by John Calvin
"For if a man asks us why God has chosen us, why he has enlightened us, and hath left so many miserable and wretched in blindness, why he changed us and turned us to him by his Holy Spirit, and others remain in their hardness, we cannot say that we are better than they, and therefore God preferred us before those whom he left alone, neither that we are worthier than they; there is not such matter. So what was it then? We must come to that which is spoken in the eleventh chapter to the Romans. When he speaks of the judgments of God he cries out, How incomprehensible are your ways! And who has given to him that he should repay them? Who can brag that he has brought anything of his own that he may say that God should be moved to love him more than another? No, no, men are void of all goodness, there is nothing in them but confusion and shame of face, and God accepts and calls whom he wants, and calls them in such a way that there is no goodness in them, but he changes them, and renews them by the grace of his Holy Spirit, that where they were inheritors of death, where there was nothing in them but curse, he reforms them to his image, he plants life and an incorruptible seed in them. When we know these things, what can we say, but be astonished and cry out as St. Paul does there. What a bottomless pit is the grace of God! How incomprehensible are his ways! So then let us mark well that we shall never know our redemption thoroughly until we come to that astonishment which was in St. Paul, and which ought to be in all the faithful." - John Calvin, Sermons on 1 Timothy
Taken from John Calvin's Sermons on 1 Timothy