Accepted by grace
Here is the one that is hardest for driven people to hold: your worth to God is not tied to your output. You were saved by grace, not by anything you produced, and the same grace carries you now. This cuts against most of your life, where you are measured by what you deliver. With God the order is reversed. You are accepted first, and the good you do flows out of that instead of earning it. Notice where your sense of being okay rises and falls with how productive you were. That is the old scorekeeping, and you can set it down. What you do for Him matters, but it never makes you His.
For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, that no man should glory.
Ephesians 2:8-9 · ASVPaul states that salvation is by grace through faith, and that even this is God's gift, not the result of works. He rules out any grounds for boasting, since the whole of it originates with God.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10 · ASVThe next verse calls believers God's workmanship, created in Christ for good works God prepared beforehand. Good works are presented as the outcome of being made new, not its cause.
Wherefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.
2 Corinthians 5:17 · ASVPaul says anyone in Christ is a new creation, and the old has passed away. The language describes a decisive remaking rather than a gradual self-improvement.
Not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy he saved us.
Titus 3:5 · ASVPaul says God saved us according to His mercy, not by righteous works of our own. Salvation is traced to God's mercy as its sole basis.