R.C. Sproul

unless it is given to him by the Father.

Now here's what I think that passage teaches.

I think that passage teaches explicitly that man in his fallen state is unable, without some kind of help by God, to come to Jesus Christ.

The passage teaches that explicitly.

passage in Don teaches that if God gives that ability, then whoever exercises that ability to come will indeed be saved.

But John only tells us that whoever believes will be saved.

He also says in chapter 6 that nobody can believe unless it's given to him by the Father.

So you see that we have to be careful not to set those two in opposition or to subordinate an explicit teaching of Scripture.

No one can come.

And yet I hear preachers all the time saying, everybody can come.

That's in direct conflict.

And they argue on the basis of implications drawn from other portions of Scripture.

That is a misuse of the Bible.

Our implications must always be measured by and made subordinate to what the Scriptures explicitly teach.

All right, now there's another problem that I'd like to go over very quickly, and that is that as we study the Scripture, we need to be very careful of words.

Again, any written document is made up of paragraphs, paragraphs are made up of sentences, sentences are made up of clauses, clauses are made up of words.

And word meanings are very important, obviously, to our understanding to what is being said.

Now, there's a real tricky problem that we encounter frequently in our attempts to interpret the Bible.

Here's what happens.

We go to the Bible.