Once there was a poor woman who greatly desired a bunch of grapes from the king’s garden for her sick child. She took fifty cents and went to the king’s gardener trying to buy the fruit, but was rudely refused.
A second effort with more money met with the same result.
It happened that the king’s daughter heard the angry words from the gardener and the pleading of the woman. She made enquires.
When the poor woman had told her story the princess said “My dear woman you are mistaken. My father is not a merchant but a king. His business is not the sell but give!”
She picked the bunch from the vine and gently dropped it into the woman’s apron.
So the woman received as a free gift what the labor of many days and nights and proved impossible to obtain.
In the same way God is offering salvation as a gift. We cannot obtain it by money or good works! “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9)