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Your post #39 acknowledges salvation by Grace, though leaves out "through faith".

Do you know what "good works" ACTUALLY refers to, and why it is said to not only be inadequate, but also detrimental to the spiritual path? Because it is refering to the EGO. It is referring to doing something "for God" with the belief that the positive effect it has is a result of your personal effort - rather than being a success that results from God's Grace flowing through whatever you do. The difference is enormous, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that you don't have to make any effort. In fact, yo have to make massive, continuous effort - but offer all of it to God, and claim no success for yourself. THAT is "not" doing "good works."

Rather than saying "you have to make massive, continuous effort", however, I'd say that the Bible calls us to make such effort, that is, even turn over our very lives over to Christ. And we learn elsewhere in the Bible that true believers indeed do this. The key being, of course, that they do not do such works with any expectation of anything at all from God in recompense for what they do. They do such works because the Holy Spirit dwells within them and draws them to Christ, which induces obedience to God's Word, and, eventually, an obedience that becomes more consistently joyful, that is, even in the face of trials and tribulations; hunger, persecution, etc.

But your earlier post (I think #11) says the opposite, that because he (MLK) did some amount of works you posit are very good, that he merits salvation because of those works (specifically the second sentence of the second paragraph):

So what is being said here - that for all he did, MLK is in hell, because even though he did so much for so many people, and showed so much courage in the face of evil that he was killed for it, he wasn’t perfect and didn’t fit the generally accepted definition of Christian, and so even though he invoked Christ in his mission to give heart to people and fight evil - he’s now in hell forever, suffering like the most vile criminal?

What utter, complete rot. I reject such a conclusion with contempt. Jesus isn’t an accountant, and if MLK didn’t do enough, then no one can. He faced the murderous equivalent of nazistic hate and responded with teaching millions a response of love and nonviolence and human dignity and calling on God. There’s not one in a hundred who could do what he did.

And lumping him in with LBJ is obscene.

I don’t care how the Left had abused his legacy and name for their own purposes - it doesn’t change what he did and taught. And if what he did and taught wasn’t Christian, then Christianity is useless.

Yes, no one can do enough to merit salvation, that is, spending eternity in heaven with God. The best that anyone can ever do merits them only eternal damnation. That's the point made so strongly in the New Testament. It's impossible for anyone to be saved based on what they've done; thus in order to be saved we must appeal to Christ's perfect atoning sacrifice - his shed blood.

God simply chose his elect, those whom he would save, the operative wording being HE. God provided the sacrifice, Christ, his son, as in the archetype of how he provided the sacrifice for Abraham so Abraham did not have to sacrifice his son Isaac.

As the magnitude of the free gift of salvation increasingly is understood by the believer, as part of the process of sanctification, the believer is simply driven to do things, through which God glorifies himself, inasmuch as the believer typically does not contemporaneously appreciate or even have much knowledge or understanding of the effects of the good works they are drawn to do, let alone have the wisdom, strength, courage or even ambition to be their architect or initiator. One can realize this if one is saved - and looks back, honestly, on their life prior to their conversion. There is an "old man" that the believer "puts off"; the new man, born again in Christ, has a whole new set of concerns - primarily obedience to Christ and drawing every close to God.

When we see a person who on one hand does "good" things but on the other hand is known to continue in habitual, grave sin, it simply tells us this is an unrepentent sinner, not someone to follow and look up to.

Of course, the Bible is clear that ordained pastors are to be held to the highest standards of Biblical living - and for good reason, to avoid having charlatans deceive the members of Christ's flock. And the Bible is clear that the penalties for false teachers will be worse than for those they misled who in the end never became true believers.