Welcome to Day 2211 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.

This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom

Wisdom Nuggets – What Does God Want? – What is the Gospel? – Daily Wisdom

Putnam Church Message – 03/05/2023

What Does God Want? -  What is the Gospel?

Last week, we finished our story narrative overview of the Bible, answering the question: What does God want? The answer we discovered over the past six weeks was that God wants you and everyone who will ever live. In other words, God wanted a human family. God wants co-workers to take care of His creation. God wants you to know who you are and why your life has value to him. He loves you and desires that you also love Him. So now we switch our focus on what is required to be part of God’s forever family and how we show this transformation in our lives. The answer to these two questions is through believing loyalty. This week, we will explore the believing aspect; in the next two weeks, we will focus on loyalty. We invested a year in a detailed study of the Good News, according to John, but today, we will view an overall snapshot of the Good News. It is simple and yet very profound. What is the Gospel, the Good News? It may sound odd to ask that question at this juncture. We’ve just invested six weeks walking through the story of the Bible, the story of how God wants us in his family. We join that family by believing the gospel. I’ve discovered that many people who attend church don’t fully understand the gospel. Some can’t articulate it. Others who can express it coherently often struggle with truly surrendering to its simplicity. They suffer inside over genuinely believing that the gospel is all that is necessary for everlasting life. Some of you may wonder what I’m talking about. There is a good chance that as I explain what I mean, you’ll either see yourself or someone you know in what follows. We’ll start by defining the gospel. Then, I’ll ask some questions along the way that are important to consider for clarity. We also need to talk about what the gospel isn’t. When we get to that part of the conversation, you’ll see what I mean by the struggle I mentioned. What Is the Gospel? It’s relatively easy to define what the term “gospel” means. The biblical word “gospel” refers to the message of salvation. The English word “gospel” is a translation of a Greek word (the original language of the New Testament) that referred to a reward given to someone who brought good news. Hence, you’ll often hear the term “gospel” equated with “good news”—the good news about the message of salvation. Let’s think about that. It might feel like we learned something. I suppose we did, but we didn’t understand what we needed to know. It’s nice that we can now define a term. But we haven’t said anything about the content of the message of salvation. We’ve explained what the word “gospel” means, but not what the gospel is. So, let’s talk about what the gospel means. What is the content of God’s offer of salvation? What are the details of the good news? And why is it good news? The word appears almost 100 times in the New Testament, so we ought to be able to figure this out. The apostle Paul probably talks about the gospel message more than any other New Testament writer. He uses the word “gospel” for the message he preached about Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, “Let me now remind you, dear brothers and sisters, of the Good News I preached to you before. You welcomed it then, and you still stand firm in it. It is this Good News that saves you if you continue to believe the message I told you—unless, of course, you believed something that was never true in the first place. I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said.” Paul also defines his message, the Good News, Romans 1:1-5, “This letter is from Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, chosen by God to be an apostle and sent out to preach his Good News. God promised this Good News long ago through his prophets in the holy Scriptures. The Good News is about his Son. In his earthly life he was born into King David’s family line, and he was shown to be the Son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit. He is Jesus Christ our Lord. Through Christ, God has given us the privilege and authority as apostles to tell Gentiles everywhere what God has done for them, so that they will believe and obey him, bringing glory to his name.” The content of the gospel—the good news—emerges clearly in these passages. Here are the elements:

• God sent his Son...
• Who was born in the line of David...
• As the man Jesus Christ...
• Who died for our sins...
• Who was buried...
• Who rose from the dead...
• Who ascended into heaven and took His place on the right hand of God…
• Who sent the Holy Spirit to indwell everyone who believes…

