I think this view is most widely held by Southern Baptists and a few others, but not all Protestants believe like this about salvation. Most believe that we are sinners saved by God’s grace and that Salvation is a process, not a one-time event.
For instance, in my case, I “got saved” at a Billy Graham crusade decades ago but I later realized that it was more of a spiritual awakening or kick-start in which Christ became real and relevant in my life for the first time after I made a decision to follow Him at the crusade. Prior to then, I had been attending church for a while (Presbyterian) with my parents but the Christian faith was an abstract to me and did not make any real difference in my life until that moment at the crusade.
After that moment when I invited Jesus to be Lord of my life, His presence in my life became palpable. I started to read my Bible regularly and wanted to grow closer to Him spiritually. I wanted Him to help mold me into the person He wanted me to be and to help others, unlike what I was doing up until that time. I wanted to be a disciple of Christ.
I consider myself to have matured in the Christian faith ever since, but there is much I still don’t know and I am still a sinner, although with Christ’s help I don’t sin as much as I once did. I still ask for God’s pardon in Christ’s name when I do sin, but I would never say that I could sin and keep sinning without repenting. To sin and keep sinning without repentance under the presumption that my soul was already eternally saved would be presumptuous and spiritually reckless of me.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood your position on salvation being a moment in time in which all our sins are forgiven, both past, present, and future. I assume you would also believe in the need for Christians to repent and ask God to forgive their sins, right, even after they were “saved”?
