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It is the bounden duty of all who hear the Gospel to savingly trust in Christ, otherwise their rejection of Him would be no sin. Many of our readers will be surprised to hear that this self-evident truth is denied by some who are, otherwise, sound in the Faith. They reason that it is “inconsistent” to call upon the spiritually dead to perform spiritual duties. A certain denomination in England have the following among their Articles of Faith:

We deny duty-faith and duty-repentance—these terms signifying that it is every man’s duty to spiritually and savingly repent and believe (Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Matt. 15:19; Jer. 17:9; John 6:44, 65). We deny also that there is any capability in man by nature to any spiritual good whatever. So that we reject the doctrine that men in a state of nature should be exhorted to believe in or turn to God (John 12:29, 40; Eph. 2:8; Rom. 8:7, 8; 1 Cor. 4:7). Therefore, that for ministers in the present day to address unconverted persons, or indiscriminately all in a mixed congregation, calling upon them to savingly repent, believe, and receive Christ, or perform any other acts dependent upon the new creative power of the Holy Spirit, is, on the one hand, to imply creature power, and, on the other, to deny the doctrine of special redemption.

Arthur Pink confronts head-on a view and practice in some groups to confuse the sovereignty of God and the personal responsibility of man... in this particular instance, evangelism. These people who are most always Calvinists, ironically agree with most semi-Pelagian/Arminians for they hold that "responsibility = ability". In their view, if someone calls a sinner to repent and believe upon Christ, this would imply that the sinner is able to do so, thus denying the doctrine of Total Depravity. The non-Calvinists argue in a similar manner, albeit in reverse, If a sinner is responsible to repent and believe, then the sinner must have the ability to do so, thus effectively proving the doctrine of Total Depravity to be false.

Like all of God's truth, it is like a narrow line along which one must walk and which is so easy to lose one's balance and fall off to one side or the other.

Read this article here: Duty Faith.

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simul iustus et peccator

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