The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed by Kathy Shortridge of Billings, Montana from the tape, GC 1301-P, titled "Bible Questions and Answers Part 18."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. ©1981. All Rights Reserved.

Question

I took a Bible course a couple years ago where the teacher said, "That because God is sovereign and He chooses certain people to come to Him in salvation, and too, because the Bible doesn’t say anything to the contrary, that its basically unbiblical to pray for the salvation of an nonbeliever. I’d like to hear what you have to say about that and straighten me out.

Answer

Well, I just think that’s silly. Its never unbiblical to pray. Praying for the salvation of an unbeliever is pretty standard fare. Jesus asked His disciples to pray that the Lord would send forth laborers into the harvest and that is an assumption that he was praying that someone would go and tell those people about Christ. Paul over and over and over prayed for the church and certainly prayed for their growth and their building up and implied in that is their evangelism. There is no commandment specifically in the New Testament that says to pray for the unsaved, but there is no commandment in the New Testament that says pray for your mother-in-law either. I mean there are some things that are obvious. I’m not picking out mother-in-laws as the most obvious of all to pray for, but all I’m saying is that there are a lot of things that aren’t touched. We go to God in a very normal way about every need and about everything.

You should read this book called “Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God”. Its a paper back by J. I.. Packer, in which he shows how that the sovereignty of God and His elective purpose does not eliminate prayer for the unsaved. Just to give an illustration: the Spirit of God is operative in your life, when you want someone to come to Christ, what is the first thing you do? You pray for them, and that’s the prompting of the Spirit of God in your heart. God not only chooses them, but He chooses the process by which that comes about. And that is through human instrumentation in prayer and in witnessing. If we don’t need to pray, then we don’t need to witness either. We don’t need to do anything, we’ll just let God come down and do His number on them.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
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