1) Calvinists claim that acts of man have no impact on who is saved.
Unconditional Election:
God does not base His election on anything He sees in the individual. He chooses the elect according to the kind intention of His will without any consideration of merit within the individual. Nor does God look into the future to see who would pick Him. Also, as some are elected into salvation, others are not.
2) Jesus says that we must obey and do the will of God to be saved.
John 15
6If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. 10If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.
Matt 7
21"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
Who do you believe?
OK, let's try this one more time... perhaps this time it will get through to you.
Yes, obedience is an act of man's will. God changes our heart and gives us a new spirit and He causes us to walk in His statutes (Ezekiel 36:26-27). When Jesus says that we must obey, He is right because those who obey and believe are the ones who are
already His sheep. Look at what Jesus told the pharisees in John 10
26"But you do not believe because you are not of My sheep.
27"My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me;
He does not say "You are not my sheep (i.e. saved) because you do not believe." Your flaw is that you seem to think that man has faith
and then they are saved, but nowhere do you find such a teaching in Scripture.
Ephesians 2:8 says
8For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
Notice what we have been saved by; we are
not saved by the faith, it says we have been saved "by grace." The faith is the
means that God uses to manifest this salvation because Christ is the
author and perfecter of faith (Heb. 12:2).
We also see the same thing in the book of 1 John. In chapter 5 verse 1, John writes:
1Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him.
The Greek actually says "
has been born of God" and the "has been born" is a verb in the perfect tense, meaning that it happened in the past and continues on to the present. The result of being born of God is that one believes that Jesus is the Christ, not the other way around. The Greek necessitates it. I showed this verse because 1 John 2:29 uses the same exact grammatical structure as 1 John 5:1. It says:
29If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him.
Those who practice righteousness "has been born of God." Same Greek term, same Greek perfect tense. There is no way around this; the
result of being saved is that one practices righteousness and willingly obeys and grows in sanctification.
Another place we see something similar is in Philippians 2:12-13. It reads:
12So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling;
13for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.
We are told to "work your [our] salvation." Yes, we have a responsibility, but a lot of people either ignore or don't like the next verse. The thought doesn't end with v. 12, it continues on to tell us that "it is God who is at work in you [us]" to do work for God's "good pleasure." We aren't working out our salvation on our own; God is faithful to those He calls and He makes sure that they will be sanctified (1 Thess. 5:23-24).
Yes, we are told that obedience and following the statues of God is important and necessary (cf. Hebrews 12:14; Romans 8:13; Galatians 5:18-21; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; Ephesians 5:1-10; 1 John 3:14-15; 1 John 4:20; John 8:31 etc), but what you seem to deny is that doing these things are the result of being saved, not the cause.