God has many people that he has not yet called, and all of our efforts in the world will not convert one of them...It is God in the exercise of his will that brings forth men and women, begetting in them this new life through the Word and the Spirit, and that we are able to press on and know that he is going to use us to accomplish his purpose. But there is another thing and that is a matter of motivation, because great gifts ought to motivate, shouldn't they? And the greater the gift, the greater the motivation. Try to imagine yourself an orphan in destitution, in poverty, who is malnourished, not being handled affectionately, and who knows no security, when a couple comes along at great sacrifice and cost to themselves. Perhaps they have exhausted all of their physical resources to take you into their home. To take you out of the poverty, the filth, the illness, and the lack of love, and to put you in a family. Could you begin to imagine what your heart's response would be to that couple? Could you imagine how you would love them? How you would want to please and obey them? You would even die for them if you really understand what they had done for you.
Well, the orphan is nothing in comparison to where we were. We were not in an orphanage, we were in prison. And we were not just in a prison, we were in a prison with a death sentence. We were in a prison where we were going to be cast into hell for evermore, and we hated the one who offered to deliver us. We hated him, his purity, his law, his grace; we wanted nothing to do with him. Yet he chose us from eternity, to place his love upon us. He sent his only Son to give his own life to deliver us. And then he sent the Spirit to come calling and he brought us to himself. He made us his own. He did not just constitute us righteous and pardoned our sins; he brought us into his family and he gave us this new nature. Doesn't that make you want to serve him and not yourself; to pursue holiness and not sin; to glorify him in all things? Just look on the gift that has been bestowed from above—the good gift, the perfect gift, the greatest gift—and love the Giver.1
Joseph A. Pipa
18 Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.