What Is The Gospel? – Part 1

“I am debtor both to Greeks and to foreigners, both to the wise and to the foolish. So as much as is in me, I am eager to preach the Good News to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek.”

—Romans 1:14–16, WEB

This is the word of the Lord.

You Can’t Live Out What You Can’t Define

Out of curiosity, have you ever absolutely bombed a really important test?

Maybe it was a test at school and you just failed it about as hard as you can possibly fail it.

Or maybe it was some kind of evaluation at work to see if you could move up to the next level, get a good promotion.

Maybe it was something completely different.

But whatever it was, it was extremely important for you to pass and excel at, but instead you slammed face first into your limitations.

Because, not only were you not prepared, but you didn’t even know the basic things you needed to know in order to finish it.

You didn’t even know the basic terms that the test was grading you on.

You didn’t even have that basic understanding of what the test was about.

So once you got there in the moment, it was like getting surprise hit by a bus.

Anybody here ever been through something like that?

Me too.

This one time back in ninth grade, I failed this test so hard that they almost euthanized me.

They were we’re just gonna put me in the woodchipper.

They said, “There’s no hope for this one.”

See, back in early high school, I was not what you would call a good student.

I was what social scientists refer to as a dunce hat.

I was lazy.

I was unmotivated.

I was disengaged.

I rarely did my homework. And when I did do my homework, I usually copied off one of my friends.

And my friends weren’t great students either, so I was copying off, like, C+ work.

I wasn’t even sharp enough to cheat off a smart kid.

And I cheated more than anywhere in the classes that I hated.

Those subjects I just had zero interest in.

Which was mostly meant math and science.

Iwas constantly having to do those “retake” tests at the end of the year for math because I was constantly failing.

The only year I did good in math was my 11th grade year, and that’s just because my teacher was hot, so I actually paid attention.

But I hated math and science.

Especially my freshman year.

You see, as a ninth grader, my required science class was biology.

And our biology teacher was one of the coaches, and he was very much a coach first and a biology teacher second.

He usually just gave us a worksheet, told us to read these pages from our textbook, and then watch “Whose Line Is It Anyway” in full volume on his laptop while we quietly did our work.

He was like the 47 year old version of an Ipad Kid.

But he just came in and did the absolute bare minimum for years—until he got fired for coming to work drunk and sleeping with a student.

Fun times in my high school.

But I hated our biology coach, and our biology coach hated me.

But I did everything I could to avoid having to put in any effort in his class.

Right down to getting copies of his multiple choice tests in advance, memorizing the order of the letters you’re supposed to circle, and then just going in and speed circle and A, D, B, C, A, C, D, A, B, B, B, and then drawing pictures of Pokemon and stuff like that on the back of the paper till the class is over.

And that worked for me for about two thirds of the semester.

I was scraping along. I had a solid B- average, because I got C’s on every homework assignment that I cheated on, and I got A’s on every test I got the answer key for—so it all kind of averaged out.

But apparently, at some point along the semester, our biology coach caught on to the fact that students were getting the answer key.

Way too many dumb kids were getting A’s.

And so, without telling any of us, he randomly switched test methods.

This was the most effort I ever saw that teacher put into anything (except for hiding a $9 whiskey bottle in his to-go mug.

But he did everything exactly the same as it always done.

Made an answer key and everything.

But on the day of the test, we got to class, he passed out the test sheet, we all looked down—and to our horror, there was no multiple choice, there was no true or false, it was all short essay questions.

And then he started the test time, kicked his feet up on top of his desk, and started watching a Dave Chappelle stand up on full blast while we worked.

And in that moment, I just flew into a panic, because all I memorized were the letters I was supposed to circle.

I didn’t know anything about the content. And so I looked down. I read each question. And I did my best to BS my way through the test.

I tried to string as many smart, science-y sounding words together as I could.

I tried to just kind of fake it till I make it through every question.

And by the end, I thought I did pretty good for a guy who didn’t even know what the word photosynthesis means.

I thought it was “the process by which a photo is synthesized.”

I didn’t even know what mitosis was? I thought maybe it was some form of hypnosis, or something like that.

So I did the test.

I decided not to worry about it.

I went about my life.

And everything was fine, until the following Monday.

Because we got to class, he passed out the results, I looked down at my paper, and in large, bright red sharpie, there was a big circle with the number 17 in the middle.

