We all have one thing in common no matter our skin color, hair color, size, brain power, talent, wealth or gender. Every one of us will die. No one makes it out alive! Why? Sin – the self rule that promises happiness but actually brings death. Created for divine companionship, we chose autonomy. Severed from our Maker, our connection to life washed away by our willfulness, we search in vain to fill the void. Thankfully there is One Who loves us so much that He humbled Himself to become human to bring the message of liberation, and choose an excruciating death in our place to fulfill the law of justice. Since He never said no to God, He alone qualifies to dismantle sin. Death could not hold Him, and He rose from the grave with a resurrected body and an invitation to life in His everlasting kingdom. His outstretched arms offer forgiveness to repair the broken connection with the Eternal and inclusion in His plan for the ages. Our “yes” begins an incredible journey, replacing our dark drift to destruction. Jesus, the friend of sinners! Now that is good news – the Gospel! cz
The contemporary understanding of the Gospel message is that saying the right words keeps us out of hell. (Star Trek followers might call it the ‘beam me up, Scotty’ approach.) Salvation is so much more – an entrance into a life with the Eternal. Nice people, moral people, gifted people, sincere people, rich or poor people – these are not kingdom people. Jesus’ people are the forgiven ones. Forgiven by His surrender on the cross, demonstrated by our surrender on earth.
“And you yourselves, who were strangers to God, and, in fact, through the evil things you had done, his spiritual enemies, he has now reconciled through the death of his body on the cross, so that he might welcome you to his presence clean and pure, without blame or reproach. This reconciliation assumes, of course, that you maintain a firm position in the faith, and do not allow yourselves to be shifted away from the hope of the Gospel, which you have heard, and which, indeed, the whole world is now having an opportunity of hearing.” Colossians 1:21jbp
Click the link to take you right to the section
- You’re Invited Dallas Willard—- Mere Christianity
- God was Thinking of Me – This is amazing
- Bad News/Good News-Gospel of the Kingdom
- Henri Nouwen on Believing
- WHAT IS THE GOSPEL
- Three videos of explanation
- Jeff Durbin & Tim Keller explain the Gospel
- What is the Gospel
- Justice is the Gospel
- GRACE & TRUST Dallas Willard
- The Real God Louise’s Story
- Detailed explanation of the Gospel
- God’s love story in song
- Remember your life is the Gospel
GOD WAS THINKING OF ME!
Yes, in the gloom a light glimmers and glows. We have received an invitation. We are invited to make a pilgrimage—into the heart and life of God. The invitation has long been on public record. You can hardly look anywhere across the human scene and not encounter it. It is literally “blowing in the wind.” A door of welcome seems open to everyone without exception. No person or circumstance other than our own decision can keep us away. “Whosoever will may come.” Dallas Willard ‘The Divine Conspiracy’
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” ― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Bad News/Good News
The Gospel of the Kingdom
What it means to be a believer
God so much desired to fulfill our deepest yearning for a home that God decided to build a home in us. Thus we can remain fully human and still have our home in God. In this new home the distinction between distance and closeness no longer exists. God, who is furthest away, came closest by taking on our mortal humanity. Thus God overcomes all distinctions between “distant” and “close” and offers us an intimacy in which we can be most ourselves when most like God.
To those who are tortured by inner or outer fear, and who desperately look for the house of love where they can find the intimacy their hearts desire, Jesus says: “You have a home….I am your home….claim me as your home….you will find it to be the intimate place to where I have found my home….it’s right where you are…in your innermost being….in your heart.”
The more attentive we are to such words the more we realize that we do not have to go far to find what we are searching for. The tragedy is that we are so possessed by fear that we do not trust our innermost self as an intimate place but anxiously wander around hoping to find it where we are not. We try to find that intimate place in knowledge, competence, notoriety, success, friends, sensations, pleasure, dreams, or artificially induced states of consciousness. Thus we become strangers to ourselves, people who have an address but are never home and hence can never be addressed by the true voice of love… , …coming home to where we belong and listening there to the voice that desires our attention. It is the voice of “first love.” “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19) It is first love that offers us the intimate place where we can dwell in safety. The first love says: “You are loved long before other people can love you or you can love others. You are accepted long before you can accept others or receive their acceptance. You are safe long before you can offer or receive safety.”
Salvation is a heart transaction between you and Jesus as it says in Romans 10:9-10(NIV): “If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.”
Henri Nouwen
What is the Gospel?
Justice = the Gospel
GRACE AND TRUST
May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone. Many people don’t know this, and that is one major result of the cutting down of the gospel to a theory of justification, which has happened in our time. I have heard leading evangelical spokespeople say that grace has only to do with guilt. Many people today understand justification as the only essential result of the gospel, and the gospel they preach is—and you will hear this said over and over by the leading presenters of evangelical faith—that your sins can be forgiven. That’s it!
In contrast, I make bold to say, the gospel of the entire New Testament is that you can have new life now in the Kingdom of God if you will trust Jesus Christ. Not just something he did, or something he said, but trust the whole person of Christ in everything he touches—which is everything. “There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human” (1 Timothy 2:5). If you would really like to be into consuming grace, just lead a holy life. The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on takeoff. Become the kind of person who routinely does what Jesus did and said. You will consume much more grace by leading a holy life than you will by sinning, because every holy act you do will have to be upheld by the grace of God. And that upholding is totally the unmerited favor of God in action. It is the life of regeneration and resurrection—and justification, which is absolutely vital, for our sins have to be forgiven. But justification is not something separable from regeneration.
Dallas Willard. The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship.
Is my God real? – a true story click here to read
“Human ethics taught me I was a pretty good kid, and so I deserved pretty good things. I had a very small god that I kept in a box who was only interested in my comfort.” By Louise Holzhauer
God’s love story in song
Verses to consider
“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.”
“…simply concentrate on being completely devoted to Christ in your hearts. Be ready at any time to give a quiet and reverent answer to any man who wants a reason for the hope that you have within you.”
For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.
And remember, the only Gospel some will read is your life.
The redemptive power of the gospel is about making room, removing barriers, and overcoming division. God made room for us in unfathomable ways – Gospel hospitality! In kind, our hospitality is an expression of faith, a culture our Jewish ancestors embraced. Our ability to make room and receive blessing from someone different from ourselves is one of the most significant witnesses a Christian can practice. Hospitality is holiness!
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