What the unregenerate sinner needs is not free will but a will made free.

Until God grants a new heart with new affections, man will never desire the thing (the Gospel) or the Person (Jesus Christ) he so desperately needs. That is because the will always chooses according to the desire of the heart. And that is just it – the heart of the problem is the problem of the heart. Outside of God’s intervention, the sinner is not just morally neutral towards God, but totally hostile and impenetratably so. The heart is a heart of stone. It is stony only in one sense. For although it is capable of loving many things in this world it is incapable of even the slightest measure of love towards the one true God. That is the nature of spiritual death – the radical corruption of the heart inherent in all the sons and daughters of Adam since the Fall.

The will chooses that which is the greatest desire of the heart at the moment of choice. While the will makes choices every day, the one thing it will never choose is that which the heart hates above all else, namely, God as He really is. For such a choice to be made – for a man to actually enter the kingdom of God – he must first delight in what he hates. This of course is impossible. And this is why something very radical has to happen. Man needs to become a brand new creature all together with brand new desires.

The new desire has to emerge before the choice can be made. He desperately needs a new heart – a heart of flesh, one that beats to know God and until given one, he detests the very idea of it. Jesus made it abundantly clear that if this is ever to happen, he must first have a brand new nature, he needs much more than a spiritual make-over. He needs a spiritual re-birth. The old has to go, the new must come. Unless a man is born again he cannot enter the kingdom God. To fail to see this will not only undermine the biblical concept of the will, it results in a failure to fully comprehend the Gospel.

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(6) Some quotes I came across:

Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
“The Lord has done great things for them.” – Psalm 126:2

“Should we not see that lines of laughter about the eyes are just as much marks of faith as are the lines of care and seriousness? Is it only earnestness that is baptized? Is laughter pagan? We have already allowed too much that is good to be lost to the church and cast many pearls before swine. A church is in a bad way when it banishes laughter from the sanctuary and leaves it to the cabaret, the nightclub, and the toastmasters.” – Helmut Thielicke, Encounter with Spurgeon (Fortress, 1963), 26

“The church’s greatest troublemakers (now as then) are not those outside who oppose, ridicule and persecute it, but those inside who try to change the gospel.” – John Stott

“This distinction [between law and gospel] must be observed all the more when the Law wants to force me to abandon Christ and His Gospel boon. In that emergency I must abandon the Law and say: Dear Law, if I have not done the works I should have done, do them yourself. I will not, for your sake, allow myself to be plagued to death, taken captive, and kept under your thraldom and thus forget the Gospel. Whether I have sinned, done wrong, or failed in any duty, let that be your concern, O Law. Away with you and let my heart alone; I have no room for you in my heart. But if you require me to lead a godly life here on earth, that I shall gladly do. If, however, like a housebreaker, you want to climb in where you do not belong, causing me to lose what has been given me, I would rather not know you at all than abandon my gift.” – Martin Luther, quoted in C. F. W. Walther, The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel (St. Louis, 1928), pages 46-47.

“If you are not a loyal servant of the King, a sheep who follows the Shepherd, a disciple who has forsaken everything, or a believer who has turned his back on a lifestyle of sin, then you are neither a servant, a sheep, a disciple, or a believer – at least not yet. Repent and believe the Gospel, lest you die in your sins and face the eternal wrath of God as many professing christians before you.” – Justin Edwards

“I know I am nothing,” say you. Yes, but you would not even have had grace enough to know you were nothing if God had not given it to you. To be nothing is ours by nature: but to know that we are nothing and to confess that we are nothing is a gift of his grace.” – C. H. Spurgeon.

