Daily to Understand Justification

Daily I must still work at the task of apprehending Christ.  Habit does this, because for so many years I considered Him a Judge.  This view has become an old, bad, rotten tree that has sunk its roots into me.  Moreover, it is a teaching that accords with reason: he who commits sin should render satisfaction for it.  This is natural law....  But in this way I lose Christ my Savior and Comforter, and turn Him into a taskmaster and a hangman of my soul.  We have now again acquired the light (of this doctrine).  But when I became a doctor, I was not acquainted with it. " 

Source: Quoted in Ewald M. Plass, What Luther Says, A Practical In-home Theology for the Active Christian. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 1959 Edition, 10th Printing (1994), p. 714.