Salvation is by grace and grace alone. Christians obey out of love, not to cooperate in your salvation. Your filthy good works cannot add to Christ’s finished work. He paid the full price. He either secured your salvation at Calvary or you are forever lost.
How true... works are the way we ANSWER the grace. We always will do works of some kind. What spirit they are based in, is the question before us. God furnishes us a new spirit to do them in, a spirit which will push away the old, satanic spirit in which we had been doing them.
Those who believe in a niggardly God will themselves be niggardly. That’s why I asked ES how his love life is and showed the scripture (hey, I can show scripture too). The 1st and 2nd commandments were given for a reason. Of course we are going to fail to keep them. God is waiting for us to see that we will fail!
Then the mercy, grace, and cleansing can kick in, and we are now on the road to heaven.
Now a caution: we must always respect God’s work. Even in runtly believers who are snagged for a while in philosophies like E-S’s (and I’ve not come across a more idiosyncratic form of “Christianity” in a long while). God orchestrates even these fumblings into lessons that will be eventually learned. As Paul said, some are delivered over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme. If E-S started out as a believer, by the time he gets out of his philosophical morass he is going to be good and tired of it, because it is blowing back upon him at every turn. “As we give, so shall we receive.”
And it’s really weird, the Christians (?) who will parrot in a heartbeat that they are “doing things in His power” and yet don’t look anything like it.
NO, by his grace we can achieve salvation at the last trump, through faith, if we endure to the end.
That is what Yeshua’s words say; that is what Paul’s words say.
Nowhere does Yehova’s word say that salvation is by grace; salvation has always been through faith, since Adam sinned. The grace is what allows us to approach Yeshua.