Establishing Doctrine:
Whosoever Will

Know What You Believe — and Why

Pastor Phil opened with a charge that's been building across this series: establish your belief system from Scripture, not from someone else's opinion. If somebody gets on social media and blasts what other Christians believe without a single scripture to back it up — that's not theology, that's noise. And if your own convictions are built on a sermon you liked rather than the Word of God, the next preacher who comes along with a better delivery will move you.

Living Word Church is in the business of building believers who know what they stand on. That starts with history.

Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation

In 1517, a monk named Martin Luther had a revelation that cracked the religious world open. At that time, Catholicism controlled the spiritual landscape almost entirely — and one of its central practices was blending culture with Scripture to create doctrine, interpreted exclusively by the hierarchy of the Church. No one else could read it. No one else could interpret it. It was the dark ages in more ways than one.

Luther confronted them. His two core convictions were simple and revolutionary:

These ideas seem obvious to us today. But in 1517 they were dangerous. Thank God for a man who stood up against tradition and said: you don't need the Catholic Church to get to heaven. You need Jesus.

Not long after, another scholar named John Calvin built his own theological system — what we now call Calvinism. It's still very much alive in 2026. The TULIP acronym sums it up:

Pastor Phil's challenge is direct: if God has already predetermined who's saved and who's lost, why do we preach? Why do we have church? Why pray? If salvation is entirely in God's hands regardless of human response, the whole enterprise of evangelism becomes theater.

God Is Sovereign — And That's Exactly the Point

This isn't a denial of God's sovereignty. Pastor Phil made that clear. God is sovereign. He does not need our permission. But sovereignty doesn't mean randomness — it means God operates according to his own will, and his will is revealed in his Word.

The question then becomes: what has he pleased? Because that's what he does. And we don't get that from opinions or church tradition. We get it from Scripture. God, in his sovereignty, gave us a book. And in that book, he told us exactly what he's pleased to do — and it looks nothing like an exclusive guest list.

Notice: God announces his sovereign intentions — and then immediately says then you will call on me. If God was going to do it regardless, why would he ask us to call? Because prayer isn't formality. It's the mechanism. It's how his sovereignty works in our lives. We don't pray "if it be your will" when we've already read what his will is in Scripture. We pray from knowledge, not from hoping our number comes up.

The Chain That Changes Everything

Romans 10 lays out the clearest picture of how salvation actually works — and it runs exactly opposite to Calvinism's flow:

The order is non-negotiable: Preaching → Hearing → Believing → Calling. God doesn't skip steps. He doesn't bypass the Word. He chose to work through preaching — and that means the responsibility for reaching the lost sits with the people who've already been reached.

And if they don't believe yet? Keep preaching. The word does not return void. It will accomplish what it was sent to do — but it has to be spoken. It has to be published. It has to be shared.

Whosoever Will

Every scripture Pastor Phil brought that morning had one thing in common: not a select few, not the elect, not those who fit a certain profile. Every single one said whosoever.

The world. Not the chosen. Not the Americans. Not the people who seem worth saving. Every nation, every tribe, every tongue. That means the person living under a bridge. That means the drug addict. That means the people we've already written off in our hearts. God has not written them off.

Pastor Phil shared the story of a man he met years ago in Nashville — a street person who walked into the church one Sunday, sat in the back, and left. A couple of weeks later he showed up at the church office in the daytime, pulled out a handful of drugs, and said he was going to take them all and die. His girlfriend had died in his arms a week before — she'd OD'd on that same bridge where they lived.

Pastor Phil looked at him and said: "The sad part is, you can do that. You won't make the news. You won't be on the headlines. Nobody will even know. But there's a God in heaven who loves you so much that he grieves over you." The man asked to use the restroom. Five minutes later he walked back out and said he'd flushed every one of those drugs. He gave his life to the Lord. Over a year later, Pastor Phil spotted him at the Tennessee State Fair — working, clean, eyes clear.

The gospel is for him. It's always been for him.

You Are a Preacher

The Great Commission — go into all the world and preach the gospel — was not addressed to pastors, evangelists, or the fivefold ministry. Jesus gave it to the church. That means you.

Two 14-year-old boys once showed up to a tent revival and almost left because they couldn't find seats together. An usher caught them on the way out, got them seated, and they stayed for the whole service. Both boys gave their lives to the Lord that night. One of them was Billy Graham. The other became his office manager and helped carry the gospel around the world for decades. Neither of them would have stayed without one usher who refused to let them walk away.

That usher wasn't a preacher by title. But they did the work of one. And seven people gave their hearts to the Lord just last Thursday night at the local jail — because John Paul went and preached.

Don't count anybody out. Don't go passive and say it's in God's hands. It's in the hands of preaching — and you've got a part to play.