Grace

Grace is the word the whole gospel leans on, and the one most easily counterfeited. It means favor we did not earn and could never earn: God moving toward us first, while we were still in the wrong. Nearly every religion runs on the opposite engine, some version of "be good enough and God will accept you." The gospel turns that around. God accepts you in Christ before you are good, and it is that acceptance, not your effort to win it, that finally begins to make you good. Lose grace in either direction, by trying to earn it or by presuming on it, and you have lost the gospel itself.

Favor you did not earn

The classic definition is one short sentence of Paul's: "by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). Every clause closes a door on merit. Saved by grace, not by us, a gift, not wages, with nothing left over to boast about. And Paul does not stop there, though we often do: the very next verse says "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them." (Ephesians 2:10). Grace closes the door on earning and opens one onto working. The works are not the price of the gift; they are what the gift was for. Paul guards it so jealously that he says grace and earning cannot even share the same sentence: "if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace" (Romans 11:6). And he fixes the timing, which is the whole scandal of it: God did not wait for us to improve. "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). Grace is one-directional. It begins in God's heart, not in our worthiness, and it reaches us at our worst.

One more thing about that sentence, because a great deal has been built on it and the building is shakier than either side admits. When Paul says "and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God," what is that? Faith, or the whole salvation? The Greek does not settle it, and the men usually cited on this split against each other. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown take it as faith outright: "and that, namely, the act of believing, or 'faith'... The initiation, as well as the increase, of faith" is God's. Calvin takes the other side, and says so bluntly: "here we must advert to a very common error in the interpretation of this passage. Many persons restrict the word gift to faith alone... His meaning is, not that faith is the gift of God, but that salvation is given to us by God."

Calvin is worth hearing there, because he is the last man anyone expects to hear it from. If the verse settled whether faith itself is handed to us, he would have said so. He read it as ambiguous and chose the wider reading, and the whole argument that gets built on those three words has to reckon with that. We hold both halves and say why: He supplied the object, so the beginning is His, and the answer is genuinely ours, and the seam between them is the place we cannot see.

The earliest Christian voice outside the New Testament said the same thing in the same breath, writing to Corinth while some who had known the apostles were still alive:

Rooted in His character, not our merit

Because grace starts with God, its ground is His own purpose and kindness, not anything He found attractive in us. "The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men" (Titus 2:11); He "saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace" (2 Timothy 1:9). This is why grace can be utterly secure: a gift that hung on our performance would be as unsteady as our performance. Anchored in God's character, it is as steady as He is.

The first ditch: trying to earn it

The oldest mistake is to turn the free gift back into a transaction, to add our law-keeping as the thing that finally tips the balance. Paul calls this not a harmless extra but an emptying of the cross: "if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain" (Galatians 2:21). To the churches reaching back toward earning, he says something startling, that they have not climbed higher but slipped off the very thing that held them: "whosoever of you are justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace" (Galatians 5:4). Grace offends the religious heart precisely because it will not let us pay. The elder brother, furious outside the party, is the portrait of a man who would rather earn than be given to.

The second ditch: presuming on it

The opposite error treats grace as permission, as if forgiveness in advance were a license to sin freely. Paul saw that coming too, and answered it before anyone could finish asking: "Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid" (Romans 6:1-2). Real grace does not loosen its grip on how we live; it is the very power that pries sin's fingers off us, "teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly" (Titus 2:12). Jude has a hard name for the counterfeit, men "turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness" (Jude 4). That is grace cheapened into license, and it is no longer grace at all (see when grace becomes a license).

Grace all the way through

Grace is not only the door; it is the whole house. We are saved by grace, but we also stand in it, "this grace wherein we stand" (Romans 5:2), grow by it, and will be brought home by it. The Christian life is not grace to begin and gritted teeth to continue. When Paul begged to have his weakness removed, the answer he got was the pattern of the whole thing: "My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Grace meets us not only at the start, in our guilt, but all along the way, in our weakness. It is sufficient. There is always enough (see the security of salvation).

Is the faith itself the gift? What "and that" refers to

One clause carries most of this argument, and almost nobody is shown the actual question underneath it. Here are the steps.

The verse as you have always read it. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8).

The question. What is "that"? If "that" means faith, then even your believing was handed to you and nothing whatever is yours. If "that" means being saved by grace through faith, the whole arrangement, then the sentence says salvation is God's gift without saying anything one way or the other about where the believing came from. Whole systems have been built on which way that pronoun points.

What the Greek does. Albert Barnes lays it out, and he is worth quoting because he states the grammar and then refuses to over-collect on it:

The word rendered "that" — touto — is in the neuter gender, and the word "faith" — pistis — is in the feminine. The word "that," therefore, does not refer particularly to faith, as being the gift of God, but to "the salvation by grace" of which he had been speaking… Many critics, however, as Doddridge, Beza, Piscator, and Chrysostom, maintain that the word "that" refers to "faith"… As a matter of grammar this opinion is certainly doubtful, if not untenable; but as a matter of theology it is a question of very little importance.

Albert Barnes, Notes on Ephesians 2:8

In plain terms: Greek nouns have gender, and "that" and "faith" do not match. Grammatically the pronoun most naturally reaches back to the whole idea, not to the one word. That is a real observation and it is not a Protestant or Catholic point; it is just what the letters say.

And then Barnes gives away why it settles less than people hope. "As a matter of theology it is a question of very little importance." He goes on to say that faith is God's gift regardless, because Scripture teaches that elsewhere. So the grammar denies you this verse as a proof text and hands you nothing to celebrate: the doctrine does not stand or fall here.

The other side, taken at strength. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the pronoun the other way and are not embarrassed about it:

and that — namely, the act of believing, or "faith." "Of yourselves" stands in opposition to, "it is the gift of God"… "That which I have said, 'through faith,' I do not wish to be understood so as if I excepted faith itself from grace."

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, on Ephesians 2:8

And they add the sentence that does the most work on this whole page, from Richard Hooker:

God justifies the believing man, not for the worthiness of his belief, but for the worthiness of Him in whom he believes.

Hooker, quoted by Jamieson, Fausset & Brown

Where the men who differ end up agreeing. Gill, who is as far from a free-will reading as a commentator gets, still writes that faith "is the way, or means, or instrument, which God has appointed, for the receiving and enjoying it." An instrument is used by somebody. And the same JFB paragraph that makes faith the gift adds that faith "cometh by the means which man must avail himself of, namely, hearing the word of God… and prayer, though the blessing is wholly of God."

Which man must avail himself of. Though the blessing is wholly of God. That is both halves in one sentence, from the strictest side of the argument, and it is what this page holds: God supplied the object and the call and the drawing, so the beginning is His; the answer is genuinely yours. Hooker's line explains why the question was never as urgent as the systems made it. Faith is not a payment whose owner has to be established. It is a hand open toward someone else's worth. It matters enormously who is being trusted. It matters very little how much credit the truster gets, and Scripture never sets out to tell us.

Where this lands

Grace is not finally a doctrine to be argued; it is a gift to be received with empty hands. The only thing you are asked to bring is your need, and the moment you try to bring anything else, a record, a resume, a reason He should, you have stepped off grace and back onto earning. So come the way the gospel actually invites you: not as the worthy, but as the welcomed. Christ has already paid for the gift (see the cross); grace is simply God pressing it into the hands of people who could never have bought it, and then teaching those same hands to live (see faith that works).

Related: When Grace Becomes a License, The Cross, The Security of Salvation, Faith Is a Verb, Born Again, Repentance, Sanctification, Rest, Justification, and Lordship. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple.