Created Unto Good Works

We have seen that our salvation, which focuses on our justification with God, is entirely of grace, the gift of God. All boasting is excluded. We cannot even boast of our faith, as if faith is our work. It isn't. Faith is not our act as a determined cause of our justification, but is the instrument and channel by which God unites us with Christ. Salvation is of the Lord, from beginning to end. He it is who quickens the dead. He alone is the one who calls the things that are not as if they were....