Drawn, Not Dragged

The Fear You Had

The fear had a specific shape. It went: if grace is irresistible, then I was not truly free. If I was not truly free, then my love for Christ is not real love. It is coerced love. It is the love a hostage gives a captor. And a coerced love is a lesser love. Therefore a God who operates by irresistible grace has produced, at best, a creation of puppets who only perform affection because the strings make them.

It is a beautiful-sounding fear. It has the rhetorical momentum of classical philosophy, enlightenment liberalism, and American individualism behind it. And it is completely wrong about how grace actually works.

The fear imagines grace as an external force overcoming an internal will — an army of God's bulldozers pressing against the fortress of your resistance until the wall falls and the bulldozers occupy the city. If that were the picture, the fear would be correct. That would not be love. That would be conquest. That would be spiritual imperialism.

But that is not the picture Scripture paints. Scripture does not describe grace as an external force that overwhelms the will. Scripture describes grace as an internal surgery that repairs the will. The will does not lose. The will is healed. A healed will does not need to be dragged to Christ any more than a healed leg needs to be dragged across a room. A healed leg walks. A healed will chooses. And when a will is healed by grace, what it freely and joyfully chooses is the thing it would not have chosen when it was broken.

What John 6:44 Actually Says

"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day."

JOHN 6:44

The key word is draws. In Greek, helkyō. It is the same word used in classical literature to describe a magnet drawing iron, a net drawing fish, a current drawing a boat. It is not the word for drag. There was a Greek word for that — syrō — and John did not use it. John used helkyō, and the distinction matters.

When a magnet draws iron, the iron is not overpowered. The iron does not writhe or resist. The iron moves toward the magnet because the magnet has acted on the iron in such a way that the iron's nature has been engaged. Without the magnet, the iron was inert. With the magnet present, the iron moves. But the motion is, in a real sense, the iron's own. You would not say the iron was dragged. You would say it was attracted. It was drawn.

Now transpose that to the soul. Before the drawing, your soul was iron without a magnet. You had the capacity for God but no orientation. You were not aimed at Him. Worse than that: you were aimed away. Every pole of your desire pointed to yourself. To arouse in you the desire for Christ, God did not have to drag you. He had to install the magnet. He had to introduce into your interior a new orientation — the Spirit — and once the Spirit was there, your iron-soul did what iron does in the presence of a magnet. It oriented. It moved. And the moving was yours, even though the magnet was His.

This is why every converted believer, looking back, experiences the conversion both as something done to them and something they did. Both are true. God drew. You came. The drawing did not make you come against your will. The drawing was itself the repair of your will so that you could come. You experienced the coming as choice because by the time you came, the choice had been restored to you. The work that made the choice possible was done in a place deeper than choice — in the new creation of your inner life.

How He Draws

Think about how a parent draws an angry toddler out from under a table. The parent does not reach in and drag the child by the ankle. The parent kneels down. The parent speaks softly. The parent holds out a piece of the child's favorite food. The parent waits. Eventually the child, of their own accord, crawls out. The parent did not override the child's will. The parent created the conditions in which the child's will was won.

This is a small picture of what grace does in the soul. God does not kick down the door of your heart with His boot. He does something more patient and more effective. He changes the atmosphere inside the house. He introduces scents you cannot help but smell — a little glimpse of the mercy of Christ in a sermon, a verse that stops you mid-reading, a kindness from a stranger that seems to have been arranged just for the day you were having. He tunes your ears until suddenly the passages you skipped over your whole life begin to ring. He tunes your eyes until the cross, which you had never really looked at, becomes the one thing you cannot stop looking at. And slowly, without ever ceasing to be you, you begin to want what you once found boring or offensive.

When the full drawing has happened, the soul comes out from under the table on its own legs. It is not being pulled. It is being won. And the won soul knows, in its depths, that it could not have won itself — because it remembers what it was like to be under the table, furious with the light, certain it did not want what it now wants more than anything. The miracle is exactly that: I now want what I once refused, and I can't explain the change except that He changed me.

The Love That Makes You Lovable

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness."

JEREMIAH 31:3

The drawing in Jeremiah is the same kind of drawing as in John 6. And look at how it is described. With unfailing kindness. The Hebrew is chesed — covenant faithfulness, steadfast love, the kind of love a groom pledges to a bride. This is not the method of a tyrant. This is the method of a lover. God does not coerce the beloved. God romances the beloved. He does what every good lover does: He moves first, He moves patiently, He moves with wisdom so exquisite that by the time the beloved is in His arms, the beloved has long since stopped believing the movement into His arms was against her will.

You were wooed. That is the right word. You were wooed by the God of the universe. Every book you read that you did not expect to affect you the way it affected you — that was the wooing. Every conversation that lingered. Every night you could not sleep and found yourself thinking thoughts you would have called religious in daylight. Every small hunger for meaning you wrote off as indigestion. All of it was His chesed, moving toward you with the patience of an infinite Lover who has forever to finish His work.

And then, at some point, the wooing culminated. He gave you the gift of faith, which is the gift of saying yes with a whole heart. You said yes. You meant yes. The yes was real. But the yes was also the fruit of a long courtship you did not recognize as courtship, conducted by a Lover you could not see, who had been working on your heart since before you had a heart. Your yes was freely given because by the time it was given, your freedom had been restored to the point where you could give it.

Why This Matters Tonight

It matters because the devil will try, later, to convince you that your conversion was coerced. He will whisper that your love for Christ is not real love because you did not originate it. He will suggest that a freely chosen unbelief would be more honest than an imparted belief. He will work this angle because it is one of the few angles that can still wound a believer who has been rooted in the truth of sovereign grace.

When he comes, remember the word helkyō. Remember the magnet. Remember the wooing. Remember that the love you have for Christ is not a puppet's love. It is the love of a soul whose iron has been polarized toward its right pole after decades of being polarized in the wrong direction. The polarization was a gift. The love is yours. The ability to love Him was given, but the loving of Him is now the deepest thing you do. And what is done freely, even though the ability to do it was gifted, remains free in every sense that matters.

Think of it this way: you did not choose to be born with working eyes. That was given. But your looking at your beloved is not therefore coerced. The looking is real. The love in the look is real. The delight at the face is real. Grace works the same way. Grace gave you the eyes. The looking is yours. And the One you look at has been looking back, with delight, since before you could see.

"We love because he first loved us."

1 JOHN 4:19

First is the key word. He loved first. You are loving second. The love is yours. The capacity to love was His. And the whole thing — the drawing, the wooing, the waking, the coming — is not a hostage situation. It is the oldest love story in the universe, with you finally, gratefully, in the arms of the Lover you were made for. He wrote the love letter before time. You are reading it now. It is yours. Read it again.