I think Spurgeon said it best,
First, let me ask, must we not all of us admit an overruling providence and the appointment of Jehovah’s hand as to the means whereby we came into this world? Those men, who think that, afterwards, we are left to our own free will to choose this one, or the other to direct our steps, must admit that our entrance into the world was not of our own will, but that God had then to choose for us. What circumstances were those in our power which led us to elect certain persons to be our parents? Had we anything to do with it? Did not God Himself appoint our parents, native place and friends? Could He not have caused me to be born with the skin of the African; brought forth by a filthy mother who would nurse me in her “hut,” and teach me to bow down to pagan gods, quite as easily as to have given me a pious mother, who would each morning and night bend her knees in prayer on my behalf? Or, might He not, if He had pleased, have given me some degenerate to have been my parent—from whose lips I might have early heard fearful, filthy, and obscene language? Might He not have placed me where I would have had a drunken father who would have imprisoned me in a very dungeon of ignorance, and brought me up in the chains of crime? Was it not God’s providence that I had so happy a lot, that both my parents were His children, and endeavored to train me up in the fear of the Lord? John Newton used to tell a whimsical story and laugh at it too, of a good woman who said, in order to prove the doctrine of election, “Ah, sir, the Lord must have loved me before I was born, or else He would not have seen anything in me to love afterwards.” I am sure it is true in my case. I believe the doctrine of election because I am quite certain that if God had not chosen me, I would never have chosen Him; and I am sure He chose me before I was born, or else He never would have chosen me afterwards! He must have elected me for reasons unknown to me, for I never could find any reason in myself why He should have looked upon me with special love. So I am forced to accept that great Biblical doctrine.
I do not know how some people who believe that a Christian can fall from grace manage to be happy. It must be a very commendable thing in them to be able to get through a day without despair! If I did not believe the doctrine of the final perseverance of the Saints, I think I would be, of all men, the most miserable, because I should lack any ground of comfort. There is no soul living who holds more firmly to the doctrines of grace than I do, and if any man asks me whether I am ashamed to be called a Calvinist, I answer—I wish to be called nothing but a Christian—but if you ask me, do I hold the doctrinal views which were held by John Calvin? I reply I do in the main hold them, and rejoice to avow it; but far be it from me even to imagine that Zion contains none but Calvinistic Christians within her walls, or that there are none saved who do not hold our views! It is often said that the doctrines we believe, have a tendency to lead us to sin; I have heard it asserted most positively that those high doctrines which we love, and which we find in the Scriptures, are licentious ones! I do not know who will have the hardihood to make that assertion when they consider that the holiest of men have been believers in them. I ask the man who dares to say that Calvinism is a licentious religion, what he thinks of the character of Augustine, or Calvin, or Whitefield, who in successive ages were the great exponents of the system of grace? Or what will he say of the Puritans, whose works are full of them? Had a man been an Arminian in those days, he would have been accounted the vilest heretic breathing; but now we are looked upon as the heretics and they as the orthodox! We have gone back to the old school; we can trace our descent from the apostles; it is that vein of free grace running through the sermonizing of Baptists which has saved us as a denomination! Were it not for that, we should not stand where we are today. We can run a golden line up to Jesus Christ, Himself, through a holy succession of mighty fathers who all held these glorious truths—and we can ask concerning them—“Where will you find holier and better men in the world?” No doctrine is so calculated to preserve a man from sin as the doctrine of the grace of God
George Whitefield said, "We are all born Arminians." It is grace that turns us into Calvinists. Calvinism did not spring from Calvin. We believe that it sprang from the great Founder of all truth. I believe that Christ came into the world not to put men into a salvable state, but into a saved state. Not to put them where they could save themselves, but to do the work in them and for them, from first to last. If I did not believe that there was might going forth with the word of Jesus which makes men willing, and which turns them from the error of their ways by the mighty, overwhelming, constraining force of divine influence, I should cease to glory in the cross of Christ. A man is not saved against his will, but he is made willing by the operation of the Holy Ghost. A mighty grace which he does not wish to resist enters into the man, disarms him, makes a new creature of him, and he is saved.
(Charles Spurgeon,
Sermons, Vol. 2, p. 124). (Charles Spurgeon,
Sermons, Vol. 7, p. 298). (C.H. Spurgeon,
Sermons, Vol. 3, p. 34). (C.H. Spurgeon,
Sermons, Vol. 10, p. 309).
