From the Sermon Tomorrow (11.13.10)

We are justified by faith and not by the law.

There is no amount of right doing that will get us to God. In fact, it is detrimental to our getting to God, because our success and failure in following the law places our focus on self and not on God. The old chorus, Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus gets it exactly right. It says, "Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace."

This is a theme that is all throughout the book of Galatians and will be all throughout the sermon in church tomorrow. It is a message that is worthy of redundancy, because we just do not get it. Our bend is always toward religion and trying to earn our way. Even in earthly relationships, we try to earn things. But our relationship with God is based only the fact that Jesus Christ suffered a death that we should have suffered to satisfy the penalty for sin that we could not satisfy so that sin could be put away and we could live.

The thing is that even that understanding of the gospel can self focused. Our right view of God and the gospel can be the things that puffs us up and we wind up centered around our right understanding of God, rather than being centering around Christ Himself.