The Bible Provocateur
The Bible Provocateur
LIVE DISCUSSION: The Frustrated Will (Part 1 of 2)
Start with a hard question: if free will could bring us to God, why did Jesus have to die? We press into that tension with a candid look at desire, nature, and the limits of human choice—then trace how grace changes the heart from the roots up. The conversation moves from calling one another to keep sharing the gospel with joy, to recognizing a rising cultural confusion that prizes autonomy while quietly begging for followers. Along the way, we unpack why our choices flow from what we love, how Adam’s fall bent the human will inward, and why Scripture describes repentance and faith as gifts rather than trophies of personal resolve.
We lean into vivid, everyday images to make the theology clear: a dog free inside a fence, a palate that cannot be argued into liking what it hates, talents that cannot be willed into existence. These aren’t cheap shots at human agency; they are a sober look at why the heart needs more than motivation. Christ’s cross is not a lesson in try harder—it is the place where dead hearts are made alive, where the Shepherd’s voice awakens sheep to follow. From there we step into practical ground: renouncing hidden compromises, treating money and influence as God’s to steward, and asking what we’re forcing the indwelling Spirit to witness in our thoughts and habits.
We close with an appeal for better disagreements. Don’t chase wins; pursue truth. Study the Word, refine convictions, and let loving correction do its work so people—not egos—are won. If you’re wrestling with autonomy, grace, and how real change happens, this conversation meets you where you feel the struggle and points you to hope that holds.
If this resonated, share it with a friend, subscribe for future episodes, and leave a review to help others find the show. What question about grace and choice should we tackle next?
BE PROVOKED AND BE PERSUADED!
And it is so easy. Proclamation. I love you too, brother. Man, I love the way you keep going at it. Don't stop. All you believers, don't stop. And we need to like, we need to uh push each other's content. We need to repost each other's content. We need to spread the word of God as often and as much and as pervasively as we possibly can. And um, and to that end, we must never tire of it, we must never lose the joy of it. And it is easy to become complacent or to become congealed in a state of security. And so, you know, so what I want to do is to continue to encourage you all to maintain faithfulness and diligence in your faithfulness. Because we are facing trying times. All moral decorum is being rapidly diminished in our society, and so it means that we are open to a variety and a flood of varying degrees of persecution. Now, I me personally, I see it coming. I believe that the days of apostasy, we're in it right now. I believe that we are witnessing and feeling the weight of apostasy. We're feeling it. I mean, any time that sinful lifestyles can be legislated, we are definitely in some pretty apostate times. But Christians, I don't say this to inspire fear because we're not supposed to be fearful. I say this to encourage your awareness, to heighten your awareness to the situation that pervades. And we need to rely on our Savior Jesus Christ, as he says in John 15, verse 5, he says, Without me you can do nothing. Without me, you can do nothing. And nothing means nothing. And my brother here asked the question: why does the church teach free will? And no one has asked me this yet, but I'm sure the question will come up, which is why do I talk about free will so much? Free will, the idea or the notion of free will, rests in the fact that men still want to be in charge. Still want to be in charge. And they still view the freedom of will to be that which enables them to come to Christ. But what they remove from the equation, what they remove from the equation is how you're able to make a choice for Christ. Now, this person says, we absolutely have a free will. No, you don't. No, you don't. So you think you do, but you don't. Now, am I saying that man does not have a will at all? In fact, I'll even give it to you that we can use the language free will if you want. Yes, I chose to be on this app. But here's the thing. Freedom of will, Christians, freedom of will is constrained. It is constrained by your nature. Like the one guy just asked me, you chose to be on this app. Yes, I do. I did. Yes, I did. But this does not, being on this app doesn't take me outside of the realm of what I'm able to do on this app. Now, here's what I'm what I'm trying to say. Here's what I'm trying to say. All of us have a particular set of bents. For example, I hate green peas. Hate peas. All of you have things that you don't like to eat. You will, it repulses you at every turn. You cannot exercise your free will to make you like it. What did peas ever do to me? Peas make me sick. I can't stand the taste of peas. But anyway, I digress. So what I'm saying is, our natures, our nature governs our choices. If your nature is whatever it is, it is what will determine your choices. Your will is framed and shaped by your nature. Now, you can be, I mean, I'm gonna stretch it a little bit here. I'm gonna stretch a little bit here. I don't care how much free will you have, you can't grow wings and fly. I don't care how much free will you have, you can't make yourself sing like Whitney