I got a 17% on my biology test because I didn’t even know the basic terms I was being tested on.

I didn’t even have a basic familiarity with the concepts I was being tested on.

I was flying completely blind. I was totally in the dark. I was biologically illiterate.

And the result was that I failed that test so hard I almost had to repeat ninth grade biology the next year.

Which is first and foremost another example why you should not imitate my childhood.

Young Ryan was not somebody that you should try to be like.

I was not a student that you should follow after back in the day.

But at exactly the same time, this is illustrative of something very simple.

And that is that you can’t live out what you can’t even define.

You can’t excel at what you can’t even define.

You can’t win at a game you don’t even understand.

And that same exact thing applies to how we live our lives.

We can’t build our lives on something we don’t even understand.

We can’t base our lives around something we don’t even grasp.

And we can’t faithfully live out something we can’t even define.

We Need to Talk About the Gospel

And that means that we need to talk about the gospel.

Ever heard that word before?

We need to talk about something called “the gospel.”

If you’ve been coming to this church for any length of time, you’ve probably heard the word “gospel” about a million and one times by this point.

Now, some of us, when we hear the term “gospel,” we think of music.

We think of “gospel music.”

We think of the music they play on Chirstian radio.

But we’re not talking about music right now.

Some of us, when we hear the word “gospel,” we think of a certain denomination.

Some of us grew up in denominations with names like “full gospel holiness church” or “apostolic gospel Baptist church,” and so on.

But we’re not talking about denominations right now.

No, when I say we need to talk about the gospel, I’m talking about something totally different.

I’m talking about the heart of the Christian faith.

I’m talking about the heart of the story that God’s word tells us.

When I say we need to talk about the gospel I’m talking about the gloriously good news of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done for us.

And the reason that we need to talk about the gospel is because there nothing more important for us than to get a solid grasp on this gospel message at the heart of our faith.

There is no more important task than for us to gain a clear and rich and deep understanding of the gospel that our faith is built on and built around and driven by.

Because as God’s people, the gospel is what our entire lives are defined by.

The gospel is the lens through which we see everything else in the world.

It is the heart of what it means to follow Jesus.

And as God’s people, we are called to live out the Gospel in our everyday lives.

We are called to spread the gospel into every corner of the world.

We are called to create a gospel culture in our families, that spreads out into being a gospel culture in our churches, that spreads out into creating a gospel culture in our city, our town, our community that transforms people’s lives through the redemptive love and power of Jesus.

But in order to do that, first we have to understand what this gospel message is.

Right?

Because the really shocking reality is that you can spend your whole life in church but never actually grasp the gospel.

Know what I mean?

You can be a cradle Christian, raised in the church from the time you came out of the womb, and get a whole lot of religion shoved down your throat without ever actually coming to an understanding of the gospel message at the heart of our faith.

And that may sound shocking, but it shouldn’t be, because the really disturbing reality is that most American churches are basically gospel-less.

Most American Churches Are Functionally Gospel-Less

Know what I’m talking about?

Most American churches are functionally gospel-less.

If you walk into the doors of the average American church, you will hear a whole lot of things about how to live, what to do, how to vote, what to avoid, who to listen to, and so forth—but you may go your entire life without ever hearing the gospel.

Like, case-in-point: If you listen to a lot of Christian talk, you’d think that Christianity is all about following certain rules so that God will reward you.

Know what I’m talking about?

It’s all about using a certain language, living a certain way, voting a certain way.

Their version of Christianity is just a giant how-to manual. It’s just a giant self help experience.

They say, “Do these things to have a perfect marriage.”

They say, “Follow these steps to make God favor you.”

They say, “If you follow these rules, then you’re a good Christian—and if you screw up, then you’re worthless.”

They ignore the gospel because they believe it’s all about following certain rules so that God will bless you.

But that is not the gospel.

Turning the Gospel into Bad News

At the same time, a lot of Christians technically believe the gospel, but they obscure the gospel by turning it into bad news.

Know what I’m talking about?

American Christians have this absolutely insane way of technically preaching the gospel, but stealing the gospel part out of it.

Stealing the good news out of it.

Like, this one time I was talking with this dude, we were talking about our spiritual lives.

We had just met at a McDonald’s. I don’t even know how the conversation got started.

But we were both Christians. We both grew up in church.

