Jerry Bridge's book, The Discipline of Grace is a great read if you want to be confronted with the utter sinfulness of who you are and then be overwhelmed by the goodness of God's grace.
In the chapter entitled, "The Pharisee and the tax collector" Mr Bridges takes us through quite a vast array of various sins that we overlook most of the time in our lives, The one that stood out to me was self-righteousness, in a great example of it Mr. Bridges gives the example of the prodigal son and the older brother, " Jesus' criticism of the older brother is implied rather than stated. But it is obvious that he puts the older brother in the same category as the self righteous Pharisee. Yet the older brother would have qualified as an elder or deacon in any of our churches today and would have been highly regarded. We need to learn the lesson Jesus was teaching and to see the hideousness of the sin of self righteousness."
Ouch! so many times we think that we have a "right" because we call ourselves "christian" forgetting that the first thing we that we indeed are, are sinners in desperate need of God's amazing grace. The gospel isn't just for the unconverted, we all need to hear the gospel and know that we are indeed worse off than we think we are but more loved than we'll ever know.
As my brother Steve Brown would say, "you think about that, Amen"
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