He saved us, not by the righteous deeds we had done, but according to His mercy.
Read that as good news about your failures and you have only got half of it. It is also a statement about your successes. The righteous deeds are mentioned and then set aside. They were not the mechanism either.
That is harder for some of us. Most people carrying religious exhaustion are not tormented by their sins. They are tired from maintaining a record that they suspect is what holds the whole arrangement together.
If the deeds are not what saved you, they are also not what keeps you. The thing was never load bearing on your performance, which means a bad month does not endanger it any more than a good month secured it.
According to His mercy is the entire mechanism. There is nothing else in the sentence doing work.
You can stop auditing. It was never the audit that saved you.