These items are the content of the good news. Let me describe them again here in light of the bigger picture of the story we talked about over the past six weeks: The Son of God became a man. He suffered and died on the cross so our sins would no longer keep us out of God’s family. He rose from the dead, so we could overcome death and be with His Father, our Father, the only true God, forever. Let’s probe that a bit. If this is the good news, why is it good? Lots of reasons. It’s good because our salvation doesn’t depend on our performance. You don’t see anything about your amazing track record or having a clean rap sheet in those passages. The gospel’s content is not about what you’ve done,/ might do,/ or need to do./ It’s about what someone else did for you. That’s good news for all of us, because none of us is perfect. None of us pleases God all the time. None of us is fit to live in his family and be called by his name on our own. We have to be made acceptable to God. The content of the gospel tells us how that happens. Notice that Paul described his ministry of telling people the good news as “bringing about the obedience of faith” so that they will believe and obey him, bringing glory to his name. He wanted those who heard his message to “hold fast” to what he said. How do you “obey” the gospel? Get baptized? Give money? Behave well? Don’t be a jerk? Help the poor? Those are all worthwhile things, but No. God wants “the obedience of faith.” You obey the gospel by believing it. Did you also notice that Paul didn’t say “the obedience of comprehension”? We may not completely understand things like God becoming a man in Jesus, or how the resurrection could happen. That’s okay. God doesn’t demand we figure it all out and then get back to him to take a final exam. He wants belief. Understanding why these things are rational /can wait. The gospel’s content is God’s offer to forgive you and give you a permanent place in his family. His offer shows his love and kindness. The Bible sometimes uses the word “grace” instead of those terms. Since there is no greater power, God wasn’t coerced into the offer. No one is twisting his arm. He offers you salvation because he wants you. All he asks is that you believe. That is the good news of the gospel. Why Do We Need The Gospel? You might think I answered this already. I did, at least in a roundabout way. But in light of my experience in Christian circles, I need to be clear. Why do we need the gospel? Because without it, we have no hope of everlasting life with God. Zero. We are estranged from God because of sin. Believing the gospel is the only remedy.   The Bible describes our predicament in several ways. Jesus said in Luke 19:10, “For the Son of Man came to seek and save those who are lost.”  It is our nature Ephesians 2:1-5 Once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins. You used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil—the commander of the powers in the unseen world. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God. All of us used to live that way, following the passionate desires and inclinations of our sinful nature. By our very nature we were subject to God’s anger, just like everyone else. But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!) We were helpless, Romans 5:6 says, “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners.” We “wandered far from God” (Ephesians 4:18). We were far from God. We were his enemies (Colossians 1:21 & Romans 5:10). You get the picture, but it is not pretty. The biblical story we walked through the past six weeks explains why we are what we are. We aren’t born into the family of God. We’re outsiders. Yet God wants us in the family. Lacking God’s nature, we abuse our intelligence and freedom to get what we want, often harming others. We live in self-destructive ways. When we don’t image God and break his precepts, we sin when we violate, manipulate, and otherwise abuse others. We are by nature sinners—self-absorbed and rebellious. Romans 3:23 - For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. It’s easy to read that and be depressed or angry. But the good news of the gospel story is /that God knew all that and loved us anyway. It’s also useful for a reason that may never have occurred to you. It makes the gospel entirely different from any other religion’s teaching about salvation. Every other religion either denies sin is a problem or says the solution is human performance—repeating rituals, saying prayers, observing holy days, or otherwise being good. To be clear, only the gospel is honest about the human situation and human inability to do anything about it. Other religions, in effect, lie to you—they tell you that you can fix the problem of your distance from God, or that you don’t have a problem. The gospel is the only truth that tells you God had to provide the solution and did. The gospel is transparently honest. It tells you the truth even though it hurts. That shows love. Lying to you isn’t love. Are There Other Ways To Be Saved? I answered this more or less, but I want to approach the question differently. God offers forgiveness, salvation, and everlasting life with him for free. It’s not something earned or deserved. It cannot be earned or deserved. Belief, or faith, is required—putting one’s trust in God’s promise and the completeness of what Jesus did. But believing the gospel means not believing other teachings or ideas about salvation. The Bible says that there is no other way of salvation. Think about it. Why would God the Father send his son Jesus to die such a horrible death on the cross if there were any other way for you to enter Heaven? The Son had to become a man, and death had to be overcome. This was the only way, and believing in God’s plan is the only way of salvation. No person besides Jesus can save (Acts 4:12). There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved.” Jesus put it very bluntly in John 14:6: “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’” There’s no ambiguity there. No one becomes a member of God’s forever family except through what Jesus has done. You don’t add the gospel to other beliefs. It is exclusive. Believing the gospel means turning away from other beliefs. That’s one aspect of what the Bible calls repentance. There are others, but they’re best addressed in the next part of our message. What the Gospel Isn’t Our discussion about the gospel’s content makes it clear that the gospel is about what Jesus accomplished on our behalf. Therefore, everlasting life and salvation are gifts to those who believe in what Jesus accomplished on our behalf. Our culture tries to muddle this clarity. It offers self-improvement or vague “spirituality” as substitutes, or more recently, referring to the “universe.” But the biblical description of the gospel defies such things. The gospel (and salvation) has nothing to do with personal enlightenment or “looking within” on a journey of self-discovery. The gospel is not about exploring ideas from a spiritual smorgasbord. These are intellectual or psychological efforts and activities that are not wrong in and of themselves but aren’t the gospel. But these sorts of “alternative gospels” are the easy ones to detect and eliminate. Unfortunately, a much more difficult hurdle impedes many people from resting in the simplicity of the salvation God offers. I suggested earlier that many people struggle with the gospel, even in church. The reason is that they are caught in a performance trap. You or someone you know may be able to define the term gospel, and perhaps even the content of its meaning. But the idea that believing what Jesus did for you is the sum total of what’s necessary for everlasting life just doesn’t seem right. Surely, we have to do something. Otherwise, how could we deserve it? That is the crux of it all. If you comprehend the Bible’s story and the gospel’s content, you should immediately grasp that we don’t deserve what God offers. And that’s a struggle for many people. We want to feel like we’ve earned the good things we have. We don’t want to be a charity case. It feels wrong to get something good without working for it, at least a little.   Guilt distorts thinking in even more subtle ways. It can paralyze our ability to see the gospel as the unconditional gift it is. Guilt drives some people to justify a gift by concluding it’s deserved because of something they did for the gift-giver at some point. And if they can’t convince themselves of that, they are determined to do something after the fact to make themselves feel deserving of the gift. Guilt blinds us to the love of God shown in the gospel. Ultimately, we must come to grips with how self-centered this thinking is. That may sound harsh, but hear me out. Working hard to make someone else think you have value /requires focusing on yourself. You can’t be focused on someone else when the goal is to make another person think you are worthy of their attention or love. We want to feel good about ourselves (i.e., we legitimately deserve something, so we aren’t taking what doesn’t belong to us). We also want others to feel that way about us (i.e., we want others to give us something because of how we make them feel about us). The gospel strips this away and casts it aside. It exposes us, demanding naked humility. It insists the focus be entirely on God and Jesus. That’s why it’s a hard pill to swallow for so many. It doesn’t let us take any credit. What it comes down to is that the gospel cares nothing about what you do, but cares everything about who you already are. You’re human. You are the object of God’s love and plan from the beginning. None of that requires performance. It just is. Because we’re sinners living in a fallen world, we’re locked into thinking no one would love us if they really knew us completely, inside and out. Consequently, we can’t imagine God loving us since nothing about us escapes his attention. He knows every thought, word, impulse, and deed. The guilt that creates within us, and the normalcy of our conditional relationships, make the unfiltered love of God for us in the gospel hard to accept. From our perspective, it doesn’t make sense. At this point, I’m not suggesting that people who hear the true gospel and embrace it with all sincerity aren’t saved. On the contrary, I honestly believe they believe and are in the family of God. I’m describing the soul-crushing internal life many of those believers are still living. Their guilt has transformed the love and grace of the gospel into a performance-centered, merit-based experience. They begin to wonder if God still loves them like he did when they understood and believed the gospel. They consider the sins they commit as believers as reasons for God to be indifferent and uncertain toward them. They are convinced they can’t measure up to God’s expectations and wonder if they “believed enough” or perhaps didn’t really believe when they thought they did. The sad truth is that many genuine Christians live tormented, defeated lives, not because of the gospel, but because of how their guilt has distorted the clarity of the gospel. When they read Scripture, they see only their sins and failures. Every sermon is an indictment (and shame on preachers who preach with that as their primary intention). The spectacular wonder of the story gets lost and forgotten. Salvation is not about performance. It never was, never will be, and never can be. We can do nothing to put ourselves at the level of God, to make ourselves fit for his presence. This is because we lack God’s perfect nature. We are like God, created to image him, but by definition, we are less than God, and God knows it. That’s why his solution was Jesus, not you.   It’s absurd to think we can bridge that gap or fill that void by doing this or not doing that. God never learns anything new about you when you fail. He’s known you all along and still loved you right where you were and are. Romans...