Has the Gospel Broken Through?

I have been out of town on a trip to New Mexico. While driving with a buddy, we listened to an outstanding series on Romans 1-4 by Tim Keller. I have never heard such a deeply penetrating analysis of sin and grace of the gospel. Or is I have, it didn't get through my thick skin. In the first sermon Keller quoted the text below from Martin Luther describing how the gospel "broke through."

I labored and diligently and anxiously as to how to understand Paul’s word [in Romans 1:17], where he says that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. I sought long and knocked anxiously for the expression “the righteousness of God” blocked the way, because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and deals righteously in punishing the unrighteous. …I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore I did not love a righteous and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. …Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise… When I saw the difference, that law is one thing and gospel another, I broke through. And as I had formerly hated the expression “the righteousness of God”, I now began to regard it as my dearest and most comforting word. So that this expression of Paul’s became to me in very truth a gate of paradise.

…If you have a true faith that Christ is your Saviour, then at once you have a gracious God for faith leads you in and opens up God’s heart and will that you should see pure grace and overflowing love. This it is to behold God in faith that you should look upon his fatherly friendly heart, in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness. He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly but only looks upon a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face.