"Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread" Is An Easy Way To Illustrate The Fallacy Of The Calvinists' Primary Argument

The Calvinist will look at a passage that says God does something and assume that means man can have no part in it because God does it. For example they will ignore a hundred passages that teach man is involved in his salvation (must meet conditions – Mark 16:16, for example) because they find a passage teaching God saves us (e.g., Rom 5:9-10).The fallacy of their argument is easily shown by “the Lord’s prayer” instruction for us to ask God to “give us this day our daily bread” (Matt 6:11). We all recognize from this verse that God gives the faithful Christian the necessities of life (Matt 6:33), and even the Calvinist recognizes that God provides us our food through our regular efforts, for example through our jobs. So the Calvinist can readily see in this case that just because one passage says God does something for us, that does not necessarily mean we don’t also have a part to play in the matter.The main lesson the Calvinist needs to learn is to take all of what the Bible says on a particular subject, instead of just the passages he thinks agree with his system and ignoring all others. I am sure if Abraham had used the Calvinistic method of interpreting what God said, because God had previously told Abraham he was to have many descendants through his son Isaac, Abraham would have disbelieved what God said when he told him to offer Isaac as a sacrifice and therefore disobeyed God’s command. Instead Abraham chose to find a way that both instructions from God were true (Heb 11:19). Most importantly, Abraham believed and obeyed what God said regardless of his own human reasoning and preferences.And if we do the same with salvation for example, we will believe both that Jesus died “for the remission of sins” (Matt 26:28) and that we must be baptized “for the remission of sins” (Acts 2:38). Both are true because God said both. We are not free to believe one and reject the other. God saves us through means – we have to meet his stipulated conditions.