Justification

If you work for your justification, what you are doing is trying to put God in your debt. And if you succeed in getting God to owe you something, then you can boast before men and God. If you worked for justification and you succeeded, you would not get grace, but a wage. God would owe it to you. And when you got it, you would be able to say, "I deserve this." And that, Paul says, is not what Abraham did.

John Piper, Brothers, We Are Not Professionals, pg. 25