And I said, “What is the gospel? Define the gospel for me. Explain the gospel to me as if I didn’t know anything, explain it to me like I’m five.”

And I’ll never forget what he said.

He said, “The Gospel is, ‘If you don’t place your faith in Jesus, you’re going to hell.’”

Now, technically every word in that sentence is true.

That’s not a lie.

That’s not false.

Jesus saves you from hell.

Placing your faith in Jesus rescues you from condemnation.

That’s a fact.

But when you put it that way, it’s not the gospel, it’s just a threat.

Same thing happened another time.

I was talking to another guy, and I said, “Explain the gospel to me as simply as you can.”

And he said, “The gospel is, ‘You better believe in Jesus, or you’re going to the smoking section.”

And it was weird. He seemed almost giddy about that, like the thought of people burning in hell because they didn’t put their faith in Jesus somehow excited him or amused him, which is really disturbing.

But neither of them could explain the gospel in a way that was actually good news.

They could only conceive of the gospel in the form of a threat.

That’s what the gospel was to them.

It wasn’t good news to them.

It was a threat that they were responding to with compliance out of self-interest.

It was a threat of hell that they were responding to by doing whatever the other person said to get out of it.

That’s not good news. That’s bad news.

That’s not good news. That’s just scaring someone into submission.

And the result is that a lot of Christian end up confusing people. They obscure the gospel because they believe it’s all about just believing the right things so that God won’t condemn you.

But that is not the gospel.

The Shipwreck of a Gospel-Less Faith

And that is a major part of why the American church is falling apart at the seams.

It’s crumbling from the base, because it has no foundation in the gospel.

Part of why so many people—and includes a lot of us—have had such negative experiences with Christianity through the years is because we grew up in gospel-less churches, or gospel-less families, where the gospel was either ignored or obscured or flat out denied.

And the result is that even if we’ve spent our whole lives in church, we have no sense of God’s redeeming love for us.

We have absolutely no grasp of God’s profound redemptive work on our behalf.

We have no sense of God’s glorious, self-sacrificial love for us.

And the unthinkable, unimaginable, incomprehensible lengths that he went to to redeem and restore us by making the ultimate sacrifice, by shedding his own blood on the cross in our place.

Even in the Bible Belt, where there is a church on every single street corner and it’s impossible to get elected to public office without at least pretending to be Christian, so many of us have grown up in what is essentially a gospel-less home, in gospel-less churches, in a gospel-less culture—and as a result, our religion is held together by fear rather than wonder, by anxiousness rather than gratitude, by worry and terror rather than amazement at the beauty of God and the beauty of His redeeming love for us.

And because that is true, so many of us have experienced an absolute shipwreck of our faith.

We’ve spent our whole lives as part of the Christian religion, but we’ve grown up in this deeply unbiblical version of the faith has actually pulled us further away from God rather than drawing us closer to Him.

A version of the Christian faith that has actually steered us away from God’s will rather than towards it.

A version of the Christian faith that has actually sabotaged our Christian life rather than putting us on the path toward flourishing according to God’s will and design for us.

The mission of God has been sabotaged and disrupted for years in America, because we have these gospel-less families and churches that robs us of a genuine understanding of the good news of Jesus—and so we’re like ninth grade Ryan bombing, his ninth grade biology test because we can’t live out what we can’t even define.

So: We need to talk about the gospel.

There is nothing more important for us as a group of Jesus followers, living this life on mission with Jesus together, than to pour ourselves into building a deep and rich and vast understanding of this gospel message that has saved us and is transforming us.

What Is the Gospel?

And so, this morning we are kicking off our new series called, “What is the gospel?”

We’re going to spend the next few weeks diving deep into what the gospel is.

We’re gonna dive deep into what the gospel means.

And we’re going to dive deep into how the gospel transforms absolutely everything for us.

But we just wanna spend this morning kicking off our new series by getting a 30,000 foot view of the gospel message together.

We want to open up the Word of God and look more closely than we have ever looked at the story that God’s word tells.

We want to bathe ourselves in the message that God’s Word declares to us.

We want to saturate our minds and our hearts and our lives in the gospel that we are saved by.

So: What is the gospel?

I’m glad you asked.

Because the gospel is incredibly simple—but incredibly shocking.

