Saving us is the greatest and most concrete demonstration of God's love, the definitive display of His grace throughout time and eternity.

We can't be saved without being good, but 'tis not because our goodness is sufficient, or can do anything of itself. But 'tis because all whose hearts come to Christ will be good, and if men ben't good, their hearts never will come to Christ.

None that will come to Christ, let his condition be what it will, need to fear but that Christ will provide a place suitable for him in heaven.

Till you have savingly believed in Christ, all your desires, and pains, and prayers lay God under no obligation;

tis plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction.

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.

now I saw it was so far from any goodness in me to own myself spiritually dead and destitute of all goodness that, on the contrary, my mouth would be forever stopped by it; and it looked as dreadful to me to see myself and the relation I stood in to God—I a sinner and criminal, and He a great Judge and Sovereign—as it would be to a poor trembling creature to venture off some high precipice.

To be justified, is to be approved of God as a proper subject of pardon, with a right to eternal life. Therefore, when it is said that we are justified by faith, what else can be understood by it, than that faith is that by which we are rendered approvable, fitly so, and indeed, as the case stands, proper subjects of this benefit?

Faith abases men and exalts God, it gives all the glory of redemption to God alone.

But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially as we serve others. Anyone who truly understands how God's grace comes to us will have a changed life. That's the gospel, not salvation by law, or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.

The brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded—"We are saved by faith alone, but not by faith which is alone".

Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously.