To bring sinners to salvation, the triune God must extend to them a special, inward, irresistible call in addition to the outward call contained in the gospel message.

¹ The doctrine of irresistible grace says that the Holy Spirit never fails to bring His own to faith. A clear grasp of this doctrine is sorely needed today. The contemporary church is in the midst of a crisis of confidence concerning biblical preaching and the diligent use of the means of grace by which the Holy Spirit works irresistibly in the lives of sinners. The church needs to reaffirm her faith in the invincible power of the Spirit-applied Word of truth.

Grace teaches us that the salvation of hell-deserving sinners is the work of the triune God alone. When Calvinists say that grace is irresistible, they mean that the Holy Spirit never fails to call, regenerate, and save those whom the Father has elected and Christ has redeemed.

The efficaciousness of this grace is defined in the Canons of Dort (Head III–IV, Art. 11):

When God accomplishes His good pleasure in the elect or works in them true conversion, He not only causes the gospel to be externally preached to them and powerfully illuminates their mind by His Holy Spirit, that they may rightly understand and discern the things of the Spirit of God; but by the efficacy of the same regenerating Spirit, pervades the inmost recesses of the man; He opens the closed, and softens the hardened heart, and circumcises that which was uncircumcised, infuses new qualities into the will, which though heretofore dead, He quickens; from being evil, disobedient, and refractory, He renders it good, obedient, and pliable; actuates and strengthens it, that like a good tree, it may bring forth the fruits of good actions.

The Westminster Confession (10.1) reminds us that God’s irresistible grace does not save people against their wills but by “renewing their wills…so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.” Unfortunately, the term irresistible can suggest capricious force or violence to a sinner’s will. If you are a believer, you know that when grace took hold of you, it brought you willingly and lovingly to what God had predetermined for you.

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