The Gospel

What is the Gospel? Many people go around talking about it and throwing it around, but do they actually know what the gospel is? Could they actually unpack it if you asked them? It is important to continually unload the Gospel on people. There is rampant confusion about what it is, especially in the South.

Most people have some cursory understanding of the Gospel, but a lot of times they really have a misunderstanding or misconception of what the Gospel is. They believe it is about religion or morality, "doing good" or "being a good person", sometimes they can even throw around the hallowed "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" as a means of explaining the Gospel.

By doing this most people rob the Gospel of its meaning and power, reducing it to a laundry list of dos and donts and preventing it from transforming the lives of God's people. This is tragic.

The Gospel, at its essence (and in my mind) is actually not mainly about us. It is about God. The Gospel points, not to us, but to the trinitarian God. It points to what God has done in Christ. It is not about us. Certainly the implications of Christ's redemption means that we move from death to life, but to the Gospel is about what God has done for us, not what we have done for God. The Gospel is Christ-centered, God-exalting, Spirit-filled power, moving people form life to death. That is the Gospel that we must proclaim to people. A Gospel that moves people from us to God, from our issues to the Cross of Christ.

The Gospel is the good news that our sin, our brokeness is not the end of the story, but that God has sent Jesus Christ to ransom us from death and bring us into life. The Gospel is though we have earned death, God in Christ has provided us life. This is the good news, not that there are some amazing rules to follow or some R rated movies that we should never see...it is that God has reconciled us through Christ and that in that reconciliation we have true hope and life.

That is something worth sharing.