If I had read this passage earlier on in my life, it would have saved me a great deal of grief and struggle, or at least put me on the road to overcoming my wrongheaded religious tendencies.

You cannot be a Christian until you understand this passage at the core of your being. I was nothing more than a Pharisee for 20 something years of my life, and still am at times, but I'm learning to live in God's love and grace and thus to Love the things He loves, or another way of saying it, to follow Him.

"The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law---a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty."

-----George MacDonald, "The Way" Unspoken Sermons Volume II