EDIT: Wow, I botched this entry all up with all sorts of semantic issues.  The 'Acts Road' plan of salvation?  'Repentance' at Sacrament of Penance . . . that is, not initiated before, in the act of contrition?  This sort of loose wording is not ideal for this sort of entry.  [EDIT WITHIN EDIT] Even the formatting is screwed up!  Only Internet Explorer could discern the correct colour; this has been corrected.[/EDIT WITHIN EDIT]

     Happy Feast of All Saints Day - it's been a long day for me, but a good one.
     In the next entry, I'll deal with what some protestants/protestant-groups say that Holy Scriptures say about how we get salvation (Romans Road et al.).  Then I'll deal with what Holy Scriptures actually do say about normative vehicles of participation within God's salvation (hint: Jesus Christ our Lord, St. Peter, St. Philip, and many others - to say nothing of the Church at large, from time immemorial - made a big deal out of it).
     As for now, Ronald continues a good discussion: 

          Baptism is not a work, at least not our work.  It is a gift from God, as is faith.  So to place it on par with the idea of 'accepting Jesus into your heart' is a wrong comparison.  We baptize because Jesus commands such.  The gift is given to us.  Receiving a gift is not a work for the gift is there and given whether we accept it or not.  If we reject the gift, then that is our work.
          The difference between the false theology of 'asking Jesus into' and proper teaching is who makes the effort.  Under synergism, I make the effort by the asking.  I take the step.  Under the truth, God/Jesus gives the gift, He makes the effort not I.

          I definitely agree that God does not 'need' us (literally for anything, since we subsist in Him and not the other way around), and I definitely agree that it is God's prevenient and sanctifying grace that is His initiating, sustaining, and finishing righteousness in us; it is only because of God's grace that we even have a Saviour to save us in the first and last place.  I would even go further and say that the Sacraments are objectively gifts and agents of God, they being the major signs (in the pre-modern/pre-Reformation, more involved sense) of God's work of grace.  As you've correctly noted, they are God's work given to us.
          However, in all of this there is a mystery here of human participation, and that's what I was getting at in the last entry, in a roundabout and tongue-in-cheek way.  Works-based salvation - as a term that the Jesus-in-my-heart theologians have levelled at the Church - falls apart under brief scrutiny.  Even if Baptism is God's work, who baptises?  Or consider the Sacrament of Penance/Reconciliation (or for the mainline, low-church protestant: asking God's forgiveness) - does God pick up the human, take him to the church on a Saturday afternoon, and make him confess?  In the same way, who asks Jesus into my heart?  If one is works-based because I 'help God out' by responding, then all of it is works-based.  Just because I describe asking Jesus into my heart as a 'response' means nothing; Baptism is a gift received.  We must respond to God's grace and 'work out our own salvation with fear and trembling', not because God 'needs' us but because He has required our response.  God could have made a Sacrament of whistling a show-tune, if He so desired; He hasn't, but He has given us Sacraments that (because He has chosen them, instituted them, and invested them in His Church) are vehicles of grace.  And He has given us the revelation - invested in His Church - that He expects us to take up a cross and follow Him in the way He has carved for us.
          The mystery can be summarised with the passage upon which many older hymns are based - about being 'washed in the Blood'.  The implication in these hymns is generally (I can think of one exception) that Jesus is going to wash you in His blood.  Ironically, these hymns that were largely crafted by the descendants of those who rescued the Bible from the evil Church actually perform a grave and repeated misreading of Revelation 7:14.  In the literal Greek, the aorist third-person plural form of plunw indicates that the saints themselves have washed their own garments in the blood of the Lamb; and most colloquial translations, if not all, clearly and cleanly translate this in an accurate manner.  Now, admittedly, this is apocalyptic imagery and has a context all its own - I would certainly espouse that and not use this one reference proof-texted to make some monolithic case for a Catholic understanding of God's salvation - but the passage itself must give us a little pause, since it so happens to be in the inerrant, infallible Holy Scriptures and just so happens to cryptically describe saints performing the works that have saved them.  This is the mystery of our cooperation within God's grace; we do have a part, we do respond.
          But if the 'works-based salvation' critique is the route one wishes to take - of me having to help Jesus out - then it is immediately apparent that asking Jesus into my heart would fit the same criteria as Baptism or any other Catholic evil.

-r