Longtime staple of evangelism, this passage provides a concise statement about the gospel of grace and faith as opposed to a merit-based religion. And that is good news, indeed. All religions of the world are, in some sense, meritorious, that is, they teach that salvation or attainment of the ultimate spiritual objective is based at least in part on the individual’s own efforts. In other words, standard human spirituality agrees that a person must be good in order to attain salvation (whatever that might mean in a given religion). However, in contrast to that false thinking, the good news from God is that, as these verses point out, nothing a person can do will merit salvation.

Paul carefully chose his words. First, grace is the cause of our salvation. He again (see Eph 1:6) uses “grace” as a metonymy (a literary figure of speech), where the word is used for “the God who acts in a gracious way.” Salvation is first and foremost an act of God that is unmerited and undeserved by the recipient. Second, faith is the means by which God has saved us. Faith is not a “work” as though it merits for us salvation. Rather it is simply the avenue by which God has determined grace to become operative in a person’s life.

Third, salvation is a done deal with present results. The tense of the verb is very specific. The believer “has been saved.” That means an action that took place in the past and has enduring effects. We are in the state of “saved-ness” as a result of being saved in the past.

Paul follows with four terse inferences to this truth. First, the salvation by grace through faith that he speaks of is “not of yourselves.” Technically, this phrase could be translated, “not out of yourselves.” Salvation does not originate with the individual and it is not caused by the individual. Let the reader take careful note of this. Second, it is God’s gift to us. While the Greek word for “grace” (charis) earlier in the verse is related to another Greek word for “gift” (charisma), Paul uses a different word here for gift, “doron” to remove any possibility of ambiguity. This salvation is a gift freely given by God to us, with no cost on our part. To suggest that a person can earn salvation by his good works is to insult God. As if that is not clear enough, the apostle adds, “not a result of works.” Finally, the end game of his reasoning is that no one can boast that he has done anything of merit to earn salvation, all are on an absolutely equal footing.