THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GOD

The Unchanging Message of the Good News

THERE WAS A KNOCK at my dorm-room door.

I opened it to find another student standing there, a young man I didn't know. Before I could say a word, he said, "You need to stop smoking pot, stop sleeping with your girlfriend, and come to Jesus."

Startled and unsure what was happening, I said, "My girlfriend lives eight hours away, and I've never smoked pot."

He shook his head, as if I had completely misunderstood his message, and said again, "You need to stop smoking pot, stop sleeping with your girlfriend, and come to Jesus."

"Listen," I said. "I don't smoke, and I couldn't sleep with my girlfriend if I wanted to. She lives on the other side of the state."

"I know you love pot," he said. "I know you sleep around. But you've got to come to Jesus."

"I'm already a Christian," I said.

He threw his arms wide, a huge grin on his face, and shouted, "Brother!"

That was not an enjoyable way to hear the so-called good news. Could the Holy Spirit use that young man's passionate initiative to bring someone to saving knowledge of him? Absolutely. Would I like to go back in time and give that kid some gentle advice? Yes, please.

Sometimes we forget the gospel is good news. We think we have to battle people with the gospel, that we have to confront them and beat them down. There's a reason the term "Bible thumper" exists. We think we're in a war and we have to "win people to Christ." It's a contest, a battle, a game, a conflict.

In that context, it's not "good news." It's propaganda. And when we see evangelism as conflict, we immediately put our listeners on the defensive. When I was a college student, "stop smoking pot, stop sleeping with your girlfriend, and come to Jesus" was unrecognizable to me as good news. My would-be evangelist told me, "You need a different moral code." That's not good news; that's a philosophical argument waiting to happen.

So if the good news isn't "stop sinning and come to Jesus," what is it?

Let's Talk about Jesus

The gospel is ultimately about Jesus.

There is an awful lot of good news about Jesus, and it's not just that he died for our sins and was raised again on the third day. Healing the sick, that was good news. Being born to Mary, that was good news. The forgiveness he gave to those caught up in evil behavior in their lives, that's good news. The way he interacted with women as people worthy of respect, that's good news. His ascension, the Transfiguration, the time he stayed in the Temple when his parents were walking home and he was "lost" from them for a few days: good news. His parables, his teachings, the feeding of the gigantic crowds — these things are all good news.

Any "gospel presentation" is, by definition, only shorthand for the "full gospel." There's no such thing as a complete gospel presentation, because Jesus is an eternal person, and all the news about him is good; which means part of the work of eternity will be getting to know him and growing in our knowledge of the good news. We don't know the entire gospel now, nor will we ever, because we will never exhaust the knowledge of Jesus' goodness. The good news we know is amazing, and the good news as we get to know Jesus only deepens and grows.

Nevertheless, there is a sort of "core" gospel that we'll refer to as the "universal gospel." It's the good news that is true for every person on earth, no matter their background, culture, ethnicity, or social status. It's good news that may take some work to understand for some, but most of us, when we think of evangelism, think precisely of this universal gospel: How do I tell someone the core, salvific truth of the good news?

My favorite place to start the universal good news is with the most famous Bible verse of them all, John 3:16: "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." The most basic, core message of the gospel is "believe in Jesus and receive eternal life."

This one verse also tells us God's motivation in saving humanity: He loves us. That's part of the gospel, too, and for many of us, the most unbelievable, baffling bit. I've had more than one person tell me it's the one thing about the gospel that they just cannot believe.

People start throwing up all sorts of objections to this simple idea, like "You don't know what I've done. God couldn't possibly love someone like me."

But as Paul writes in Romans 5:8, While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (NKJV). Christ died for sinners. Why? What was his motivation? Because God loved the world so much. Jesus didn't come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. If we love him, it's because he loved us first.

The simplest, core bit of the universal gospel is all in John 3:16. It doesn't spell everything out — it implies the other pieces, assuming maybe you already know them. For instance, it doesn't say "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" or "The wages of sin is death" (both part of the universal gospel in the sense they are the bad news that the good news answers), but it says that if we believe in Jesus, we don't have to perish. It sort of assumes we know that everyone dies rather than spelling it all out for us.

I have plenty of friends who, if they were going to choose a passage to boil the gospel down to its core bit, would rather use 1 Corinthians 15:1-6:

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

This passage answers a question we might have had after reading John 3:16: What exactly do I have to believe...