"We see the horror of our sin most clearly in the hellish death of Christ, for it was our sin that caused him to die (Isa. 53:4-8, 10-12). We see the hopelessness of our sinful condition when we see that we had to be rescued from it. We see the severity of our sin when we understand that it was God himself who had to be our rescuer.

Realizing this confronts the performance aspect of the flesh, for it tells us that sin is not something we can overcome through our own effort. While people involved in religious forms of the flesh may believe they are taking sin seriously by persistently reminding people to stop doing it, they are actually trivializing sin by depicting it as something that can be overcome through behavior modification. It is this trivialized view of sin that is behind the "try harder" solution andand all forms of legalism. "

~Gregory A. Boyd, Seeing is Believing