You complain much of yourself. Does your sin make you look more at Christ, less of yourself? That is right, or else complaining is but hypocrisy. To be looking at duties, graces, enlargements, when you should be looking at Christ, that is pitiful. Looking at them will make your proud; looking at Christ’s grace will only make you humble. By grace you are saved (Eph 2:5). In all your temptations be not discouraged (James 1:2). Those surges maybe not to break you, but to heave you off yourself upon the Rock Christ. Thomas Willcox
The idea of complaining is not necessarily bad, but it depends on what one is complaining about and to whom one is voicing the complaints. The driving point of this paragraph (above) is that a person must be driven to Christ or flee to Christ regardless of whether one has the sense of drowning in sin or experiences much grace. If we complain of sin in order to appear righteous to others, that is sinful. If we complain of sin and yet don’t even try to leave the sin, that is sinful. If we complain of sin and yet that drives us to an unhealthy form of introspection, that is sinful as well. What we must see is that if we truly complain of sin that should lead us to complain to Christ who alone can deliver us from sin.
The believer must learn to quit looking at self so much as that leads to a focus on self rather than a sense of dependence on Christ for all things. The heart must be given to Christ and to Christ alone rather than doting on self in some way. The gaze of the believer’s love and heart is to be fixed on Christ rather than self. Christ opens the hearts of His children at times so that they can see how foul they are which should drive them to Him. Christ may open the hearts of His children so that they can see their great weakness, but that is so that they will seek Him as the total Self-Sufficient One in all things. But by nature men are focused on self and want to remain that way. For some reason they think that they can cure themselves of sin or that there is some righteousness to be obtained by focusing on the sin. There are times to focus on sin, yes, but that is to break ourselves of a self-focus and drive us to Christ in all things.
The opposite of the person (only in one sense) who dwells on his own sinfulness rather than the sin driving him to Christ is the person that dwells upon his or her own gifts and graces. What these two things have in common is that they both dwell on self rather than Christ. The person that focuses on his or her own gifts and graces rather than being taken with the giver and worker of those gifts and graces is a proud person and does not realize the true source of those graces. If we see graces and kept duties in ourselves, that should lead us to praise Christ alone and not self. The giving of grace that gives us graces should lead us to marvel at the grace that God shows. But it is so easy for an imperfect heart to use grace to focus on self rather than Christ.
Whether God opens the eyes of sinners to see their sin or opens the hearts of some to obedience by grace, the purpose is to show all our utter dependence upon Christ. How the heart of the believer may be taken up with a temptation, but the believer needs to focus on the grace of Christ and the cross of Christ in order to break the power of that temptation. But the heart of the believer may also be taken up with the graces that God gives and works through that believer, but in that case the believer should also look to Christ for strength to overcome such a sinful and wicked heart that would try to take the credit for what Christ is doing in the soul.
The soul must learn that it has no strength in terms of fighting sin at its root apart from Christ. The Lord Jesus has left His people in a state of total and utter dependence upon Him if they are to do good at all. Jesus told us that apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:5). It is only grace that can teach us this in the depths of the soul and it is only grace that can give us the grace to rest in Christ whether in times of temptation or in times where God is working His graces in and through us. Both temptations to sin and graces given are to teach us that we must have Christ at all times. We may indeed swing from one to the other as we grow, but we need to learn to seek Christ as our Rock and our Anchor at all times. Our hearts are too often taken away from Christ to look to self in some way.
God Loves... Himself 
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