The angel Gabriel startled Mary with this glorious gospel announcement.

The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary; for you have found favor with God. 31  "And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name Him Jesus. 32  "He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David; 33  and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and His kingdom will have no end." Luke 1:30-33 (NASB)

Later, as Joseph pondered what his next course of action would be after having discovered that Mary was with child, the angel proclaimed to him in a dream.

... “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. 21  And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Matthew 1:20-21 (NLT)

After Jesus’ birth, an angel appeared to the shepherds in the field outside Bethlehem and boldly announced these words.

..."Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; 11 for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. Luke 2:10-11 (NASB)

Each of these pronouncements or proclamations contains key elements of the gospel. Jesus is the promised Messiah King of Israel – the Lord. He will save God’s people from their sins as Savior. The angel combined both ideas in the announcement to the shepherds: Jesus will be a Savior who is Christ (Messiah) the Lord.

Many years later, when Jesus officially announced his public ministry in Nazareth, his boyhood home, he did so by quoting one of the great liberation proclamations of Isaiah the prophet.

“The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, 19  and that the time of the LORD’s favor has come.” Luke 4:18-19 (NLT)

Jesus understood that his purpose in life, death, and resurrection was to be the Savior King of Israel who would liberate all mankind from the power of sin, Satan, death, disease, and everything else that holds people in bondage.

After the resurrection, when Peter made the first gospel proclamation of the church era, he fearlessly and boldly announced to the city that had recently put him to death that Jesus is both Lord and Savior.

“So let everyone in Israel know for certain that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, to be both Lord and Messiah!” Acts 2:36 (NLT)

The gospel is a bold proclamation that Jesus is the promised Messiah King, the Lord, who died to liberate us from the tyranny of sin and death. It includes a call to action. All we have to do is believe the good news, repent from our rebellious death-filled ways, accept God’s forgiveness, and publicly declare our allegiance to Jesus through water baptism.

The proclamation of liberation becomes effective in our lives when we respond to it. A bold public gospel deserves an equally bold public response.

Share this post...

 

 

 

 

 

If we hope to clearly present the gospel, we must first understand what it is. To get started, let us look at a very well-known summary verse found in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Romans 1:16 (NASB)

First and foremost, the gospel is God’s power and means to save people.

As important as prayer is, it cannot do what the gospel does. Prayer never takes the place of the gospel. Neither do good works, great church services, or the powerful gifts of the Spirit in operation. Only the gospel, when it is communicated effectively and believed, can rescue people from sin and darkness. Only the gospel can provide the doorway into God’s favor and family. Only the gospel is the gateway into eternal life in God’s presence.

Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who believe. 1 Corinthians 1:21 (NLT)

The gospel becomes effective when we believe it.

Belief is much more than simple acknowledgement of a set of facts or agreement with the Bible’s logic or story. Faith includes an action component that moves us to put our lives on the line in service of the focus of the gospel, the Lord Jesus. This is why Paul wrote that he was not ashamed of the gospel. His faith propelled him into a lifetime of obedient service to Christ and the gospel, regardless of the personal cost.

Faith can be thought of as a combination of trust and allegiance which produces a quality called faithfulness those who believe.

People who are “full of faith” trust in God with all their hearts and remain steadfastly loyal to him. Such faith in the gospel moves people to declare that they believe Jesus rose from the dead and is lord, which is the formula for declaring allegiance to Christ given by Paul in Romans 10:9-10.

Water baptism is the way we publicly and unashamedly first demonstrate our faith and allegiance to Christ and the gospel. A lifetime of faithful service is one of the earmarks of true believers.

Share this post...

Gospel in a Minute

Paul concluded his gospel presentation at Antioch of Pisidia with these words.

Be careful! Don’t let the prophets’ words apply to you. For they said, 41  ‘Look, you mockers, be amazed and die! For I am doing something in your own day, something you wouldn’t believe even if someone told you about it.’” Acts 13:40-41 (NLT)

Principle: The Gospel Includes a Warning

If our hearers choose to accept God’s generous offer of reconciliation, life awaits them. However, those who reject the message doom themselves to a continuation of their present condition as spiritual orphans in the universe – an eternity away from God’s loving presence.

