Perhaps in trying to do 'our best' sometimes, even the most well-intentioned acts take us further away from God.

Charles Wesley tried his level best to live a 'good' life while a student at Oxford.
He and his friends were so methodical in their strict religious practices that they were labelled ‘Methodists’- that’s where the name came from.

But only later did Wesley realise that all his religious exercises would never remove his own sense of guilt. He needed simply to accept God’s forgiveness.

In one of his poems (which later became the words to a hymn) he summed it up like this:

No condemnation now I dread
Jesus and all in Him is mine!
Alive in Him, my living Head.
And clothed in righteousness divine.
Bold I approach the eternal throne
And claim the crown, through Christ my own.