Beating the gospel into our heads...

According the Martin Luther, we "leak" the gospel, and it needs to be beat into our heads. Every day. Over and over. My pastor has been teaching throught Galatians, and has quoted Luther on justification (which IS the gospel) and our need to understand it, hear it, and preach it to ourselves constantly.

Justin Taylor over at Between Two Worlds had a link to this article by Jerry Bridges, which says the same thing...

So I learned that Christians need to hear the gospel all of their lives because it is the gospel that continues to remind us that our day-to-day acceptance with the Father is not based on what we do for God but upon what Christ did for us in his sinless life and sin-bearing death. I began to see that we stand before God today as righteous as we ever will be, even in heaven, because he has clothed us with the righteousness of his Son. Therefore, I don't have to perform to be accepted by God. Now I am free to obey him and serve him because I am already accepted in Christ (see Rom. 8:1). My driving motivation now is not guilt but gratitude.

Yet even when we understand that our acceptance with God is based on Christ's work, we still naturally tend to drift back into a performance mindset. Consequently, we must continually return to the gospel. To use an expression of the late Jack Miller, we must "preach the gospel to ourselves every day." For me that means I keep going back to Scriptures such as Isaiah 53:6, Galatians 2:20, and Romans 8:1. It means I frequently repeat the words from an old hymn, "My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness."

I urge you to read Bridges' article in its entirety...I was recently talking to a friend, trying to explain why this Galatians series has been so liberating, and found myself totally unable to articulate what I meant. I think this article says what I was fumbling to say.