I understand what you're getting at but the truth is, it's hard to say.
I was what I call a professional aisle walker. I went up for every altar call, knew the words to all the hymns, knew just when to shout "Amen", was in church every time the doors were open, but I wasn't anymore born again than the man in the moon. I was in the church all my life until I repented and trusted Christ (as opposed to "accepting Him") in my mid twenties..
My dad, on the other hand, heard the Gospel all his life and resisted God until he finally got saved in his late fifties.
God saves who He will, when He will.
Just because it isn't in our time or how we think God should do it doesn't mean God isn't still sovereign and doesn't mean God is done.
If God wants your Uncle Billy saved, then God will save him. If not, then He won't.
Glad that you were "saved" from walking the aisle for the rest of your life, and yes, trusting Him, rather than our commitment to Him, is indeed the biblical way of salvation.
You probably missed it, but "Uncle Billy" is a fictitious character I've created to help point out the inconsistencies of Arminian - Pelagian views .
Ok, then logically thinking, why would a Calvinist care what anyone else believes? It seems irrational for Calvinists to try to change others. Sovereign God does not need you to fight against other doctrines? Calvinism and logic are quite often at odds. God told Adam don't eat. Sovereign Gods will was fulfilled by Adam eating???? It honestly has a degree of craziness to it.
OK, so all this time of going to church, walking the aisle, praying the prayer--you were seeking God, correct?
And if you were seeking God, Calvinists will tell you that you were regenerated. No one seeks God, they say, so you must have been regenerated. So you were regenerated for YEARS before you actually repented and believed (or, as Calvinists say, God gave you the gift of faith.)
Is this how you would characterize your experience? Why or why not?
No. If I had been regenerated, I would have repented and trusted Christ, not merely walked an aisle to say a canned prayer in the hopes that that would be the time I'd have the will power to "be good" enough to be a real Christian.
Of course not.
Because it isn't Biblical and because it's a wildly inaccurate straw man presentation of elementary Reformed doctrine.
True - and God sovereignly chose the free will model. Created it... sustains it.
"He came to His OWN and His OWN received Him not" John 1:11
"Behold I STAND at the door and knock... if anyone hears my voice and opens the door - I will come in" Rev 3
Rom 10
7 or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, 9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; 10 for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
Why do Baptist label themselves as Calvinists or Arminians? We don’t come from Reformed Catholic Like Churches do we? Yes we may have a particular like for Doctrines of Grace or Arminian “Free will” Theology but we are Baptists are we not....there is a certain liberty to our individual belief systems and there should be some guidelines to operating in a Christian structure.