Even if you’ve spent your whole life in church, when you truly begin to wrap your head and your heart around the gospel, it is absolutely earth shattering. It is profoundly life-altering. The gospel is a shock to the system.

Because the fundamental message of the gospel is this: God saves sinners.

Real quick: Say this with me:

The heart of the gospel is that God saves sinners.

Listen very, very carefully to what I’m about to say, because even if you’re a lifelong Christian, this might be about to turn your worldview upside down.

The fundamental truth that separates the gospel of Jesus from every other religion or ideology is that the gospel counter-intuitively and counter-culturally proclaims that God saves sinners.

Here’s what I’m talking about: Every other religion on earth preaches and teaches that, as a human, you must save yourself.

You must clean yourself up to make yourself good enough for the gods.

You must fix up your life to become worthy of that God up on the mountaintop.

You must pull yourself up by your bootstraps so that you’ll be good enough, you’ll be strong enough, you’ll be wise enough, you will be self-controlled enough, you’ll be worthy of the gods’ attention.

That is the fundamental message that nearly every religion in the world proclaims.

They say, “If you want to be blessed, saved, glorified—if you want to experience eternal joy, enlightenment, reward—you have to follow these rules. You have to walk this path. You have to meet these standards. You have to earn your way into the good graces of the God, or the gods. And here’s how you do that.”

They say, “We’ll show you how to do that. We’ll teach you the steps to do that. We will sell you the tools to do that.”

That is what defines almost every religion on planet Earth.

But that is not what Jesus taught.

That is not what the true God who actually exists is like.

Because instead of joining that chorus with every other religion in the world and saying, “Sinner, save yourself!” the gospel beautifully proclaims that God saves sinners.

This is the most important thing that I’m going to tell you today—and in case you don’t get it today, I’m going to repeat this a million times over the next few weeks.

But listen very carefully to what I’m about to say:

The gospel is not a set of rules.

The gospel is not a philosophy that you take up.

The gospel is a declaration.

It’s an announcement.

The gospel is good news.

And so, real quick, just to fully burn this truth into our heads together, I want you say this with me:

The gospel is not good advice, the gospel is good news.

Let’s say that again together real quick:

The gospel is not good advice, the gospel is good news.

Thank you. Here’s another one. I want you to say this one with me, too:

The gospel is not something that I do for God, the gospel is something God has done for me.

Let’s do that one again, too:

The gospel is not something that I do for God, the gospel is something God has done for me.

The gospel is the story of how God has made a way for you to be saved through Jesus Christ, and when you surrender to Jesus, that salvation becomes yours.

It is the gloriously good news that God saves sinners.

Four Questions the Gospel Answers

I love the way that the late pastor and theologian Timothy Keller puts it. He says that, essentially, the gospel answers four questions.

Where Did We Come From?

First things first, It answers the question, “Where did we come from?”

Because the gospel tells us that we were created by God.

We were created good, by a good God, in a good world, for good things.

Why Did Things Go So Wrong?

But it also answers the question, “Why did things go so wrong?”

The gospel tells us that we are fallen.

Our world is fallen.

We are broken.

We rebelled against this good God in this good world, and as a result sin came into the world.

Sin infected our nature.

Sin broke and shattered our world and everything in it.

Sin has poisoned every aspect of life on this earth in our fallen and broken world.

And the result is that we stand condemned before God.

Our sin separates us from God, and it brings on his righteous wrath.

Our sin must be justly judged by a holy and righteous God.

And that would be horrifically bad news for every single one of us—but, the gospel says that God didn’t leave us in that condemnation.

How Can Everything Be Put Right?

No. The gospel also answers the question, “How can everything be put right?”

And the answer that the gospel gives us is that this God that we rebelled against loves us with a redemptive love.

He loves us with a sacrificial love.

With a restorative love.

We don’t serve and worship a cut and run God.

We don’t serve and worship a God who just throws away damaged goods.

No. The God of the gospel is a God who loves broken things and broken people—and who restores broken things and broken people.

And his desire to redeem and restore us was so deep and so radical that he did something crazy.

He left the glory of heaven. He walked away from the comfort and the wealth and the power of His heavenly throne.

And came to earth in the form of a servant.

In the form of a peasant.

In the form of a lowly human.

He lived out a perfect life, a life without sin. A life of genuine goodness.

He lived the way that we were meant to live. The way that we were created to live.

He lived a life of genuine goodness and righteousness.

