A.W. Tozer wrote:
The Pharisees were religious in their daily life. They were outwardly pious and well acquainted with the forms of worship —but within their beings were attitudes and faults and hypocrisies which caused Jesus to describe them as “whitewashed sepulchres.”
The only righteousness they knew and understood was their own outward form of righteousness based on the maintenance of a fairly high level of external morality. Because they thought of God as being as stern and austere and unforgiving as they themselves were,their concept of worship was necessarily low and unworthy.
To a Pharisee,the service of God was a bondage which he did not love but from which he could not escape without a loss too great to bear. God,as the Pharisees saw Him,was not a God easy to live with. So their daily religion became grim and hard,with no trace of true love in it.
It can be said about us,as humans,that we try to be like our God. If He is conceived to be stern and exacting and harsh,so will we be!
The blessed and inviting truth is that God is the most winsome of all beings,and in our worship of Him we should find unspeakable pleasure.
God would have us know that He is just,indeed,and He will not condone sin. He has tried to make it overwhelmingly plain to us that through the blood of the everlasting covenant He is able to act toward us exactly as if we had never sinned.
(From Whatever Happened to Worship?)