One of the greatest dangers in spiritual life is to fall into the trap of auto-salvation, the conviction that we can be saved through our own heroic moral effort. The principal problem with such a strategy is that it results in the strengthening of the very egotism that we hope to overcome.
Jesus judges the Pharisees for their hypocrisy because on the outside they appeared righteous, but on the inside they were filled with hypocrisy and evildoing. He critiqued in the Pharisees just this kind of egotism: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones.” He is teaching us that sin is not a weakness that we can overcome but a condition from which we have to be saved.
This insight should allow us, at an elemental psychological and spiritual level, to relax and to surrender. But what often happens in the hearts of sinners is a kind of tightening of the spirit as the mind and will strive to break out of the prison of fear. All of this stretching and straining serves only to throw the ego back on itself in a misery of failure and self-reproach.
Sin is not a weakness that we can overcome but a condition from which we have to be saved.
Lord, have mercy on me, a poor sinner.
Smitten With Goodness 