Sinner Saints

Per The Centrality of the Gospel (I highly recommend reading this article) by Tim Keller:

“Without a knowledge of our extreme sin, the payment of the cross seems trivial and does not electrify or transform.  But without a knowledge of Christ’s completely satisfying life and death, the knowledge of sin would crush us or move us to deny and repress it.  Take away either the knowledge of sin or the knowledge of grace and people’s lives are not changed.  They will be crushed by the moral law or run from it angrily.  So the gospel is not that we go from being irreligious to being religious, but that we realize that our reasons for both our religiosity and our irreligiosity were essentially the same and essentially wrong.  We were seeking to be our own saviors and thereby keep control of our own life.  When we trust in Christ as our Redeemer, we turn from trusting either self-determination or self-denial for our salvation – from either moralism or hedonism.”