The Parable of the Soils: What God Alone Can Do

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Why does the same gospel produce such different responses in different people? Jesus addresses this very question in His parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1–23; Mark 4:1–20; Luke 8:4–15). A farmer goes out to sow his seed, which Jesus identifies as the Word of God. The seed falls upon four different kinds of soil, representing four different responses to the Word. Notice that the sower scatters the seed freely, without first determining which ground is most likely to produce a harvest. This is how we are called to proclaim the gospel. We preach Christ indiscriminately, to everyone, without attempting to determine who is elect or who might respond favorably. The same gospel is proclaimed, with the same promises and the same call to repentance and faith. Yet the results are dramatically different. The difference lies in the soil, which represents the condition of the human heart. And there is a vast difference between hearing the gospel, making an outward profession of faith, and actually being born again.

The first soil is the hardened pathway. Here the seed falls upon ground so hard that it never penetrates. The birds come and quickly devour it. Jesus explains that this represents the person who hears the Word but does not understand it, and Satan snatches away what has been sown. There is no saving response, no repentance, no faith. He may follow the words well enough at an intellectual level, but the message is not received with spiritual understanding. This reminds us of what Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 2:14, that the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God because they are spiritually discerned. The problem goes far deeper than a lack of information. The sinner’s heart is naturally opposed to God. He needs far more than persuasion. He needs a new heart.

The second soil is the rocky ground, and here things become more deceptive. The seed springs up quickly, and initially everything looks promising. Jesus tells us that this person receives the Word immediately and even with joy. Think about that. There is an enthusiastic response, perhaps accompanied by tears, a public profession of faith, baptism, and involvement in the life of a church. To those looking on, this may appear to be a wonderful conversion. Yet Jesus says there is no root. When tribulation or persecution arises because of the Word, the person falls away. Luke records that such people “believe for a while” (Luke 8:13). There is a temporary faith that looks very much like the real thing, yet it differs in kind from saving faith, and testing exposes it. The initial joy may have been sincere as an emotional experience, but it was not evidence of genuine regeneration. This is why we must never confuse enthusiasm for Christianity with the new birth. Emotional responses may accompany genuine conversion, and often do, but they cannot establish that conversion has actually occurred. As 1 John 2:19 explains, those who finally depart from the faith demonstrate that they never truly belonged to Christ.

The third soil presents another danger, perhaps even more subtle. Here the seed falls among thorns, and the plant begins to grow. There is a response to the Word, and outwardly there may be every appearance of Christian faith. Yet as time passes, the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things choke the Word, and it proves unfruitful. Unlike the second soil, Jesus does not specifically say that this person falls away. Indeed, such a person may remain outwardly attached to a church for many years. The problem is that the heart is increasingly occupied with other things. Christ does not have its supreme affection. The things of this world, many of which may be perfectly legitimate in themselves, have become more important than the things of God. This person may still profess faith, but no mature spiritual fruit is produced. An outward attachment to Christianity, even one that lasts for decades, is no guarantee that someone has actually been born again.

Then we come to the fourth soil, and here everything changes. This person hears the Word, receives it, understands it, holds it fast, and bears fruit with perseverance. Jesus speaks of different yields, thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold. Not every Christian produces the same amount of fruit, but every genuine Christian produces fruit. This is the only soil in the parable that represents a truly regenerate person. The fruit does not make the soil good. Rather, the good soil produces the fruit. This is precisely the relationship between regeneration and the Christian life. Good works are the evidence of salvation and never its cause: having been saved by God’s grace, we will bear fruit. The fruit may vary greatly in its abundance and maturity, and genuine believers still struggle with remaining sin. Nevertheless, where God has granted spiritual life, that life will become evident.

What accounts for the difference between the fourth soil and the first three? We need to be careful here and allow Scripture to speak for itself. The story itself never tells us how the fourth soil came to be good. It describes the different responses to the Word and their outcomes. Yet Jesus does not leave the question unanswered. Between the parable and its explanation, the disciples ask why He speaks in parables. He replies that to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven “has been given” to them, while to the crowds it has not been given (Matthew 13:11). Now notice how Jesus describes the soils. The person on the pathway hears the Word and “does not understand it” (Matthew 13:19). The person in the good soil hears the Word and “understands it” (Matthew 13:23). Set these verses side by side, and the understanding that marks the good soil turns out to be the very thing Jesus has described as a gift. The difference is not that one sinner was naturally more intelligent, humble, wise, or spiritually inclined than another. The difference is the sovereign grace of God.