And God will provide rest for you who are being persecuted and also for us when the Lord Jesus appears from heaven. He will come with his mighty angels, 8 in flaming fire, bringing judgment on those who don’t know God and on those who refuse to obey the Good News of our Lord Jesus. 9

They will be punished with eternal destruction, forever separated from the Lord and from his glorious power. 10 When he comes on that day, he will receive glory from his holy people—praise from all who believe. And this includes you, for you believed what we told you about him. 2 Thessalonians 1:7-10 (NLT)

The presentation of the gospel puts people in a place of decision with their eternity hanging in the balance. With so much on the line, the loving thing to do is warn our hearers of the enormous consequences of their decision.

Share this post...

Gospel in a Minute

Paul delivered the extraordinary good news that through Jesus, the Messiah King who was rejected and crucified, God offers forgiveness and reconciliation.

“Brothers, listen! We are here to proclaim that through this man Jesus there is forgiveness for your sins. 39  Everyone who believes in him is declared right with God—something the law of Moses could never do. Acts 13:38-39 (NLT)

Principle: The Gospel Offers Forgiveness and Reconciliation to God

Even though the main focus of the gospel is the lordship of Christ, the extraordinary good news is that God does not hold our rebellion against his rule and our rejection of his person against us, if we put our faith and allegiance in the risen Christ.

Instead he freely forgives us and put us back into a right relationship with him, which includes becoming part of his eternal family through the new birth! This means we are able to reconnect with the Source of Life! We are restored to the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe!

Only a fool would pass this up; yet, without the Spirit’s help, that is exactly what we will do. Pray that the Spirit of God will open blinded eyes, deaf ears, and hardened hearts and give his people the compassion and courage to make the gospel known.

Share this post...

Gospel in a Minute

Paul went on to show how the Bible predicted Christ’s resurrection.

And now we are here to bring you this Good News. The promise was made to our ancestors, 33  and God has now fulfilled it for us, their descendants, by raising Jesus. This is what the second psalm says about Jesus: ‘You are my Son. Today I have become your Father.’ 34  For God had promised to raise him from the dead, not leaving him to rot in the grave. He said, ‘I will give you the sacred blessings I promised to David.’ 35  Another psalm explains it more fully: ‘You will not allow your Holy One to rot in the grave.’ 36  This is not a reference to David, for after David had done the will of God in his own generation, he died and was buried with his ancestors, and his body decayed. 37  No, it was a reference to someone else—someone whom God raised and whose body did not decay. Acts 13:32-37 (NLT)

Principle: The Gospel Shows How the Old Testament Points to Jesus

The Old Testament not only points to Jesus, it can only be properly understood in reference to him. Jesus the Messiah is the point of it all, the culmination of God’s interactions and promises made to the Adam and Eve in the garden and to Abraham and his descendants, even to the Gentiles.

Jesus’ resurrection caused verses that seemed mysterious or unclear to come into sudden bold relief, such as the ones quoted by Paul above. Once Paul’s eyes were open to Jesus’ true identity, the entire Bible came to life for him. When we share the gospel, we should point out how Jesus is the focus of the entire Bible.

So a time was set, and on that day a large number of people came to Paul’s lodging. He explained and testified about the Kingdom of God and tried to persuade them about Jesus from the Scriptures. Using the law of Moses and the books of the prophets, he spoke to them from morning until evening. Acts 28:23 (NLT)

Share this post...

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, let’s agree on some definitions, even if they are of my own making. Permit me some poetic license. Zombies are “the living dead.” They walk around as living people, but are actually dead. Welfare Christians only consume, living off what others produce. They don’t really want to contribute to the kingdom enterprise. Both can be found in our local churches.

