John 6:37-38 “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.’”

If the evidence of Jesus’ power does not convince people. If his words of promise are challenged or ignored, what hope is left? “All that the Father gives me will come to me.”

We like to think of ourselves as free and independent. Like most teens I was in hurry to get my license, and then my own car, so that I could come and go as I wanted. I found the girl of my dreams when I was in high school and married her by the time I was twenty-three. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with my life in grade school and pursued my goal until I graduated from the seminary with a masters of divinity. I was senior pastor of a large congregation with a school by the time I was twenty-eight.

No one “made” me do any of this, and it felt like I was behind the steering wheel driving this life the whole way, making my own choices, doing my own work. Maybe your own life feels the same way, or did at one point in time.

But it is all largely an illusion. People were shaping and influencing me. Some doors opened, while others closed. God was at work, guiding and shepherding me on the path that brought me to this very day.

If that is true of the content and features of our external lives, how much more so the inner life of faith. Jesus made it amply clear that none of us comes to God under our own power on our own terms. A few verses later he tells this crowd, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” It is an interesting word he uses for “draw.” This is not draw in the sense of urging or enticing. In secular Greek, this is the word you use for dragging a boat up on shore. Have you ever tried to handle a boat like that? It doesn’t exactly help or cooperate in the process. It’s awkward and heavy. Although we don’t want to say that God forced us to faith against our will, he was still the one at work forming and shaping that will, working the miracle by which he dragged us to Jesus and his grace.

So Jesus sees our coming to him as the Father’s work, not our own. “All that the Father gives me will come to me.” We may doubt, and challenge, and question, like the skeptics in this crowd. But God the Father still has the final say over our hearts and lives. As a gift of his grace to us, he makes a gift of us to his Son. By directing our lives and exposing us to his word and sacrament he drags us to Jesus and makes us his own by faith.

And Jesus isn’t disappointed or embarrassed by the gift his Father gives him, “And whoever comes to me I will never drive away.” Jesus is nothing but pleased to have us, no matter who we are, no matter how we have come. In the book The Hammer of God there is a scene in which a younger pastor is telling an old pastor, a little too proudly, that he is a believer, and that he has given Jesus his heart. “One does not choose a Redeemer for oneself,” the old pastor tells him, “nor give one’s heart to him. The heart is rusty old can on a junk heap. A fine birthday gift, indeed! But a wonderful Lord passes by, and has mercy on the wretched tin can, sticks his walking cane through it and rescues it from the junk pile and takes it home with him. That’s how it is” (p. 147).

So God’s own intervention has made us to belong to him. He has changed our hearts, which are inclined to refuse to believe.