The rest of Scripture speaks with the same voice. In Ezekiel 36:26, God promises to remove the heart of stone and give His people a heart of flesh. Notice who performs this work. God does. In John 3:3–8, Jesus teaches Nicodemus that no one can see or enter the kingdom of God apart from being born again, a sovereign work of the Holy Spirit. In John 6:44, Jesus explains that no one can come to Him unless the Father draws him. And in Acts 16:14, when Lydia heard Paul’s preaching, we are specifically told that the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying. The Word was proclaimed outwardly, but God performed the necessary work inwardly. James 1:18 and 1 Peter 1:23 likewise connect the new birth with the Word of God. Peter speaks of seed as well. We have been born again, he says, “not of perishable seed but of imperishable,” through God’s living and lasting Word. Two verses later he calls this Word the good news that was preached (1 Peter 1:25). The seed in the sower’s hand is no ordinary seed. God uses the proclamation of His Word as the means through which He brings sinners to spiritual life. The Holy Spirit opens blind eyes, gives a new heart, and brings the sinner willingly to Christ in repentance and faith. The fourth soil is good because God has graciously made it so. What the parable shows us in the fruit, the rest of Scripture explains in the root.

What enormous encouragement this gives us in evangelism, and what a solemn warning concerning false professions of faith. We cannot regenerate anyone. We cannot manufacture saving faith through persuasive techniques, emotional manipulation, or human effort. As Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). We preach Christ crucified and risen, calling all people to repent and believe, knowing that everyone who comes to Him will be received. In Luke’s account, Jesus presses the point home: “Take care then how you hear” (Luke 8:18). Our confidence must never rest merely upon a decision we once made, an emotional experience we once had, or the length of time we have been associated with a church. The question is whether we are presently trusting Christ and whether our faith is bearing the fruit that His grace produces. No Christian is without sin, and our fruit is never the ground of our acceptance before God. Christ alone is that ground. If this parable leaves you troubled, look hard at what you are relying on. Your own efforts cannot bear that weight, and neither can your faithfulness. Make sure your full reliance is on Christ Himself. The same sovereign grace that brings us to Christ keeps us in Christ (Philippians 1:6). And so we sow the gospel freely, examine ourselves honestly, rest in Christ completely, and give all the glory to God. Salvation, from beginning to end, is of the Lord.

What About Jacob and Esau? Corporate Election and the Argument of Romans 9

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Bring up Romans 9 in a conversation about election, and sooner or later someone will say it: “Paul isn’t talking about individuals there. Jacob and Esau stand for two nations, Israel and Edom. God chose a people for a role in history. He wasn’t choosing particular persons for salvation.” This view usually goes by the name corporate election: God chose a group rather than particular people.

It’s a common answer, and it deserves a fair hearing, because it isn’t simply made up. Some of the very Old Testament passages Paul quotes in Romans 9 do speak of nations. When the twins struggled inside Rebekah, the LORD told her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided” (Genesis 25:23). And when Paul writes, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” (Romans 9:13), he is quoting Malachi, where God goes straight on to say of Esau, “I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert” (Malachi 1:3). That is Edom, the nation.

So yes, nations are in view, and I’m glad to say so. But that doesn’t settle anything yet. The question that settles it is this: what is Paul trying to prove? Follow his argument from the opening of chapter 9 to the close of chapter 11, and the national reading runs out of road long before Paul does.

Here, in plain words, is where I believe the road leads. Paul certainly speaks about nations in Romans 9, but national election can’t explain his whole argument. God chooses particular people for salvation by His own gracious purpose, before they have done anything good or bad, and not because He foresaw anything in them, not even their faith. Then, in His own time, He brings each of them to faith in Christ.

The Problem Paul Is Answering

Romans 9 doesn’t open with a lecture on predestination. It opens with a grieving man. Paul speaks of “great sorrow and unceasing anguish” in his heart, and then he says something astonishing: “I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers” (9:2-3).

