Because of Christ's work on your behalf, God does not dwell on your sin the way you do. So, relax and rejoice…and you'll actually start to get better. The irony, of course, is that it's only when we stop obsessing over our own need to be holy and focus instead on the beauty of Christ's holiness, that we actually become more holy!

The average Christian is like a kitten that has found a ball of yarn and has played with the yarn and romped until it is wrapped in a cocoon. The kitten cannot get itself out. It just lies there and whimpers. Somebody has to come unwind it. We have tried to be simple, but instead of being simple we have simplified—we have not become simple. We are sophisticated and overly complex.

We have simplified until Christianity amounts to this: God is love; Jesus died for you; believe, accept, be jolly, have fun and tell others. And away we go—that is the Christianity of our day. I would not give a plug nickel for the whole business of it. Once in a while God has a poor bleeding sheep that manages to live on that kind of thing and we wonder how." (Rut, Rot or Revival, p. 173)