You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again

Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection

Mere Christianity - CS Lewis, pg 88

You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator. In the same way, you sum up the whole of new Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of god as one's holy Father. if you wnat to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. if this is not the tought that prompts and controls his worskhp and prayers, and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. for everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively christian as opposed to mrely Jewish, is ummed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. "Father" is the Christian name for God.

Packer, Evangelical Magainze 7, pp 19 -20.

Mature Christians are not people who have completely hit the bedrock. I do not believe that is possible in this life. Rather, they are people who know how to keep drilling and are getting closer and closer 

- Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods, pg 176 -