In this BLOG I will give several quotes from Ebenezer Pemberton. He was a pastor from 1727 to 1777 (the latter being the year of his death) in a few churches in the Boston area. He is again representative of what Reformed evangelism and preaching look like. Notice the things that he does in calling to sinners and what he does not do. He does not leave salvation in their hands and up to the choices of their wills.
Third, to conclude, cry mightily unto God to enable you to come to Christ by faith, and receive Him with your whole heart. Faith is the gift of God; no man can come to Christ except the Father draws him. Renounce therefore all confidence in yourselves; depend entirely upon almighty grace to produce within you the work of faith with power; and never cease your importunate supplications till all your difficulties are removed, till your prejudices are conquered, and you are enabled to open the everlasting doors to your souls to receive and entertain the King of Glory, to whom be all honor, blessing, and praise forever and ever, Amen.
The first work of the Spirit is to convince men of their sins, whereby they have offended the eternal Majesty of heaven; to alarm their guilty fears by a discovery of their infinite danger…that the sentence of the law is pronounced against them, and there is but a step between them and eternal death; that they are in subjection to the tyranny of sin and Satan, and have no strength or power to knock off their captive-chains…When they find that they are utterly unable to help themselves, and that it exceeds the power of the whole creation to deliver them from so deplorable a ruin-then their hearts will be filled with distressing fears and they will anxiously inquire, “What shall I do to be saved?”
I now proceed to show that this is a work of almighty grace and is performed in the day of God’s power. Sinners will never come to Christ if left to follow their own inclinations and desires. The human nature was universally depraved by the first apostasy so that, while in an unregenerate state, we are insufficient for any good thing and are entirely destitute of spiritual strength…To come to Christ is to deny ourselves under every form and to renounce all our carnal confidence. To fly to the righteousness and atonement of our great Redeemer for justification and life requires a humble acknowledgement of our inability to help ourselves, and an entire dependence jupon the victorious power of His grace to mortify our corruptions and subdue our rebellious inclinations, to sanctify and save our souls. This is so contrary to the pride of man, so disagreeable to the appetites of flesh and blood, that degenerate nature will forever cry out. “These are hard sayings, and who can hear them?”
But this conviction further implies an utter despair of any deliverance in themselves from those dark and disconsolate circumstances. This aggravates the misery of the sinner, and gives the most bitter accent to their grief and sorrows. In the days of their security they imagined that they could at any time repent of their sins, and by a few importunate addresses for mercy secure a title to the divine favor; but they are now convinced that that they have offended an infinite God and stand exposed to the demands of inflexible justice….Thus they find that they are lost in themselves; and it is beyond the power of the whole creation to deliver them. They have not to flee to but that God whom by their iniquities they have so grievously offended; nothing to depend upon but unmerited mercy, which they have times without number forfeited.
Surely the difference between this approach and the modern approach can be seen. There were no pleas to the free-will and no pleas to make a decision to come to Christ on the people’s own power. Instead what we see is a driving home to the conscience that people must be broken from any hope in themselves and to recognize that they have no power or anything to come to God with. Here we see a man who was thoroughly acquainted with the depravity of man and the Gospel. He knew that for a person to come to Christ that person had to depend entirely on grace to produce faith within him. His call was not to look to themselves and to do something, but to renounce all confidence in self and what it could do. His call was to sinners to call upon God and ask Him for grace in order to come to Him. This was the way that the Puritans called people to Christ and this was the way men like Jonathan Edwards did it. They saw Arminian ways as dangerous to the Gospel and opposed them vehemently.
God Loves... Himself 
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