On Passive Regeneration

John Murray, in Redemption: Accomplished and Applied (Eerdman's. 1955, 99-100):

It has often been said that we are passive in regeneration. This is a true and proper statement. For it is simply the precipitate of what our Lord has taught us here. We may not like it. We may recoil against it. It may not fit into our way of thinking and it may not accord with the time-worn expressions which are the coin of our evangelism. But if we recoil against it, we do well to remember that this recoil is recoil against Christ. And what shall we answer when we appear before him whose truth we rejected and with whose gospel we tampered? But blessed be God that the gospel of Christ is one of sovereign, efficacious, irresistible regeneration. If it were not the case that in regeneration we are passive, the subjects of an action which God alone is the agent, there would be no gospel at all. For unless God by sovereign, operative grace had turned out enmity to love and our disbelief to faith we would never yield the response of faith and love.