“All I have is my sins!”

In truth, believing the Gospel would be an immeasurably great and difficult task for us if God were not to accomplish it within us.  But suppose it were not so exceedingly great and difficult.  Even if it were an easy condition that God had proposed to us for our salvation, our salvation would not be a gift; God would not have given us His Son, but would merely have offered Him to us with a certain restricting condition.  But that is not God’s way.  The apostle Paul says, “[They] are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”  We are justified gratuitously, without any contribution on our part – without even the least thing being required of us.

Accordingly, we poor sinners praise God for the place of refuge He has prepared for us, to which we can flee even when we have to come to Him as completely lost, dead broke beggars, who have not the slightest ability to offer to God something that we have achieved.

Blessed are we!  We have a Gospel that proclaims: “Here is indeed a refuge for sinners!”  Jesus Christ is the faithful Savior, to whom we all can flee.  And we should offer Him nothing more than to say, “Here are my sins!”

Then Christ will ask me, so to speak, “Do you not have anything more?”

And I will answer, “No, all I have is my sins!”

Then He will say, “Fine, then you are the right one for Me.”

As soon as someone comes up and wants to offer Him something, then that person is denying the Lord Jesus.  “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”  And that name is the dear name of Jesus.  So remember: we should regard it as a horrible corruption of the Gospel to treat the command to believe as a condition of a person’s justification and salvation.

From C.F.W. Walther, Law and Gospel: How to Read and Apply the Bible, St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2010, p. 299 (emphases in original).