Free Will Quotes

The heart is the main thing in true religion. I make no excuse for asking the special attention of my readers, while I try to say a few things about the heart. The head is not the principal thing. You may know the whole truth as it is in Jesus, and consent that it is good. You may be clear, correct, and sound in your religious opinions. But all this time you may be walking in the broad way which leads to destruction. It is your heart which is the main point. Is your heart right in the sight of God? Your outward life may be moral, decent, respectable, in the eyes of people. Your minister, friends and neighbors, may see nothing very wrong in your general conduct. But all this time you may be hanging on the brink of everlasting ruin. It is your heart which is the main thing. Is that heart right in the sight of God?

J.C. Ryle, Is Your Heart Right in the Sight of God?

 

Then why do you embrace Christ, and your moral Buddhist neighbour across the street does not? Are you smarter than he is? More spiritually sensitive? Better, in any way? What makes you to differ? Is the Holy Spirit working just as hard on him as He did on you? If so, why do you believe, and he does not? No matter how hard you try, you can’t avoid coming to the conclusion that, in a 'free will' system of salvation, those who believe do so because there is something different about them. If the Spirit is bringing equal conviction to bear upon each individual, the only deciding factor, given equality in everything else, is something in the person himself. I believe the only possible difference between the redeemed in heaven and the guilty, condemned, punished sinner in hell is a five-letter word ... It’s called 'grace

~ James White

Free will has carried many souls to hell, but yet never a soul to heaven.

 ~ C.H. Spurgeon

Man is nothing; he hath a free will to go to hell, but none to go to heaven, till God worketh in him" and "you dishonour God by denying election. You plainly make salvation depend, not on God’s ‘free grace’ but on Man’s ‘free will.’ 

~ George Whitefield

 

A man’s free will cannot cure him even of the toothache, or a sore finger; and yet he madly thinks it is in its power to cure his soul. 

~ Toplady

...the whole Pelagian poison of free-will … a clear exaltation of the old idol free-will into the throne of God … That the decaying estate of Christianity have invented. 

~ John Owen 

...the general consent of all that sect is that God (by his foreknowledge, counsel, and wisdom) has no assured election, neither yet any certain reprobation, but that every man may elect or reprobate himself by his own free will, which he has (say they) to do good or evil … [All these things are] forged by their own brains, and polished by the finest of their wits, when yet in very deed they are but the rotten heresies of … Pelagius, long ago confuted by Augustine …

~ John Knox 

They go and set up free-will with the heathen philosophers and say that a man’s free will is the cause why God chooseth and not another, contrary to all scriptures.

~ Tyndale 

 

I once laboured hard for the free will of man, until the grace of God at length overcame me.

~ Augustine