I had a friend in college who was fairly committed to the proposition that my theology was wrong. He often came into my room and brought literature. Lost of literature. Rushdoony, Gentry, Demar, Sproul, etc. He was persistently frustrating. One day he brought me a book called “Putting Amazing Back Into Grace” by Michael Horton. At the time I had grown increasingly skeptical of my Reformed friends. So the book sat unread and untouched for several months.
As I prepared to go to Pennsylvania for my Christmas break I decided to take the book with me. I don’t remember if I had the intention to pick it up or if it was simply an attempt to prove I could resist the grace of the book.
As the snow poured down slowly, but surely as the grace of God, I was left with many, many hours to read. And read I did. After exhausting the few books I had brought with me I was left with Horton’s book staring at me from the corner of my room.
I picked it up and began to read it. “Election,” he wrote, “does not exclude anybody from the kingdom of God who wants in. Rather, it includes in God’s kingdom those whose direction is away from the kingdom of God and those who would otherwise remain forever in the kingdom of sin and death.” I read and kept reading and before I could realize what I had read, several hours had gone by and the book was completed. I don’t know what had happened, but my former antagonism had disappeared in light of the multitude of texts and the sheer logic of the grace of God for sinners. The Reformation had reached my heart, soul and mind.
