The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

“Sin is: in despair not wanting to be oneself before God…. Faith is: that the self in being itself and wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God.”3 Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.

Brilliant. I think one if the most shocking and incredible paradoxes about bin the Christian faith is that the more you put your identity in God, the more freedom you gain in being your unique self. Something I’m working on myself.

If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but paralyzed with fear. If you lose your identity through the failings of someone else you will not just be resentful, but locked into bitterness. If you lose it through your own failings, you will hate or despise yourself as a failure as long as you live. Only if your identity is built on God and his love, says Kierkegaard, can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything.

We pin our happiness to nearly everything else in life other than God. Our identity (MY identity) is not complete without grounding it in Jesus.

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 in Jesus for your standing with God. You are trying to save yourself by following Jesus.

Another thoughtful paradox that so many radical Christians get wrong. As I continue my faith journey I am more and more convinced that the point of the faith is to root out any trust, reliance, or faith we have in ourselves and turn our eyes to Jesus.

We believe that if we don’t obey we are going to lose God’s blessing in this world and the next. In the gospel, the motivation is one of gratitude for the blessing we have already received because of Christ.

We have already been saved. There is no action in this world we can take to undo that, we can only refuse it. Powerful, heartbreaking.