Notice what grieves him. Israel had been given the covenants, the law, and the promises, and from Israel, by human descent, came the Christ Himself (9:4-5). Yet so many of Paul’s own people stood outside of Christ. Nobody wishes himself cut off from Christ over a question of which nation will serve which. Paul’s grief is about salvation.

And his grief raises a hard question. If God made promises to Israel, and so many in Israel have rejected their Messiah, has God’s word failed? Paul answers at once that it has not, and he gives the reason: “For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (9:6).

Read that again slowly. Paul is drawing a line inside Israel, between those descended from Jacob by birth and those who truly belong to the people of promise. The problem on his desk is a divided nation, with some in Israel believing and many not. To say “God chose the nation” doesn’t touch that problem, because the nation is the very thing being divided.

Twins in One Womb

Paul proves his point with two examples. The first is Abraham’s sons. Abraham had more than one, but God had said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named” (9:7). Physical birth was never what made someone a child of God. It is “the children of the promise” who “are counted as offspring” (9:8).

Someone might answer that Isaac and Ishmael had different mothers, so of course they were treated differently. Paul closes that door with his second example. Rebekah “had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac” (9:10). One father, one mother, one pregnancy: twins.

Then Paul presses the timing. The boys “were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad” (9:11) when God declared, “The older will serve the younger” (9:12). Before either boy drew a breath, before either made a single choice, God had spoken. Paul even tells us why God did it that way: “in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls” (9:11).

Jacob and Esau did become nations. Genesis says so plainly. But nations come from people, and Paul has fixed our attention on the moment when these two were still unborn. The deeds of Israel and Edom lay centuries in the future. Paul’s subject is what two boys had not yet done. God’s purpose stood before either of them had done anything at all, so that it would rest on “him who calls” and on nothing else.

Listen to the Objections

You can often tell what a teacher actually said by the objections his hearers raise. Paul anticipates two.

The first comes immediately: “What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means!” (9:14). Why would anyone think of injustice? Because Paul has just said that God chose one twin over the other before either had done anything. If God’s choice simply followed what people did, nobody would cry “unfair.”

Paul doesn’t answer the charge by softening what he said. Instead, he quotes what God said to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” (9:15). Then he draws the conclusion: “So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (9:16).

Mercy doesn’t depend on human exertion, and it doesn’t depend on human will either. Whatever finally separates the person who receives mercy from the person who doesn’t, Paul locates it in God, “who has mercy.”

Paul turns next to Pharaoh, to whom God said, “For this very purpose I have raised you up,” so that God’s power would be shown in him and His name proclaimed in all the earth (9:17). Pharaoh was Egypt’s king, of course, and his hardening brought judgment on the whole land. But God addresses him as a man, and Paul draws a personal conclusion: “So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills” (9:18). Paul doesn’t tell us Pharaoh’s final destiny, and we don’t need to claim more than he says. His point is God’s freedom.

The second objection is sharper: “You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’” (9:19).

Think about what that question assumes. Finding fault is what a judge does with someone who has to answer for what he has done. And “who can resist his will?” is exactly the objection you’d expect if verses 16 and 18 mean what they say: that God’s will, and not man’s, is what finally decides.

Once again, Paul doesn’t retreat: “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (9:20). He reaches for a picture the prophets had used. Through Jeremiah, God told the whole nation they were clay in His hands: “so are you in my hand, O house of Israel” (Jeremiah 18:6). Paul takes that familiar picture and presses one part of it: the potter’s right to make “out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use” (9:21). Notice the words “the same lump.” The clay is the same in every vessel; the difference lies in what the potter purposes for each one.

“Even Us”

Next comes a question that brings everything down to earth. What if God, Paul asks, has patiently endured “vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,” in order to make known the riches of His glory for “vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory” (9:22-23)?

Wrath and destruction, mercy and glory: this is the language of judgment and salvation, of where people finally stand before God. And Paul tells us who the vessels of mercy are: “even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles” (9:24).

Watch the small words. The vessels of mercy are those “which he has prepared.” Then Paul says, “us whom he has called.” Which, and then whom. The ESV has caught something in Paul’s Greek. In verse 23, the word for “which” is neuter, matching the neuter word for “vessels,” the form Greek normally uses for things. By verse 24 it has become masculine, the form Greek uses for a group of people. Paul has stopped talking about pots. He is talking about people, and he counts himself among them.

