Irresistible Grace is the doctrine that when God effectually calls a sinner to salvation, that call cannot fail. It is sometimes misunderstood as if God drags unwilling sinners kicking and screaming to heaven. That is not what the doctrine means. The Reformed view is more subtle and more wonderful. The fallen sinner does not want Christ. He cannot want Christ, because his will is in bondage to sin. "The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to Him; nor can He know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). Before grace, the sinner resists. What irresistible grace does is change the resisting will itself. God does not force a sinner to come against his will; God gives him a new will that now wants to come. Ezekiel 36:26 describes it: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh." When the heart is changed, the result is inevitable: the new heart wants Christ, and the new heart comes. This is what Jesus meant by "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him" (John 6:44) — and two verses later: "Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father" (6:65). It is what Paul meant when he said his conversion was by God's "good pleasure" to "reveal His Son in me" (Galatians 1:15-16). The Lord of the universe did not ask Saul of Tarsus for permission; He overwhelmed him on the Damascus road, and Saul found himself wanting the Christ He had moments before been persecuting. Irresistible grace is gloriously good news: if salvation depended on our precarious grip on God, we would fail; but it rests on God's unshakeable grip on us.