But instead of being rewarded for it, He took our punishment.

He took the punishment that we deserved.

He took the condemnation that our sin rightly brought on us.

And He went to the cross, and He died in our place.

He took our place on the cross.

He was our substitute.

He was a sacrifice for us.

The God we sinned against, the God we rebelled against, the God we spit in the face of in the beginning, the God whose world we broke, came into the world and took our sin and our punishment and our condemnation on to his own shoulders, and he paid it for us.

He satisfied that righteous wrath for us.

He transferred our penalty to himself.

And in that process, He overcame the brokenness of the world.

He defeated the darkness of the world.

He claimed victory over the devil, over the forces of darkness, over the powers of evil, so that one day he will return and will restore everything.

He will undo the fall.

He will undo the brokenness of the world.

He will turn our universe right side up again.

Make all things right and good and holy and glorious again.

And there will be no more brokenness, no more grief, no more suffering, no more evil, no more darkness, because our Lord has been victorious over all of it through the cross.

Everything will be put right again through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus.

How Can I Be Put Right?

And, finally, the gospel answers the question, “How can I be put right?”

And the answer that the gospel gives us is that that redemption, that salvation, that restoration is available to us by grace, through faith.

God’s word says the redemption Christ has purchased for us in the cross can be ours if we place our faith in Jesus.

If we throw ourselves on the mercy of Jesus.

If we reach out to Jesus and ask Him to redeem us, he redeems us.

He doesn’t make us pay for it—He’s the one who paid for it.

He doesn’t make us buy it—He’s the one who bought it.

He doesn’t make us earn it—He’s the one who earned it for us.

He doesn’t make us change our lives to become worthy of it—He’s the one who was worthy of it on our behalf.

Our redemption is purchased on Jesus’s dime.

Our salvation was purchased for us by the blood of Jesus.

Our Forgiveness was bought with the precious blood of Christ.

We couldn’t afford it, but he afforded it for us.

And the result is that we are fully and freely and forever saved.

We are gloriously redeemed.

We are permanently free.

We will never again be chained by the condemnation that our sin deserves, because we have been sprung out of our sin-prison.

We have been broken free from the shackles leading to the executioner’s block.

Not by our hard work, not by tipping the scales so that our good outweighs bour bad, not by cleaning ourselves up to become worthy of God’s grace—but because Jesus came and did it for us.

That’s why Paul speaks those famous words at the beginning of his letter to the Romans. He says:

“For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek.”

—Romans 1:16, WEB

The Heart of the Gospel Is That God Saves Sinners

The heart of the gospel is that God saves sinners.

And in these coming weeks we are going to lean deeper and further into this gospel message than we ever have before.

We’re going to spend these next few weeks diving deep into what this gospel is, what this gospel means, and how this gospel transforms absolutely everything for us.

What we’re trying to do over the next few weeks is quite literally get a new set of eyes.

We are trying to grow a new vision.

We are trying to learn how to understand everything else in our lives, and everything else in the world, through a fundamentally different story than the one that our fallen and broken world has given us.

Over these next few weeks, we want to allow the gloriously good news at the heart of God’s word to bulldoze over the lies and the false narratives that we have inherited from the world and from our culture—and in many cases, even from our families and our churches—and replace it with the transformative truth of Jesus Christ.

We want to become a gospel-centered people, and a gospel-centered church, so that we can do gospel-centered work out of gospel-centered love, on mission with Jesus, and turn our corner of the Earth into a gospel culture.

And so in the coming weeks, I pray that our understanding of the gospel pierces our hearts, and the roots of the gospel grow deep into it the very depths of who we are, and make us into new people.

I pray that as we dive deep into the gospel message, it will radically transform the way you see God, the way you see yourself, the way you see the world around you, the way you see your purpose in this life, the way you see your time, the way you see your value, the way you see your needs, the way you see your relationships, the way you see your church, the way you see your community, the way you see your neighborhood, the way you see your wife or your husband or your kids.

And so, as we trek through this “What Is The Gospel” series over these next several weeks, ask the Lord to put your heart on the operating table and radically remake you from the inside out.

Ask God to give you a heart that is radically transformed by the gospel, and then come back next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, and the week after that, as we explore the bottomless depths of God’s redeeming and transforming and restoring love through the gospel of Jesus.

Let’s join together in prayer.