I do not actively participate in the current Calvin/Arminius debate. When I was young, I studied at length the merits and demerits of free will, foreordination, election, predestination, etc. After exhausting myself, I gave up, feeling I knew little more than when I started.
From that intense study, two things stuck with me. One, I saw that groups of believers that go too far toward predestination finally fade out of existence. My Great Great Grandfather was baptized as a hardshell Baptist. Few of this ilk remain. Hyper-Calvinism carries in itself its own seeds of destruction.
Two, for my sanity, I have tried to balance the two. In conversations about life before salvation, emphasize free will. Push for everyone to come. Whosoever will may come. The banquet in the parable of the wedding banquet (MT 22) was filled only with people the servants went to find (v. 9) indiscriminately and found (v. 10).
After salvation, as we look back on our conversion, the emphasis should become sovereignty. God sought me. God chose me. God secures me. Holding these two doctrines in tandem, I have inner peace about them.
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