You describe the power of ‘free-will’ as small, and wholly ineffective apart from the grace of God. Agreed? Now then, I ask you; if God’s grace is wanting [lacking], if it is taken away from that small power, what can it do? It is ineffective, you say, and can do nothing good. So it will not do what God or His grace wills. Why? Because we have now taken God’s grace away from it, and what the grace of God does not do is not good. Hence it follows that ‘free-will’ without God’s grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good. This being so, I give you full permission to enlarge the power of ‘free-will’ as much as you like; make it angelic, make it divine, if you can!—but when once you add this doleful transcript, that it is ineffective apart from God’s grace, straightaway you rob it of all its power. What is ineffective power but (in plain language) no power? So to say that ‘free-will’ exists and has power, albeit ineffective power, is, in the Sophists’ phrase, a contradiction in terms. It is like saying ‘“free-will” is something which is not free’—as if you said that fire is cold and earth hot. Fire certainly has power to hear; but if hell-fire (even) was cold and chilling instead of burning and scorching, I would not call it ‘fire’, let alone ‘hot’ (unless you meant to refer to an imaginary fire, or a painted one). (Martin Luther, Bondage of the Will )
What Luther does in this paragraph is really demonstrate the utter futility of maintaining a free-will position. If the will does not have the power to do what it wants to do, then it has no power at all. When speaking of the omnipotence of God, we simply say that He is free to do all that He desires to do. At any point that God is not free to carry out what He desires to do is the point He has no power. So the human will that does not have the power to do what it desires is the will that has no power at that point and is under the power of another. It is also true that anything which is ineffective to carry out what it desires has no freedom to do what it desires. A will that is ineffective in doing what it desires has no freedom to do what it desires and so that will is not free at all.
On the other side of the issue is the freedom of God and the power of grace. Scripture is quite clear that God is free to have grace on those He pleases: “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion” (Exodus 33:19). The free-will position, however, gives man the power to decide if God is going to show grace on him or not. Scripture says that God will be gracious to whom He will be gracious and not be gracious to the person who makes a free-will choice for God to be gracious to that person. In another view, the Reformers re-captured the biblical position of salvation by grace alone. Another way of wording that, then, would be that salvation is by the will of God alone and the power of God alone. The only will that is free in this sense is the will that has the power to do what it pleases. The human will does not and the will of God is.
Luther uses this to show that even in the smallest of things the will of the human soul is not free because it cannot command the power of grace. The will of the human soul, even if it had the power of an angel, cannot do the slightest good unless it has grace. If the human soul cannot do the slightest bit of good apart from grace, then the human soul is always in the power of evil to do evil apart from grace. That is not freedom but bondage. As Luther points out, an ineffective power is no power at all. It might seem that one can have a lot of power but simply cannot quite get over a certain limitation. A man that can press 500 pounds over his head has power over the 500 pounds. But if he cannot press 525 pounds, he has no power over the 525 at all. The will that cannot actually carry out the good by itself is not the will that has power to do the good. Human beings are never free to do good apart from grace because they can do no good at all apart from grace.
Luther’s words leave us at the point the Bible does. All human souls are utterly dependent on grace and on grace alone for salvation and sanctification. We are not left in our own hands dependent on our own wills and power. We are in the hands of God and of the real power of grace. That shows that the will is enslaved to sin (all that is non-grace and so not to His glory) and does not have the power to change itself, save itself, or do anything good for itself. All true good must come from God and it comes on the basis of grace alone. The will is not free and it is an attack on grace alone (the only kind there is) to say that it is. It is, as the book by Walter Chantry says, either free will of free grace. One or the other is free, but not both. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is by grace alone and so the will is not and cannot be free. That is why we must teach people their true state and their true nature so that they can see the true Gospel. We have to be saved from our enslaved will and given a new nature. We have to be saved from following what we think is our freedom in order to be slaves of Christ. It is either free-will or free-grace. You choose? No, God chooses.
God Loves... Himself 
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