Timothy Keller from his book ‘The Reason for God’ taught:
Sin and evil are self-centeredness and pride that lead to oppression against others, but there are two forms of this. One form is being very bad and breaking all the rules, and the other form is being very good and keeping all the rules and becoming self-righteous. There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. The first is by saying, “I am going to live my life the way I want.” The second is described by Flannery O’Connor, who wrote about one of her characters, Hazel Motes, that he knew that the best way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin”2 If you are avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless and save you, then ironically, you may be looking to Jesus as a teacher, model, and helper but you are avoiding Him as Savior. You are trusting in your own goodness rather than Jesus for your standing with God. You are trying to save yourself by following Jesus.
That, ironically, is a rejection of the gospel of Jesus. It is a Christianized form of religion. It is possible to avoid Jesus as savior as much by keeping all the Biblical rules as by breaking them. Both religion (in which you build your identity on your moral achievements) and irreligion (in which you build your identity on some other secular pursuit or relationship) are, ultimately, spiritually identical courses to take. Both are “sin.” Self-salvation through good works may produce a great deal of moral behavior in your life, but inside you are filled with self-righteousness, cruelty, and bigotry, and you are miserable. You are always comparing yourself to other people, and you are never sure you are being good enough. You cannot, therefore, deal with your hideousness and self-absorption through the moral law, by trying to be a good person through an act of will. You need a complete transformation of the very motives of your heart.
The devil, if anything, prefers Pharisees—men and women who try to save themselves. They are more unhappy than either mature Christians or irreligious people, and they do a lot more spiritual damage.
The Damage of Pharisaism
Why is Pharisaic religion so damaging? Recall the “sickness unto death,” the spiritual deep nausea we feel when we fail to build our identity on God. We struggle for a sense of worth, purpose, and distinctiveness, but it is based on conditions that we can never achieve or maintain, and that are always slipping away from us. As Kierkegaard says, we have not become ourselves. This is experienced internally as anxiety, insecurity, and anger. It leads us externally to marginalize, oppress and exclude others.
Despite all their legal righteousness, then, Pharisees have lives that are, if anything, more driven by despair of sin. They build their sense of worth on their moral and spiritual performance as a kind of résumé to present before God and the world. The moral and spiritual standards of all religions are very high, and Pharisees know deep down that they are not living up to those standards. . . . ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Penguin Books, New York, NY, 2008)183-84
