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.

Faith is a deep-seated belief in the existence of God that radically alters the way you live your life. Now, here's the rub. Faith isn't natural for us. Biblical faith is counterintuitive and countercultural. So we even need God's grace to have faith to believe in the existence of the One whose grace we so desperately need. And the grace is yours for the asking again today.

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.

Perhaps we commit vertical larceny much more than we realize. Perhaps we quest for personal glory more than we think. Perhaps we take credit for what only God can do more often than we think we do. Perhaps, in subtle idolatry, we give credit to places and things when it really belongs to God.

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.

None of us is yet a grace graduate, but we're satisfied. We all give evidence that we still need to grow, but we're satisfied. And because we are satisfied, we are resistant to the grace that is our only hope.

Perhaps all the fear of man, the pride of knowing, the seduction of acclaim, the quest for control, the depression in the face of hardship, the envy of the ministry of others, the bitterness against detractors, and the anxiety of failure are all about the same thing. Each of these struggles is about the temptation to make your ministry about you. From that first dark moment in the garden, this has been the struggle—to make it all about us.

God's grace dethrones you from your little kingdom and welcomes you to a much better kingdom than you could ever want for yourself.

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