I said on Sunday that I cherish the Reformed understanding of God and salvation, the Calvinist understanding of God’s sovereignty. It’s not because I’m drawn to a particular human system, but rather because I believe that teachers throughout church history, in the great stream of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Whitefield, Keller, Piper, Sproul (and many others) have rightly understood the Bible’s teaching on God’s sovereignty in the world and in salvation.
Someone asked me the other day to point them in the direction of resources on Reformed theology. There’s lots of great material available, so I’ll suggest just a few resources.
I’d recommend R.C. Sproul’s book Chosen by God. If you’d like to go even deeper, you can watch the six sessions of Sproul’s teaching series ‘Chosen by God’ online for free.
Also very helpful is John Piper’s teaching series TULIP, on the five points of Calvinism, which you can watch for free on the Desiring God website. Here’s the first session, with text, video, and audio. If you benefit from this session, you can click through to the others.
Finally, you may be interested in hearing how I think about the important personal, pastoral benefits of the Reformed understanding of God and salvation. Here are a couple pieces I wrote, one for the Gospel Coalition, and one for Desiring God.
I came to the Reformed understanding of God and his sovereignty only over time, through conversations with others and mainly through reading the Bible and studying it to see if these things were so. I so appreciate what R.C. Sproul says in the first few minutes of his teaching series Chosen by God (see the link above) – these are doctrines that stretch and challenge us, and doctrines that call for great humility and charity toward one another. This view of God will humble us if we really understand it. It will steady us and strengthen us, as we rejoice in an all-wise, all-sovereign God.