Daily Inspiration Quote by Johann Arndt

Grace is doing the heavy lifting here, and Arndt wants you to feel it in your bones. In a single sentence he sweeps away the spiritual accountant’s impulse to separate “big” gifts (righteousness, salvation) from the supposedly smaller perks that might look like wages. “Even these” is the tell: whatever the “these” are in his surrounding argument - virtues, good works, consolations, spiritual experiences - Arndt refuses to let them become proof of merit. They, too, are “bestowed,” not achieved.

The phrasing is deliberately leveling. By pairing “pure grace” with the headline doctrines of the Reformation, Arndt polices a boundary Protestants were anxious about: if salvation is free, what do you do with holiness, discipline, and visible piety without sliding back into works-righteousness? His answer is psychologically shrewd. Humans will accept grace for rescue while still craving a little ownership over improvement. Arndt denies that compromise. Growth doesn’t purchase salvation; it’s downstream from it, and even the downstream current is gift.

Context matters: Arndt writes in the late Reformation world, when doctrinal precision had curdled into factionalism and, soon, the Thirty Years’ War. His devotional theology (later famous in True Christianity) tries to marry Lutheran orthodoxy to lived transformation. The subtext is corrective, almost pastoral: stop treating God like a contract partner. If righteousness and salvation are gratuity, so is every lesser good you’re tempted to turn into a receipt.