This drives me nuts more than almost anything else I’ve seen in “young Calvinism” (rampant arrogance being the lone exception).

The takeaway point about the Calvinist understanding of God’s sovereignty isn’t, “it doesn’t matter what we try to do, so who cares?” Rather, “stop worrying about what will be; simply trust God to ‘work in you both to will and to act according to His good pleasure,’ and leave the results of those actions in His hands.” I’ve noticed that Calvinists with Type-A (some might say “choleric”) personalities seem to be the ones with the most trouble recognizing this distinction.

I can’t “make” someone love me, but I can love regardless. Jesus calls me to do the latter, not the former.

(Shoot, I can’t make the mechanic up the road look at my only car in a reasonable timeframe! But I can hold my tongue when every inch of my body wants to yell and scream and curse him. And I can pray that they fix the thing and get it back to us before my pregnant wife’s appointment with her midwives on Tuesday.)

One of my greatest concerns about Calvinism is that too many of the young Calvinists I meet today have such a fatalistic attitude about life. I don’t believe that Calvinism must naturally takes you down that path, but I think one has to be a little fuzzy in a few of the particulars of Calvinistic thinking to avoid some traps of going to its extremes. That won’t endear you to the purists. But then some of the purists are too pure for Calvin, so there you have it!

And to provide a counter, Arminianism keeps people in a constant fear for their salvation when it is practiced in its extreme too. It tends to wallow in do’s and dont’s instead of focusing on the person of Jesus Christ. As Calvinist pastor John Piper says, “God is the Gospel,” yet too many Arminians forget this. I’ve run into people who have been baptized over and over and over again because they are always being converted over and over. There’s no confidence in Christ there; it’s all confidence in performance. And that’s not Christianity.

So both “teams” have got problems. I come down somewhere in the middle. This means that either both teams like me because they think I’ll eventually fully play for their team, or they write me off as a heretic. Either way, I’m cool with it!