I needed to be a Calvinist.  However, I was still very young in the faith, and at that time, I was not a Calvinist.

I guess that at that time I was probably something more like a “four point” Arminian, i.e. I still believed in eternal security.

Therefore, I went before the LORD and begged him to let me know if I really had gotten saved, before.  I went to an evening service at Pastor Huff’s church, but it was more than a year before they had called him to be the Pastor.  The Pastor at that time preached exactly on the subject that was gripping my heart.  I do believe that the LORD convinced me that I was already saved.  I was also convicted that I should not let someone ever talk me out of my salvation again, even someone like John McArthur.  I gave the man back John McArthur’s book.

However, as an already born again Christian, I realized that I did need to strive towards fully surrendering to the Lordship of Jesus.  I’m still not “fully” there yet, but I believe that I’m really saved, and I am convicted in the areas that I still need to surrender.  Yet, I realize now, that it was a miraculous work of the Holy Ghost when I got saved. 

How can I think that, I, as a lost child of hell, could do the same miracle that the Holy Ghost does?  Also, how could a lost child of hell, be so Christ-like, to pray exactly like Jesus did, “not as I will, but as thou wilt”?  For someone to think that they, totally on their own, as an unregenerate, fallen child of Adam, could do the work of the Holy Ghost instead of him, and to be so perfectly Christ-like in their “full” surrender, well, that, I think, betrays a little arrogance.  Why do we want to credit ourselves with so much?  Is it not our pride, even as Christians, that refuses to give the LORD the glory, by denying that he really did it all?  Why are we so bent on demanding that we did it, ourselves?

For so many years, my pride bathed itself in self-glorification, by imagining that I did all that, simply by the power of my own free will.

I wonder, will there will be anyone who will to argue with Jesus at the Judgment seat of Christ,            and attempt to convince him that he really didn’t do it all, that our free will was just as capable as his Divine will?

                          Thank you,

                                       Gino

His point seems to me to be this - If even the most earnest Christian has trouble bringing his will into alignment with God's will, then what is the possibility of the will of the natural man doing so?  The human will is not neutral, it is corrupt, and must be first moved upon by the will of God, or there can be no movement except in the direction of religious pride.  To understand that does not necessarily make one a Calvinist, as Martin Luther and any confessional Lutheran would be quick to tell you.  But to deny it does make one a Semi-Pelagian, whether or not they can see it.