Notice, too, where these people come from. God called them “from the Jews” and “from the Gentiles.” Since they are drawn out of both groups, the called cannot simply be Israel, and they cannot simply be the Gentiles. God has gathered a people made up of persons, from both sides of the line that once divided Jew from Gentile.

I want to be careful here. Verse 24 shows that Paul has real people in view. It doesn’t, by itself, tell us why these were called and others were not. For that, Paul has already pointed us back to verses 11 through 16, and he will take us forward into chapter 11.

Paul doesn’t make us wait that long. Three verses later he quotes Isaiah: though the sons of Israel be as many as the sand of the sea, “only a remnant of them will be saved” (9:27). There is the line from 9:6 again, running right through the middle of Israel.

Responsible All the Same

If the chapter ended there, someone might conclude that people are simply puppets. It doesn’t end there. Paul goes on to explain why Israel stumbled, and he lays the blame on Israel. They pursued the law as the way to righteousness, yet “they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works” (9:32).

Then he tells us what he prays for: “my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved” (10:1). Once more, the subject is salvation. Israel’s problem was never a lack of zeal (10:2). They were trying to establish a righteousness of their own, and so “they did not submit to God’s righteousness” (10:3).

In the middle of that same chapter stands one of the widest invitations in the Bible: “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (10:13). And the chapter closes with God Himself speaking of Israel: “All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and contrary people” (10:21). Picture it: hands held out all day long, and a people who will not come.

The same apostle wrote Romans 9:16 and Romans 10:13, and he felt no need to apologize for either. God is sovereign in mercy, and sinners are responsible for their unbelief. Paul holds both truths without embarrassment, and so should we.

A Remnant, Chosen by Grace

In chapter 11 Paul asks the question his readers would naturally ask: “has God rejected his people? By no means!” (11:1). His first piece of evidence is himself, an Israelite from the tribe of Benjamin.

Then he names the principle that has been running underneath the whole argument since 9:6: “So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace. But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (11:5-6). And he lays it out as plainly as anyone could: “What then? Israel failed to obtain what it was seeking. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened” (11:7).

Look at what Paul shows us inside that one nation: two groups, the elect and the rest, and the difference between them is God’s choice, a remnant chosen by grace. This is the very line Paul drew in 9:6, and a reading that sees only nations in Romans 9 has no way to account for it.

Where Faith Comes From

Some of the most thoughtful defenders of corporate election would agree with a good deal of what I’ve written so far. They don’t deny that Jacob and Esau were real men, and they agree that these chapters are about salvation. Their position is more careful than the quick answer we started with. God chose a people, they say, and individuals come to share in that election when they enter that people by faith.

That is a serious position, and it deserves a serious answer. Those who hold it would add, rightly, that faith is not a work. Faith earns nothing; it receives. So the real question is a different one: what finally accounts for one person believing and another not?

Paul has already given his answer. Mercy “depends not on human will or exertion, but on God” (9:16). If the deciding difference between a believer and an unbeliever were, in the end, the human decision to believe, then mercy would depend on human will. That is precisely what Paul denies.

The rest of Scripture agrees. “And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:30). Every person called in this sense is justified, and nobody drops out between the calling and the glory. So this calling can’t be a general invitation that some accept and others refuse. It is the call that actually brings people to Christ.

The Lord Jesus said it just as plainly: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). Later in the same chapter He said, “no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father” (John 6:65).

So faith matters enormously. Election excuses no one from believing, and no one who hears the gospel is saved without believing it. But faith is the gift God gives to those He chose, never the reason He chose them. The London Baptist Confession of 1689 says that God chose His people “purely as a result of His free grace and love, without anything else about them serving as a condition or cause moving Him to do so” (3:5, modern English edition). For that very point it cites Romans 9:16, as it does again in 3:2.

What about the rest? Here we should speak as carefully as Scripture does. On this, the confession says: “Others are left to live in their sin, leading to their just condemnation, to the praise of His glorious justice” (3:3). God does not have to make anyone a sinner in order to judge him. Left to ourselves, every one of us would stay in unbelief, Jacob included. And when God hardens, as Paul says He does (9:18), He acts as the righteous Judge, giving sinners over to the unbelief they already prefer.

