the Gospel

great stuff at the Gospel Driven Life

The Gospel is glorious because it is not about what we do. It is not even a message that tells us to “ask Jesus to be your savior and you will be forgiven.” That is not the Gospel, it is a response to the Gospel. The Gospel is news about what Jesus has done. We subtly distort the Gospel when we make it about us. The Gospel is more than “God loves you as you are.” It is God saves you as you are.

The Gospel is news about Him not about us. It is the description of what he has done. We are the beneficiaries, but God is the One who has acted to save us. We should dwell often on his person and work and less on ourselves...
When this truth – the life and death of Jesus the Messiah – is no longer at the center of our lives and preaching and counseling, I am likely to create a caricature of God. I like to think of Gospel centrality as the Sun in the middle of the solar system – it is over 98% of the mass of the entire solar system, and its mass keeps all the planets in orbit. Shrink the centrality of the Gospel and the planets fall out of line. That means that all the good things of the Christian life are kept in line by the Gospel. If the Gospel is diminished in our hearts, there is bad fruit.

Shrink the cross and the empty tomb and we are drawn from godliness into moralism. We teach and bring constant exhortation to a better life but without hope. People do not live in faith, but in self-reliance...
Shrink the cross and my felt needs creep into the center of the stage. I cease to think clearly about what God sees as important -- sin and holiness and eternity. I think my felt needs are what matters.

Shrink the cross and we become religious intellectuals, doctrinally precise and defined, but without the warm and glorious humility of living in the grace of God.

Shrink the cross and all attempts at relevance become nothing but powerless platitudes, and religious or moral vanity.

Shrink the cross and we are drawn into sentimentality and the pursuit of good religious feelings...
Magnify the cross! With the cross dominating, we see the central issue to be our standing before God in his glorious holiness. We see that the central enemy is deep-seated sin and arrogance. We see the only power able to forgive and justify and put sin to death is the blood of Jesus applied to our lives in the power of the Spirit. We see the centrality of the local church, for which Jesus died. We see the necessity of Gospel power over religious sentiment or mysticism or how to’s.

The Gospel is about God and what he has done in order that we will be saved from wrath. It is not about our sense of purpose in life or our sense of meaning. It is not about our psychological problems – our “issues” as we say. It is about something far deeper – it is called sin. It is not about our needs – it is about our standing before the God who is the Creator and Judge of all. It is not a therapy, it is a blood sacrifice. It is not moral advice for the well meaning, it is resurrection of the dead.