God is not beholden to us at all. He doesn't owe us anything.

Salvation is a gift of grace.

His grace is sufficient.

Martin Luther said, "A Christian is not someone who has no sin or feels no sin; he is someone to whom, because of his faith in Christ, God does not impute his sin.

From start to finish, the whole Christian life is by grace through faith. A new life in Christ commences with faith, continues by faith, and will be completed by faith.

The Bible gives us a theology which is more human than Calvinism, and more divine than Arminianism, and more Christian than either of them.1243

but if the Spirit "bloweth" where He "listeth," those, too, who have become believers here are made partakers of that gift; and that according to the proportion of their faith, not in consequence of their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Calvinism emphasizes divine sovereignty and free grace; Arminianism emphasizes human responsibility. The one restricts the saving grace to the elect: the other extends it to all men on the condition of faith. Both are right in what they assert; both are wrong in what they deny. If one important truth is pressed to the exclusion of another truth of equal importance, it becomes an error, and loses its hold upon the conscience.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.

If my activism, however well-motivated, drives out love, then I have misunderstood Jesus' gospel. I am stuck with law, not the gospel of grace.

Grace is the most perplexing, powerful force in the universe, and, I believe, the only hope for our twisted, violent planet.