One year ago, in the Article of the Month, we published John Gerstner's lecture from 1978 PCRT Conference on TULIP and he had this to say regarding which of the 5 Points that was most troublesome for people to accept. In his classic manner, he expresses this here:

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It is my deep conviction based on many, many encounters, that the main reason people have problems with TULIP and with the Reformed Faith in general is because they do not believe in total depravity. They think it’s the article we’re coming to, unconditional election and limited atonement, but, every time, just yesterday, when I was speaking on a campus in Ohio, it came out once again. I don’t have a time to mention, but every time it comes out, that the seeming opposition to the decrees reveals an already latent, and perhaps unsuspected opposition to this first doctrine. It’s like a person saying “I have a pain in my shoulder” and the physician says “There’s nothing wrong with your shoulder, you’re suffering from gall bladder trouble.” We think it’s the decree that’s the locus of our problem, but, if we look carefully, almost invariably, we’ll be discovering it’s because we can’t take the insult of man as he is described. And if you think, incidentally, that I have been a little rough on you, you should read George Whitfield, taking you to the tomb of Lazarus, for example, and reminding you, that that cadaver is an exact one-to-one correspondence of your dead soul, and making it very, very plain that you stink in the nostrils of almighty God. I think he would have been somewhat disappointed in the inadequacy of my presentation, and all I can say is that George Whitfield is guilty of understatement. It is impossible, to indicate how utterly gone we are. But, if you do once convince yourself of that particular truth, you’ll be just like Martin Luther. You’ll accept unconditional election, even if it weren’t in the Bible! You’d start putting apocryphal literature in there, just to make sure that it was spelled out. It just had to be! In Bondage of the Will, the way Luther, who was a Calvinist before Calvin, as you know, although some Lutherans as you know, don’t always know that. And Luther who was a Calvinist before Calvin puts it is, “I know Martin Luther well enough to know that he would never ever have found his way out of this miry pit if God hadn’t reach down and lifted him out.” It is as simple as that! And once you get that idea, that you are gone, and the thoughts and intents of your heart are only evil continually, you know full well that you have a spark of life in you. If there’s the slightest yearning for holiness, any impulse whatever towards Jesus Christ, is because something has happened to you. God has visited you. This is what the theologians call the divine initiative.
~ John Gerstner

The Chestnut Mare