"I'll do it myself!"

Any mother of toddlers has heard these words, usually shouted at top voice.

My three-year-old twins are no exception to this. They are champions of Do It Myself-ness.

My son in particular loves to be independent. He wants to be Superman.

Every day getting into the van, we have a struggle over opening the automatic sliding door. He wants to open it himself, but, although he can press the button inside to close it, he's not strong enough to pull the handle on the outside to activate the opening mechanism.

As you can imagine, this causes a lot of delay. I've actually starting to leave the van door open inside the garage in order to avoid the whole thing.

My little boy simply refuses to accept the fact that he's not able to open the door from the outside, and he needs Mommy's help in order to do it.

This reminds me of us as Christians in a way. We want to do it ourselves.

More than anything, we want to rely on our own righteousness. We want to be "good enough" for God. We say we're saved by grace and all that, but do we act that way?

In fact, many times what we do is live by a set of rules, and try to get everyone else to agree that our version of the rules is the correct one.

But we don't earn God's grace by being good enough to deserve it. We can't.

So why do we keep trying to be good, using our own strength, instead of allowing God to work through us? I don't know.

Not only is relying on our own righteousness much harder, more frustrating and utterly doomed to failure, it can actually separate us from God.

Galatians 5:4 says, "You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace."

When I read this, I found it incredibly convicting. Is trying to be justified by my own "goodness" actually alienating me from Christ? God forbid!

Why can't I just be humble enough to admit I CAN'T do it myself?