“Grace does not run in the blood, but corruption does. A sinner begets a sinner, but a saint does not beget a saint.” – Matthew Henry

“Of course any contemporary observer who saw Christ die would have listened with astonished credulity to the claim that the Crucified was a Conquerer. Had he not been rejected by his own nation, betrayed, denied and deserted by his own disciples, and executed by authority of the Roman procurator? Look at him there, spread-eagled and skewered on a cross, robbed of all freedom of movement, strung up with nails or ropes or both, pinned there and powerless. It appears to be total defeat. If there is victory, it is the victory of pride, prejudice, jealousy, hatred, cowardice and brutality. Yet the Christian claim is that the reality is the opposite of the appearance. What looks like (and indeed was) the defeat of goodness by evil is also, and more certainly, the defeat of evil by goodness. Overcome there, he was himself overcoming. Crushed by the ruthless power of Rome, he was himself crushing the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15). The victim was the victor, and the cross is still the throne from which he rules the world.” – John Stott, The Cross of Christ

“He turns the Roman gibbet of the cross into a triumphant chariot on which He rides in triumph over all His enemies.” – John Calvin

The Greatest News in One Sentence: “That the greatest good (God) offers the greatest action (love) to the greatest need (wrath-owed sinners) by sending the greatest treasure (Jesus) in the greatest invitation (to everyone) into the greatest life (everlasting).” – Jared Wilson

“Paul ran from Christ; Christ pursued and overtook him. Paul resisted Christ; Christ disarmed him. Paul persecuted Christ; Christ converted him. Paul was an alien; Christ made him a member of the family. Paul was an enemy; Christ made him a friend. Paul was ‘in the flesh’; Christ set him ‘in the Spirit.’ Paul was under the law; Christ set him in grace. Paul was dead; Christ made him alive to God. How does one give reasons for this? He does not give reasons; he sings, Union With Christ (Grand Rapids, 1983), pages 86-87.

“A humble and prayerful spirit will find a thousand things in the Bible, which the proud, self-conceited student will utterly fail to discern.” – J.C. Ryle

“At the cross, God stormed the last bastion of the self, the last presumption that you were going to do something for him.” – Gerhard Forde

Robert Cunningham, professor of church history at Edinburgh 150 years ago, on the doctrines of grace:

“There is not a converted and believing man on earth, in whose conscience there does not exist at least the germ, or embryo, of a testimony in favour of the substance of the Calvinistic doctrine of election.

This testimony may be misunderstood, or perverted, or suppressed; but it exists in the ineradicable sense which every converted man has, that if God had not chosen him, he never would have chosen God, and that if God, by His Spirit, had not exerted a decisive and determining influence in the matter, he never would have turned from darkness to light, and been led to embrace Christ as his Saviour.

This is really the sum and substance of Calvinism. It is just the intelligent and hearty ascription of the entire, undivided glory of their salvation, by all who are saved, to the sovereign purpose, the infinite merit, and the almighty agency of God–the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” – Robert Cunningham, The Reformers and the Theology of the Reformation (T&T Clark, 1862), 209

“Man’s will is free to follow his inclinations, but fallen man’s inclinations are always and invariably away from God.” – R.C. Sproul

“Jesus is no longer visible upon earth; but he has promised his spiritual presence to abide with his word, ordinances and people, to the end of time. Weary and heavy laden souls have now no need to take a long journey to seek him, but he is always near them, and in a spiritual manner, where his Gospel is preached… Therefore, come unto him. That is, raise your hearts, and breathe forth your complaints to him… He is just such a Savior as your circumstances require, as you yourself could wish for.” – John Newton, Works (Edinburgh, 1988), II:462.

“How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! Luke 11:13

In a sermon preached in 1740, Jonathan Edwards pointed out that we ask God for basically two kinds of things. We ask him for temporal blessings like health and jobs and family needs. We also ask him for spiritual blessings. But Edwards noted how much more frequently and fervently we ask for temporal blessings:

“They don’t need any preaching to stir them up to take thorough care to obtain those outward things… And if they begin to suffer for want of those things, how much do they make of their sufferings!… Had God nothing better to bestow upon you, when he had made you his children, than a little money or land, that you seem so much to behave yourselves as if you thought this was your chief good?… I am bold to say that God is now offering the blessing of his Holy Spirit to this town, and I am bold to say we may have it only for the asking.”

“You will not be able to extemporize good thinking unless you have been in the habit of thinking and feeding your mind with abundant and nourishing food. Work hard at every available moment. Store your minds very richly, and then, like merchants with crowded warehouses, you will have goods ready for your customers, and having arranged your good things upon the shelves of your mind, you will be able to hand them down at any time without the laborious process of going to market, sorting, folding, and preparing… Take it as a rule without exception, that to be able to overflow spontaneously you must be full.” – C. H. Spurgeon
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