The Free Choice | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 12, 1862

The Free Choice.

WHEN a man becomes a Christian, he acts as a free man; and whatever power has been exerted over him, no violation has been done to his liberty, nor has he done anything which has not been to him a matter of preference or choice.

The converted sinner acknowledges the power of God in his change. He is sensible that he has become what he is by an influence from on high. It was some such mysterious power that arrested his attention, that alarmed his conscience, that induced him to give his heart to God. But he has been sensible of no violation of his freedom. He has done nothing which he has not done freely. He was not converted by bringing a deep sleep upon him, as Eve was formed from the side of Adam, nor was an unnatural stupor diffused over his frame, benumbing all his faculties, and leaving him to be molded as the clay; but he was converted in the full exercise of his faculties, and with the entire consciousness of acting as a free man. He has done nothing which he did not prefer to do; he has abandoned no sin which he did not choose to abandon; he has formed no new plan of living, by becoming a Christian, which he did not choose to form. One of the most free and unfettered acts of his life was that when he gave himself to God; and he became a Christian with as much conscious freedom, and with as much of the spirit of rejoicing, as the imprisoned father leaves the gloomy cell where he has been long immured, to visit his children when his prison-doors are thrown open, or as the galley-slave exults when the chains fall from his hands.

There is no act that man ever performs more freely than that of becoming a Christian. His whole heart is in it; and no matter what sinful course he abandons, what sacrifices he makes, and what friends he is constrained to leave, or what amusements he is required to abjure—he does it most freely. And no matter what trials he may see before him, no matter though his embracing religion may require him to forsake his country and home to preach the gospel in a heathen land—it is all cheerfully done. It is the act of a free man. He prefers it. He would not, for all the gold, and diamonds, and coronets, and crowns of the earth, have it otherwise. And though he is conscious—for who could not but be so in such a change?—that this has been brought about by the power of God, and will always ascribe it to the agency of the Holy Ghost, yet he feels that no law of his nature has been violated, and that one of the most free acts of his life was then when he gave his heart to God.—Barnes' "Way of Salvation."