The gospel is not a message
of “You’d better work harder to be good so God won’t kill you.”
And it’s not a message, on
the other hand, that says, “It doesn’t matter what you
do or how you live.”
No, quite the contrary.
The gospel is a message that God loves you,
accepts you, and wants you, and that God will transform you into the person he
made you to be.
As disciples of Jesus, we are to spread the
gospel to everyone. And as we do, we need to remember that we are not
responsible for saving people. God takes care of that.
In fact, when Christians think they are
responsible for saving people, they tend to use overly emotional or coercive
approaches in their attempts to get people to respond to the gospel. Often they paint God as angry or
vengeful by ignoring Jesus' teaching that God loves humanity and that mercy
wins over judgment. Such teaching turns the "good news", which is
what the word "gospel" means, into bad news. Jesus did not say force
or coerce people to accept the gospel.”
He said, “Proclaim the gospel.”
Our job is to display God’s
love, not display our own judgmental-ness or self-righteous pushiness.
In 1 Corinthians 3:6, Paul
compared preaching the gospel to planting seeds, and pointed out that it is
through God’s love that those seeds grow. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God
gave the increase,” he wrote.
The fullness of the true
gospel is nothing less than God becoming human, living a sinless life in the
flesh, dying for sinful humanity in humanity’s place, rising from the dead as
the glorified Man and ascending to the right hand of the Father as humanity’s
savior and advocate. In doing so, he redeemed and reclaimed every aspect of
what he called good when he created humanity in the beginning.
The Christian life is a life
in union with Christ. Paul wrote in Galatians 2:20, “It is no longer I who live,
but Christ lives in me.”
Being an authentic Christian
is more than just a social association with other believers. It is a new and
distinct identity in our Creator and Redeemer.
It is a transformed life, a
new creation, lived out in the redeeming power of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit.
I’m Joseph Tkach, speaking
of LIFE.