Oh, the Depth!

So, were Jacob and Esau nations? Yes, they became nations, and Paul knew it as well as anyone. But Paul didn’t stop where the national reading stops. He followed God’s choice all the way down to persons: twins before they were born, a remnant inside Israel, and a people called out of Jews and Gentiles alike, “even us.”

May I ask you something? When you read “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,” what rises in your heart? Some people bristle at the second half. But Esau was a sinner who deserved God’s judgment, and so was Jacob. The real wonder is the first half: that God set His love on Jacob at all. Any believer who knows his own heart finds the same wonder in his own story.

And if you’re reading this and wondering whether you could be one of God’s chosen, don’t go looking for the answer in God’s secret plans. Look to Christ. He said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out” (John 6:37). The promise of Romans 10:13 still stands for everyone who calls on the name of the Lord.

When Paul finished these three chapters, he laid down his argument and worshiped:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

“For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”

“Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?”

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. (Romans 11:33-36)

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. ESV Text Edition: 2025. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

A Rock in My Theological Pond

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How the sovereignty of God led me out of the Word of Faith movement

In the fall of 2000, a flyer from Ligonier Ministries arrived in the mail. Dr. R. C. Sproul was coming to Scottsdale, Arizona in November, a short drive from my home, for a Friday night and Saturday morning of teaching. I had watched his videos on the holiness of God years before, and I respected him. Then I saw the subject: “Chosen by God,” the biblical doctrines of election and predestination.

My heart sank. Why would a man with a mind like his travel all the way from Florida to talk about an idea so far past its sell-by date?

I went anyway, and I sat on the back row. My plan was simple. The moment he stopped opening the Bible and started quoting theologians, I would slip out quietly without disturbing anyone.

He never gave me the excuse. He opened the text and stayed there. By the end of Friday night I was thinking, “Well, he has a point. There are verses that lean in that direction. But I have my verses too.” What brought me back on Saturday was the promise of a question-and-answer session. That, I was sure, was where the wheels would come off.

The first two questions were the very ones I would have asked. What about John 3:16? What about 2 Peter 3:9? In a couple of minutes on each, he walked us through the actual wording of those verses in their context. He showed us what we had been reading into them, and then what they actually said.

If someone had pointed a camera at me just then, they would have seen a very white face. I wasn’t excited. I was upset, because I could see that I had been the one reading into the text. I was in trouble, not him.

I left that conference unconvinced. I also left deeply bothered. I had not heard a single verse taken out of context, and I had to admit that my assumptions about certain texts were guilty of that exact charge.

The Same Bible

The irony of my story depends on how I came to love the Bible in the first place.

I grew up in Chester, England. My father was a preacher. When I was eight or nine, I picked up his Bible while he was out of the room, read for a while, and found nothing in it to draw me back. I made a private decision that day: whatever my father was doing, it was not for me. I wanted to be a professional soccer player.

When I was fourteen, my father asked me to go with him to a church service to hear a gospel presentation. I went, quite reluctantly.. but I went. That night, under the preaching of the Word, I saw myself, for the first time, as a sinner before a holy God, and I came to Christ. The boy who had found the Bible boring suddenly could not get enough of it. I spent my allowance on Bible-teaching cassette tapes and gave three or four hours every night to the Scriptures. I preached my first sermon at fifteen.

Hold on to that. The Bible I fell in love with as a teenager is the same Bible God would use, years later, to correct me.

What I Believed and Taught

I trained at Elim Bible College in England (today Regents Theological College). Most of my teachers were Reformed in their understanding of salvation, though they never explained why. I respected them for it, and I had no time for it. My heart was elsewhere. I had applied to a Word of Faith Bible school near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and been accepted. I went to Elim only because my father, who was paying the bills, would not pay for the other.

After graduating in 1987, I became associate minister to a well-known British faith preacher and traveled with him to Australia, New Zealand, India, and the United States. In 1993 I planted a church in Phoenix, sponsored by a Word of Faith church in Tucson. In those years I hosted a live, two-hour program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and taught on a daily radio program called The Spirit of Faith. The church grew from almost nothing to around three hundred people. I was as committed to the movement as a man could be.

