Grace takes the agency of salvation out of human hands, whereas the heart’s desire of every child of Adam and Eve is to keep it there—to strive endlessly to find something we can do to make ourselves legitimate. But grace makes all our efforts to legitimize ourselves irrelevant because it proclaims us already legitimized by the work of Someone Else, without a single effort on our part.
— Robert Farrar Capon
The Astonished Heart
