If I'm drowning and a guy on the deck of a ship throws me a life ring, and I take it, my surviving does not = "I saved myself."
Actually it means you
cooperated in the saving of yourself, hence synergism, which is always the root of most disagreements involving soteriology.
No one can believe unless God grants it and all to whom God grants the Son will believe.
See John 6:63-65 which plainly teaches that regeneraiton precedes faith.
63 "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
64 But there are some of you who do not believe." (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.)
65 And he said, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father."
It unambiguously teaches that
no one can believe in Jesus Christ
unless God grants it... and it is the Spirit who quickens, regenerates and gives life. If that were not enough, in John 6:37 of the same passage Jesus teaches with the same language that all whom God grants will have faith in Christ.
"All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out."
To be perfectly clear,
monergism asserts that God is not unconditionally willing to save each and every person, rather that God instead has mercy on whom He will have mercy. The point is not that
monergism provides a way to reconcile God's universal desire to save with a limited number of people actually being saved, but that synergism's primary
raison d'etre is false: the only escape for the synergist from an assertion that God is unwilling to save each and every person, is that God is actually unable to save each and every person, and that assertion denies God's omnipotence.
Think about it and it will come to you. :AMR:
AMR