If you aren't daily admitting to yourself that you are a mess and in daily and rather desperate need for forgiving and transforming grace, and if the evidence around has not caused you to abandon your confidence in your own righteousness, then you are going to give yourself to the work of convincing yourself that you are okay.

Denying sin makes a liar out of God and denies the message of his Word. Here's the bottom line—either God, in his Word, is true when he says that you have a problem you can't solve or you're right that you're not so bad after all. It can't be both ways.

It really is possible to live in a state of Advent schizophrenia, where you celebrate the birth of the Messiah while actively denying your need for his birth, life, death, and resurrection.

Yet we all tend to think that we are more righteous than we are, and when we think this, we have taken the first step to embracing the delusion that maybe we're not so bad in God's eyes after all.

You will always deny your need for God's grace when you are more irritated than convicted. It's possible to be irritated with things in other people that you regularly excuse in yourself.

The person who is comfortable in his own righteousness hasn't really understood grace, and the person who is unimpressed by God's grace hasn't really understood his sin. So

God, who loves us enough to sacrifice his Son for our redemption, works so that we would see ourselves clearly, so that we would not buy into the delusion of our own righteousness, and so that with a humble sense of personal need we would seek the resources of grace that can only be found in him.

The fact is that no one gives grace better than someone who is convinced that he needs it, as well.

If a system could give us what we need, Jesus would never have come.

The more you see your sin, the more you will respond tenderly to other sinners and want for them the same grace you have received.

The more you see your sin, the more you will respond tenderly to other sinners and want for them the same grace you have received. And as you taste new life, you will begin to celebrate, in fresh new ways, the grace that is yours in Christ Jesus.

It really does take grace to know how much you need grace.