Participation

I have been studying the history of the subject of the relationship between God's grace and human works, that is things done for God and others. In the time of the Reformation reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin were so fed up with trying to earn salvation through penance and other good works that they lit very heavily on the conviction that we are saved by faith and not through gaining merit by following God's way. Martin Luter even penned the Latin word "sola" in the margin of his Bible. Sola means alone or only and so the text now read, "By grace you have been saved trough faith alone. It is not your own doing, it is the gift of God." I am writing from memory at the moment.
One reformer Philipp Melanchthon by name agreed at first with Luther, but observed that the result of seeing salvation as strictly the work of God was that people were not being very observant of God's way as revealed also in scripture. So he argued in his later works that people needed to respond to God's grace in faith and obedience if they were to be saved. This became kind of a heresy in Lutheranism called synergism--"working with." That is the view that humans had to work with God if they were to be saved.
This Got me to John Wesley whose way of dealing with this issue was--at least in my estimate after reading a lot of this works--is that God awakens every person who comes into the world so that they have the desire and power to respond to the light they have. As they respond, they experience more grace and more light. Thus they do not merit salvation because of their response to God's grace because God empowers them as they move along the path; but their participation is a requirement, a condition. A little like a computer. It enables you to do things that you cannot do on your own, not only by providing the software and hardware without which you could not do what you need to do, but also provides you with help and assitance in doing it. As you participate in the process of computing you become more skillful and the computer is able to be of even more help. Now the computer is a machine--an intelligent one--but God is a person. That fact allows an even more intimate relationship between God's grace and our works. By obedience and love we participate by faith in the whole pilgrimage of redemption with God and with others who value God's will and God's way.