Here is what I believed, and what I taught others to believe:

  1. Physical healing was purchased at the cross and guaranteed to every believer now. God had already done His part every time.
  2. Faith is a force that works by spiritual laws, as fixed as the law of gravity. Words spoken in faith have creative power. You will have whatever you say.
  3. God gave man dominion over the earth and now waits to see what we will say. His hands are tied by the words of our mouths.
  4. It is always God’s will to heal and to prosper, so praying “if it be Your will” is unbelief.
  5. Giving is seed sown for a financial harvest. In the early years I didn’t emphasize prosperity. Toward the end, I did.

I never taught that believers are “little gods,” or that Jesus had to suffer in hell to finish our redemption. My understanding of the Trinity and of the person of Christ did not change, and I preached repentance and faith. I believe I was a Christian in those years. But I carried a whole boatload of baggage.

Something else kept me in longer than it should have. When I heard the wildest claims from the movement’s famous teachers, I could simply say, “I don’t believe that part,” and stay. There was no headquarters to answer to. I didn’t have to swallow everything to carry the card.

There were seeds of doubt. I saw healings that seemed genuine. I also conducted funerals for people who had been prayed for and pronounced healed. I would never have told a grieving family that their loved one lacked faith. I said the person had not been able to “appropriate” the healing. It meant the same thing. Looking back, I wince: I prepared people to be healed, but I never prepared a family to face death.

I would now describe the whole system as demanding on our timetable what God gives on His. The blessings of the age to come do break into this present age. Physical healing is one of them, given when and where God chooses. Christ did purchase complete healing for His people. In glory no one will call out from the back row, “Speak up, we can’t hear you!” But not all of it is ours yet. God still heals in answer to prayer. What He has not promised is complete healing for every believer now. Paul says that even we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23).

The Rock Hits the Water

After Scottsdale, I went into what I called my study cocoon. I maxed out my little credit card buying everything I could find on the subject: Sproul’s material, the writings of James Montgomery Boice, and James White’s The Potter’s Freedom. For six to nine months I worked through it with my Bible open, and almost no one knew what I was doing.

I came out convinced. Sproul was right, and I was wrong. I had believed my tradition over what Scripture actually taught. It was about a year before I began to preach it, and when I did, I was not subtle. My first sermon on the subject came from Ephesians 2:1, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins,” and I titled it, “What Is It About Dead Do You Not Understand?”

The God of the Word of Faith waits on man. The God of the Bible waits on no one. “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). Nowhere does Scripture tell us that man is on the earth and does all that he pleases.

The movement loves Mark 11, where Jesus speaks of telling a mountain to be taken up and thrown into the sea. Read on, though, and Jesus turns at once to prayer. The mountain is moved by God, at the asking of His people. Three chapters later, in Gethsemane, Jesus Himself faces a mountain of His own, the cup of suffering, and asks His Father to remove it: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36). The Father’s answer was no. If Mark 11 means what I once taught, then Mark 14 makes our Lord a man of failed faith, and no Christian believes that. Perfect faith prays, “not what I will, but what you will.”

Think of buttoning a shirt. Get the top button wrong, and every button below it is wrong too. I had God’s sovereignty wrong, and I was wrong all the way down. Correcting that top button meant undoing much of what followed: the God whose hands were tied, the words with creative power, the healing owed to every believer on demand.

That raised a question I could not put down. If I was wrong about this, and I was very wrong, what else was I wrong about? R. C. Sproul flew into town, threw the rock of God’s sovereignty into my theological pond, and flew home to Florida. I am still seeing the ripples.

The First Ripple: Is the Bible Enough?

I had always believed the Bible was without error. What I had never grasped was that it is enough.

Near the end of his life, with his death in view (2 Timothy 4:6), Paul wrote to Timothy: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). Paul was leaving Timothy to face whatever would come after him. He did not point him to new revelation or to the next great anointing. He pointed him to the Scriptures. The words Paul chose picture a man fully fitted out for his task, with nothing missing from his kit.

He had done the same with the elders of Ephesus. Believing he would never see their faces again, he warned them that fierce wolves would come in among them. Then he said, “And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32). God and His Word were enough for whatever lay ahead.

