Any time you turn around, put your attention on yourself, and begin checking yourself for fruit, you are going to fall and fail. It is a spiritual law that when you look to self, you are overcome. But when you look to Jesus, you are an overcomer. How many of us have spent our entire Christian lives like children in the garden, pulling up the tiny green shoots every few minutes to see if there's a radish there yet. There's nothing else to try.
Relationship is the end of trying.
And that's why it's bad news. Because there's nothing that you can do to earn or merit your obedience. It is a gift. It's a humbling thing to realize that you are just as incapable of dealing with your present sinning as you are to deal with your sins of the past. But for all of salvation, the answer is in the vineyard.