Houston or Luther Van Ross or some great singer. You can will all you want to. You will never play a guitar like Prince or Jimi Hendrix. You can exercise all you want and do all the things you want to do. It is not likely that you're gonna be able to play basketball like Michael Jordan or LeBron James. I'm sorry. Your free will will not allow you to do that. Now, now, that being said, somebody might say, well, that's a little extreme. I'm not the one promoting free will. I'm saying that man does have a will. But what I am saying is that man's will is, if we use the word free, it is free within the context of his or her nature. All of us have a varying degree of sinful proclivities. There are sins that each one of us chooses above others. Some of us are fornicators and adulterers, some of us are alcoholics, some of us are are gluttons, some of us are covetous, some of us are greedy for power and fame. We all have different things, and those things impact our choices. So the idea that men can choose that would go that men are free to choose what goes contrary to their nature, is absurd. What man goes out to do what he doesn't want to do, or to pursue that which he cannot do? So this is not, this should not be a hard thing for Christians to understand. If you put a dog in a backyard and you got a fence that surrounds the backyard, that dog is free within the confines of the fencing. But within the confines of the fence area, the dog is completely free. Completely free within the bounds of the circumstances. So, Jason, you mentioned volition. Volition, the will, the same thing. The exertion that a person exercises in their own proclivities, their own bents, the things that they are most likely to do based on what they desire. But let's talk about how this impacts Christ and our faith. If man had a free will, and I'm posing a question to all of you, if man had the free will that so many of you say that you do, then why did Christ have to come to earth and die on the cross to save us if all we had to do was exercise our free will? This is what I don't understand. If that was enough to draw men to faith in God, why did Christ have to come to earth and die on a cross? Why? What did the death of Christ change? The death of Christ changed something in the status, the nature of men when they turned to Christ. And because there is nothing you can do without Christ, the only way you can come to Christ is to somehow have your will affected by Christ. Otherwise, why did he come? What is the nature of our redemption and our reconciliation to God? Reconcile how? Think about it. There was a conciliatory relationship between Adam and God. They were together. God gave Adam one directive: do not eat from that tree. This one tree. Adam being completely perfect and upright is literally the only man made from dust that truly had a free will. He had the ability to maintain his uprightness before God, and he had the option to disgrace himself by disobeying God, which is what he did. But when he did, but when Adam fell, he lost the ability to freely choose how or to choose to obey God. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. Now, now you have people in the church screaming and calling me a heretic. I'm preaching heresies, I'm the devil spawn, all this other kind of stuff, because I'm saying you don't have a free will. Adam gave up his free will by his fall and became dead in sin and trespasses. If someone is dead, what life is there in death? None. It's a non sequitur. It's ridiculous. There is no life in death. So if you're dead, then how is it, if you're dead, then how is it you can make choices? What dead men do choices make? I mean, what what choices do dead men make? Choices that only perpetuate death? Such is our nature from the minute we are born. We are born dead to sin, dead in sin and trespasses. Born. So at what point did you in your life inherit or were given, as some of you like to say, at what point did God give you this quote unquote free will? And again, I'm not saying you don't have one. I'm not saying you don't have one. I'm just saying that it is limited, it is constricted to within the boundaries of your nature, which is sinful. So, what you are really free to choose is from the smorgasbord of sin. You can choose whichever sin you want. But what you cannot choose and obtain is righteousness without a sovereign work of the triune God in your wicked hearts. The reason why any one of you would be advocating this quote unquote mythological free will is because you want to stay in charge. You want to be the king on the throne of your own heart. So you come up with all kinds of weird machinations as to trying to sound theologically profound by saying things like, Jesus died to make repentance available or accessible. And it's true to one sense. The gospel message goes out to all. God commands all men everywhere to repent. But there are secret impulses at work in the heart of those who actually do repent. Because the Bible tells us that repentance has to be granted, it has to be authorized. You have to be approved to receive repentance. And when you get repentance, when you get salvation, when you get faith, the scripture says that the gifts and the whole calling, the gifts and the high calling of God are without repentance. Here's what that means. It means that when God gives you a gift, when God gives you a gift, it is not like a man giving you a gift on earth