“Moreover whom He did predestinate, them He also called”.
(Romans 8:30b)
The calling is not only an enlightening, but also a yielding of the heart to God. When a man does not know, through the grace of God, what this is, he thinks it is very easy to achieve this, for he thinks too much of himself, because he does not know himself. When he is crying for God; if he could, would wash the feet of God’s people; if he spends the night or part thereof praying, reading the Scriptures, searching for the truth, he cannot forebear to think that his heart has been yielded to God. He cannot help thinking so, and yet his heart still has to be yielded. He is still at enmity and does nothing but maintain himself against God. His self-righteousness is still hidden from him, because he has not been called yet and has not yet become “light in the Lord”. The calling is the yielding of the heart to God. That is why the calling is necessary. It is necessary that a man is called by God, by name, and then his heart will be yielded to God. We find something about this in Psalm 27:5:
“Thy voice said unto me: do seek my face.
I answered Thee: I will, Lord, show Thy grace;
Be merciful to me and do not hide
Thy face; o Lord, my God, stay at my side!”
So then the calling is the same as that which takes place in the day of God’s power (Psalm 110:3), and that is why we have also the following words in the Holy Scriptures: “And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (Rev. 22:17). It is when a man is called, that he does understand that the yielding of the heart can only be done by such a God Who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were (Rom. 4:17). No sooner is someone called, or he understands, that the power that was necessary to create the world and to raise Jesus Christ from the dead, was also necessary to yield his heart to the Lord.
(From: Meditations, 26 January. Sermon on Romans 8:33, 7 April 1932 in Rotterdam.)