{So we see there are two opposite pitfalls...Failure to overemphasize my part or God's part in evangelism can be a pitfall...} Each is the result of partial vision, which means partial blindness; each reveals a failure to face squarely the biblical antinomy of the responsibility of man and the sovereignty of God. Both unite to warn us not to pit these truths against each other, nor to allow either to obscure or overshadow the other in our minds. Both unite to warn us also against reacting from the one extreme of error into the other.
We shall proceed now according to this maxim. In what follows, we shall try to take both doctrines perfectly seriously, as the Bible does, and to view them in their positive biblical relationship. We shall not oppose them to each other, for the Bible does not oppose them to each other. Not shall we qualify or modify, or water down, either of them in terms of the other, for this is not what the Bible does either. What the Bible does is to assert both truths side by side in the strongest and most unambiguous terms as two ultimate facts; this, therefore, is the position that we must take in our own thinking. C. H. Spurgeon was once asked if he could reconcile these two truths each other. "I wouldn't try," he replied; "I never reconcile friends." Friends?- Yes, friends. This is the point that we have to grasp. In the Bible, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not enemies. They are not uneasy neighbors; they are not in an endless state of cold war with each other. They are friends, and they work together. -J. I. Packer (Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God Pgs. 42,43)
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