Looking back, I can see that we called ourselves people of the Word, but we were really people of our favorite words. The same few verses, usually lifted out of their setting, carried all the weight.

The Second Ripple: Spiritual Gifts

Next I had to face the gifts I had practiced for twenty years. The sufficiency of Scripture did not settle that question by itself. Many brothers and sisters affirm that the Bible is enough and still believe these gifts continue. But it sent me back to the text to ask whether I had confused the extraordinary gifts that marked the founding of the church with the ordinary Christian life that followed.

Today I am a cessationist. Let me explain what I mean, because the word is often misunderstood. I believe God still heals. I pray for the sick, and God is pleased to work miracles in our day. What I no longer believe is that the miraculous gifts of healing, tongues, interpretation, and prophecy are still functioning in the church. The church is built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets (Ephesians 2:20), and God bore witness to the message of those who first heard the Lord with signs and wonders and gifts of the Holy Spirit (Hebrews 2:3–4). A foundation is laid once.

Then I compared what the New Testament describes with what I had seen. In John 9, a man blind from birth received his sight and said, “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind” (John 9:32). In Acts 3, a man lame from birth went into the temple walking and leaping. In more than twenty years, I never saw anything like that. I saw healings, and I conducted many funerals. I never saw anyone deaf or blind from birth healed, or anyone with a severe disability made whole.

Tongues told the same story. As a young teenager I was taken aside by an older man in the church whose ministry was helping people speak in tongues. For about twenty minutes he urged me, “Speak it out! It’s there!” until I said something just to end the ordeal. He told me to go home and practice. For two decades I prayed that way, mostly at home, sometimes for an hour at a time. I heard plenty of stories about someone speaking a real foreign language by the Spirit, the way it happened at Pentecost. In all those years, I never once saw it.

My experience did not settle the question. Scripture did. But my experience finally stopped arguing with it.

The Third Ripple: One Story, One Savior

The next ripple reached the way I read the whole Bible. I came to see Scripture as one story, with Christ and His saving promises at the center from beginning to end. That changed how I read one passage in particular.

I used to preach “the blessing of Abraham” as a promise of wealth. Abraham was rich, I told people, and because they belonged to Christ, Abraham’s riches were theirs to claim. Paul tells us how that blessing reaches us, and what it is: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13), “so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith” (3:14). Two verses later he tells us who Abraham’s offspring is: “who is Christ” (3:16). The blessing came to us because Christ bore the curse in our place. It is being declared righteous by faith (Galatians 3:8–9) and receiving the Holy Spirit, all of it in Christ. I had taken a promise of God Himself and turned it into a bank balance.

The Fourth Ripple: The Church

The ripples reached the church as well.

As a Word of Faith pastor I preached texts more than passages: a verse here, a verse there, chosen to support the point I wanted to make. Today I preach through books of the Bible, verse by verse. It is very hard to take verse 8 out of context when you preached verse 7 the week before.

I also came to embrace formal church membership, something I had never believed in. In the world I came from, loyalty often ran to the traveling ministry and the big conference more than to a local flock. In place of chasing the next big meeting, I came to treasure the ordinary means of grace God gives His people every Lord’s Day: the Word preached, the Lord’s Table, and prayer. They are deeply supernatural, though nothing about them looks spectacular to the world. The New Testament assumes a church that knows who belongs to it. Leaders keep watch over souls “as those who will have to give an account” (Hebrews 13:17), and a shepherd cannot give an account for sheep he cannot name. Jesus says, “tell it to the church” (Matthew 18:17). Paul speaks of those inside the church and those outside it (1 Corinthians 5:12–13). None of that works unless the church knows its own members.

The Gold Watch

To anyone still in the movement I came from, may I say this? Suppose someone tells you that the gold watch your grandfather left you is not real gold. You might be offended. But if you know it is gold, you will not be afraid to take it to the jeweler. Take the convictions you hold dear to the Scriptures. Read the verses in their context. Give them the honest hearing I was forced to give on the back row in Scottsdale.

I began this journey convinced I had a great deal to teach others from the Word of God. The Lord, in His kindness, had a great deal to teach me, and He still does. He did it through the very Bible I had been preaching all along. The God who opened my eyes is the God who does all that He pleases, and I would not have it any other way.

“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen” (Romans 11:36).