Three Ways to Live

"People tend to think there are two ways to relate to God-to follow him and do his will or to reject him and do your own thing-but there are also two ways to reject God as Savior. One is the way already mentioned: by rejecting God's law and living as you see fit. The other, however, is by obeying God's law, by being really righteous and really moral, so as to earn your own salvation. It is not enough to simply think there are two ways to relate to God. There are three; religion, irreligion, and the gospel. In 'religion', people may look to God as their helper, teacher, and example, but their moral performance is serving as their savior. Both religious and irreligious people are avoiding God as Savior and Lord. Both are seeking to control their own lives by looking to something other than God as their salvation. Religious legalism/moralism and secular/irreligious relativism are just different strategies of 'self-salvation'. Christians may have had both religious phases and irreligious phases in their lives, but through the gospel they have come to see that the reason for both their irreligion and their religion was essentially the same, and essentially wrong. Christians have come to see that their sins as well as their best deeds have equally been ways of avoiding Jesus as Savior."

Tim Keller, Gospel in Life