The Father Draws You

In Him was life, 

and the life was 

the Light of mankind.

–John 1:4 NASB

Life. We have it in limited quantities—eighty years worth, give or take a little. And what is life? It is a capacity for growth, reproduction, change, and activity. A pebble has none of these. We have all of them.

But in Jesus there is a higher kind of life—not mere biological life, but the Life of the Ages, eternal life. 

How is this life different? It is the life of the New Reality. We live now in the biological sense in the Old Reality. We will live a higher kind of life in God’s New Reality which is in some sense already here for Jesus-followers and yet is not here. Now and not yet. The life Jesus bears is life in the New Reality.

We have none of this kind of life in ourselves.

We have been chosen before time for this New Life in Christ. God chose us (read more here). We did not choose him. God pursued us. If we thought we were pursuing him, we may not have realized he is unattainable by ordinary means. He not only chose us before time, but all our life he has been pursuing us.

No one can come to Me 

unless the Father who sent Me draws him; 

and I will raise him up on the last day.

–John 6:44 NASB

We see two things in this famous verse: our incapacity and God’s hidden influence.

Incapacity. Our inability to believe in the actual God (as opposed to the gods of our own creation and imagination, including false images of the God of Jesus Christ). We have proofs that God exists, but they don’t lead to the actual God who made all things and became what we are to make us what he is. We have notions of religion, including notions of Christian religion. But all are a sham unless God reveals himself to us.

It is the Spirit who gives life . . . 

–John 6:63a NASB

God’s Spirit gives life. Our flesh (our unaided self) can do nothing. Paul agrees: “A natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14 NASB). 

But this does not mean there is no way to have union with God. As Paul says, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3b NASB). In other words, the Holy Spirit can enable us to believe Jesus is Lord; we just can’t arrive at this on our own.

But some will say, “How unfair of God! He commands belief but makes himself unknowable!”

As Augustine famously said 1,600 years ago, “Command what you will and grant what you command.” God is not discoverable, but he reveals himself. God is hidden, but he makes himself known at certain times and in certain places. He is in a cloud of unknowing, but he lets rays of his glory peek out like sunbeams warming our hearts.

“Unless the Father who sent me draws him,” Jesus said. But does the Father call out to us, revealing hints and removing shadows? Some will say, “I never heard a divine voice speaking to me. And, if anything, my life experiences have pushed me away from God, not towards him.”

If you can’t look behind and see the tracks of God’s pursuing you, you will. Paul says twice that Jesus’ saving power is more powerful than the Adam Myth. According to that myth, all people inherited sin and death from Adam. But “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22 NASB) and “as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19 NASB).

As sure as death and taxes will find you, so will Christ’s love.

There are other objections as well to the idea that you cannot discover God, but he will plant little hints of himself in your life leading up to the day he fully reveals himself.

Someone will say, “Your claim cannot be true because Paul says elsewhere that God is evident and can be known from what is made.” 

This objection comes from Romans 1:18-32, a passage in which the text says, “Since the creation of the world His invisible [attributes, that is,] His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20 NASB).

It seems as if we are finding a contradiction in Paul. The same Paul who says we cannot in our natural state understand spiritual truth (1 Corinthians 2:14) seems to be saying we have no excuse not to know God because his existence and authority is evident to our natural minds!

But Romans 1:18-32 is not what Paul believes. This text is Paul summarizing his rivals’ belief system and mocking it. He picks it apart in Romans 2-3. God is not deducible, nor is he retributive and punitive. You can see Paul’s actual belief in Romans 5-8. And you can read more about the problem of Romans 1 here.

God’s acts for us are many, extending from before time until after the end of all things. His acts include: election, drawing, granting, regeneration, deliverance, reconciliation, sanctification, redemption, resurrection, and glorification. 

In Christ there is life, the Life of the Ages. It is God’s Spirit who bequeaths this life. And no one finds it or discovers God unless God the Father draws them.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (not a believer in Jesus) titled his best known work God in Search of Man. Yes, God is. You are I, we are the lost sheep he never gives up on. We are the Prodigal Child he watches for every day, awaiting our return home where we will find forgiveness and love.

Long before we consciously believe in him, God has been “drawing” us, planting little Easter eggs in our lives. A longing for mother-love or father-love. A sense of sudden and unexpected joy. The loss of a loved one. Unexpected recovery from a serious medical condition. Coming to grips with the reality of addiction. Facing the inevitability of death. There are an unlimited number of ways people have seen hints of God in their lives.

After all, Jesus who was “lifted up” on the cross—identifying with us through death and defeating death by being raised—had this to say: 

And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, 

will draw all [people] to Myself.

–John 12:23 NASB