This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion…therefore I hope in Him! The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord….For the Lord will not cast off forever. Though He causes grief, yet He will show compassion according to the multitude of His mercies. For He does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men….Who is he who speaks and it comes to pass, when the Lord has not commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that woe and well-being proceed? Lamentations 3:21-26, 31-33, 37-38
Salvation is the gracious gift of God, but it is not altogether one-sided. There is a give and take to it. The Lord gives and we take, we receive. The gift is not something we can counterfeit. If He doesn’t give, there is nothing for us to receive. His giving, then, is paramount. But our receiving is indispensable. Our refusing the gift doesn’t negate the gift. Our receiving the gift is an act of faith, but that doesn’t make it a “work”. We are saved by His grace, through our faith. And even our faith is His gift to us, another gift for us to receive.
This give and take is perhaps (perhaps) best summed up by an Eastern Orthodox Bishop, Kallistos Ware, who put it this way:
“What God does [in saving us] is incomparably more important than what we humans do; yet our voluntary participation in God’s saving action is altogether indispensable. Our cooperation with God is genuinely free, but there is nothing in our good actions that is exclusively our own. At every point our human cooperation is itself the work of the Holy Spirit. The inter-relationship between divine grace and human freedom remains always a mystery beyond our comprehension.”
