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
Luther’s statement that “what the grace of God does not do is not good” is vital to the biblical position. It sets out that what is of grace is good and what does not come from grace is not good. In other words, the will is not free without God’s grace and cannot do one good thing unless it is God’s grace doing it through the human soul. Apart from the grace of God the will is the slave of evil since it has utterly no power to work good and cannot turn itself to do good. As Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). People don’t usually like the word “nothing” in this passage as it destroys any sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance. The context tells us that this is bearing fruit and it has to do with spiritual things. So the will is not free to bear fruit and is not free to do any spiritual thing apart from the grace of God in it. The will that cannot do those things is not free.
What this teaching does is throw us totally and completely on the grace of God for salvation and sanctification. We cannot look to self and the will of self to do anything good. In terms of salvation we must teach souls not to look to themselves for faith or for any act of the will, but to look to the grace of God alone for all things. In terms of sanctification, we must teach souls to look to grace to work holiness in them rather than to accomplish anything of the will and power of self. If more people would take this book of Luther’s and focus on these few things God might change the world as He did during the time this book was written. But of course all of that is by grace alone as well.
The will cannot turn itself to do good, produce good, or even to wish good. The will of the flesh is and always will be a fleshly will and cannot do good in the slightest. The will that is apart from grace is a will that nothing good can come from. As Paul said, “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). Paul did not look to his will or his own power to do what he did, but he looked to grace to do it. It is the grace of God that gives power to the soul and it is the grace of God alone that can give spiritual power to the soul. Apart from that grace all that Paul would have done would have been the works of the flesh as indeed he did as Saul the Pharisee. The works of the flesh can be done with great zeal and great activity, but they are still the work of the flesh. Those are the works that Scripture speaks of as dead works and that we must be cleansed from them in order to serve the living God (Heb 9:14). It is from dead works that we are to repent of (Heb 6:1).
It is when people don’t understand the will and the nature of grace that they are caught up in all sorts of dead works thinking that they are serving God. It is when people trust in something that they can do whether it is an act of the will or a choice or a prayer that they are turning from the grace of God for something that they can do. Not resting in 100% grace but instead an act of the will or a prayer is to refuse grace as a whole and trust wholly in self. Grace is 100% or it is not at all. Grace must totally reign in the soul or it does not reign at all. It is either the will trusting in itself to trust in grace or it is the soul looking to grace alone to do all the work. The Gospel is by grace alone and the will has no power in that at all.
God Loves... Himself 
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