where the man says, I have this gift for you, and then you go, oh no, I can't take it. They get all righteous when people offer them gifts. So somebody offers you a gift, and then you go, no, man, I can't take that, I can't take that. You know, I know you, you know, it put you out. I can't take that. And so the guy takes his gift and leaves. That's not the gift of God. That's not the gift of salvation. Because God says that the gifts and the high calling of God are irrevocable. They are without repentance, meaning that when God gives it to you, you take it. You can't help it. You take it, it's yours. But this only happens for those whom God has chosen and called to be faithful to him, only to his sheep. Sheep don't make choices about their shepherd. They know his voice and they follow him. They don't deliberate, they don't contemplate all the different ways that they might want to consider if they want to follow the shepherd or not. The sheep, sheep are like the dumbest animals on earth. That's true. They're like the dumbest animals on earth. But one thing about the sheep, they know their master's voice and they won't follow another voice. And they will only ever follow their master's voice. And if they should go astray, if they should go astray, it is not because they reasoned or contemplated that they just that they wanted to take another direction. Because as dumb animals, their nature hasn't left them and departed from them. They are still the dumb animals that they are. That's what we are. We're sheep, we're dumb animals. And you know what? I'm proud to be a dumb sheep. Because the one thing that a sheep knows is his master's voice and him he will follow. It's funny. The world tells you today, it the world today ridicules you for being a sheep. Calling someone a sheep now is a bad thing. It's a bad thing. When somebody calls you a sheep, they're calling you a follower. And it's odd because you will find people on a social media platform like this one craving for you to follow them. Like sheep. And then they criticize you for doing the very thing that they want you to do. The world is a crazy place right now, Christians. It is a crazy mix of confusion and chaos. Man is stupid because we reject our Creator and the means through which He has laid out for us to have perpetual communion with Him forever. The Bible doesn't even touch the surface of the most remote part of God's smallest toenail. The Bible doesn't even touch it. The Bible is a speck of what we're going to know about God when we leave here. Women, if you are with a man who is not your husband, give him up right now. If you are defrauding someone out of money, out of property, out of whatever, if you are defrauding people and trying to find justification in some profound outlay that you have allowed yourself to embrace, you better give it up. You better give it up. You better give it all up. If you are lusting inordinately for the accumulation of wealth, power, fame, give it up. Everything that you have, none of it belongs to you. Everything, every single thing that you have on this earth has been given to you, and it belongs to the Lord, and you are entrusted by him to act as a steward of his affairs. Your house is his, your car is his, your clothes are his, your wealth is his, your bank account is his. All of it. You have been hired to be an administrator over God's affairs. What are you doing with it? Your body belongs to him. What are you doing with it? The Holy Spirit of God dwells within you. What are you forcing the Holy Spirit to witness while he is in your heart? What is he hearing in your mind? I can't wait to do a series of videos on temptation and lusts and sin and all these things. But it's more, it's more than just what you do hourly. It is that evil concupiscence that exists and resides in the subliminal heart that has to be extinguished, uprooted, and extinguished. Now that won't fully come. That won't fully come until the restitution of all things when Christ returns. But we have to deal with crushing the seed of the sin that resides within us. This world is a playpen of sin and death, desiring to sift you out as wheat. I have never seen so many Christians come on here, for instance, and want to fight. They want to fight and split hairs over things that we should be talking about and sharpening each other. I want you all to agree with me, and I want to agree with you. I want to disagree with you, and you disagree with me if we have a difference. But we sort it out. That's what Christians do. We debate over things and we make it better. What the collective community of Christianity understands now, they didn't understand 100 years ago, or a thousand years ago, or two thousand years ago. Our collective understanding progresses. It progresses. We get better at understanding and uncovering truths that the Word of God has spelled out for us. We don't need to come out here on these platforms and engage with one another just for the sake of being right. Do I want to be right? Yes. You want to be right? Yes. But not at the expense of the truth. In other words, we don't want to just win arguments. We want to win people to the truth. Which means that we have to believe that we're telling the truth. And we can't tell the truth unless we study the truth. But you have a lot of people who don't spend their time in the word of God, but they'll get on here in a minute and tell you you're speaking heresies.