Chosen For Life - Chapter 6 - Amazing Grace

In Sam Storms excellent and thorough book on divine election he devotes a chapter to discussing grace. Storms believes that anything less than the doctrine of unconditional election as espoused in Calvinism seriously compromises God's grace (Chosen For Life, 77).

Early on in Chapter 6 Storms discusses God's goodness which he defines as "the inclination and resolve of his nature to promote the welfare and happiness of his creatures." (Chosen For Life,78) He then considers a few general attributes that pertain to goodness: longsuffering, the delay of penal judgment; mercy, the restoration of the wretched; and grace, the goodness of God manifested toward the guilty and undeserving (Chosen For Life, 78).

Following his elucidating of goodness, Storms proceeds to list and explain 10 characteristics of grace:

1. grace presupposes sin and guilt
2. grace contemplates sinners as ill-deserving not merely undeserving
3. grace is not dependent on the merit or the demerit of its objects
4. grace cannot incur a debt and is thus uncompensated
5. grace stands opposed to works in justification but is the source of works in sanctification
6. grace that saves is eternal but is manifested in the historical appearance of Christ
7. grace is free
8. grace is sovereign; God is gracious in His being but need not be gracious to anyone
9. grace is the foundation or the means of our election
10. grace is unconditional in election but conditional in many of God's acts and blessings

(Chosen For Life, 79-81)

The sixth chapter of Chosen For Life, entitled Amazing Grace, is a clearly written and compelling explanation of grace and how it works in and through the doctrine of unconditional election. This chapter alone makes the book's purchase well worthwhile.