Zombies

Zombie church goers are those who have never been born again. Jesus called them “tares” or weeds, who are mixed in with the real wheat. (Matthew 13:24-30) Before the harvest, it is difficult to distinguish one from the other, but eventually wheat produces grain and weeds do not. Most churches have the living dead in their midst. They might even be in leadership. They talk and act as if they are alive, but inside, as Jesus put it, they are dead.

What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. 28  Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness. Matthew 23:27-28 (NLT)

Church zombies are in a dangerous predicament. They think everything is fine, not realizing that they are in imminent danger of spending an eternity in hell. Jesus gave this dire warning.

Write this letter to the angel of the church in Sardis. This is the message from the one who has the sevenfold Spirit of God and the seven stars: “I know all the things you do, and that you have a reputation for being alive—but you are dead. Revelation 3:1 (NLT)

Jesus taught that having the living dead among us is a fact of church life. We should assume their presence and continually communicate the gospel in the hope that one day the Holy Spirit will open their eyes, enabling them to respond with repentance and faith.

Welfare Christians

The early Puritans tried an apolitical form of communism. They decided to own and work the colony’s land as a community and share its produce. A serious problem quickly emerged: some people chose not to work, relying instead on the productivity of others, creating a lot of resentment among the industrious ones. Imagine that! The leadership of the colony quickly altered their approach and divided up the land among individual land owners who were responsible for working their own private property and growing their own food. This rewarded the hard workers and punished the slothful ones. Capitalism is very practical. It is too bad that we still have not learned our lesson.

Today welfare is a program designed to have the government support those who cannot make it on their own. This was once the province of the church; but, as government secularized and took more power unto itself, it wanted people to look to it as their god, the supplier of all their needs. Some people definitely need such assistance, but another group, perhaps the larger one, quickly learned how to “play” the system. They discovered how to avoid working for themselves and live instead off the forced largess of others. The problem has not been corrected as before in New England because the government now has a vested interest in keeping people on the dole. Welfare recipients vote. So today we have government sponsored indolence in many cases.

Churches are full of what I call “welfare Christians.” By this I mean church goers who are playing the system by letting others pay their way and do the work. Welfare Christians do not give their money, their time, or their energy to the local church. They just show up, at least some of the time. They like to consume the product offered by the church when it suits them.

By the way I worded this, I hope you see that welfare Christians can only exist in churches that allow this to happen. Sadly, many churches promote such a cl

Gospel in a Minute

Paul summarized the message of salvation in a paragraph.

“Brothers—you sons of Abraham, and also you God-fearing Gentiles—this message of salvation has been sent to us! 27  The people in Jerusalem and their leaders did not recognize Jesus as the one the prophets had spoken about. Instead, they condemned him, and in doing this they fulfilled the prophets’ words that are read every Sabbath. 28  They found no legal reason to execute him, but they asked Pilate to have him killed anyway. 29  “When they had done all that the prophecies said about him, they took him down from the cross and placed him in a tomb. 30  But God raised him from the dead! 31  And over a period of many days he appeared to those who had gone with him from Galilee to Jerusalem. They are now his witnesses to the people of Israel. Acts 13:26-31 (NLT)

Principle: The Gospel Is a Spoken Message that Demands a Response

Having framed his gospel presentation within the history of Israel, Paul summed up the salvation message by telling his listeners and us that Jesus is the one promised by God in the Old Testament, who was rejected by the Jewish leaders, put to death, buried, rose again from the dead, and appeared to many.

The gospel is a message that must be spoken. Acts of mercy and love are not sufficient to properly communicate it. Such acts can open people’s hearts, but unless the gospel is spoken, people will not understand what God has done for them and who Jesus is. They will not be able to properly respond.

Following such a gospel summary, all that remains is to explain the meaning – our forgiveness and justification and Jesus’ lordship over all creation. And what would Paul’s listeners do with this amazing news? What is the proper response?

Share this post...

Gospel in a Minute

On his first missionary journey, Paul the Apostle preached the gospel to Jews in Antioch of Pisidia. He assumed they were familiar with the promises God made to King David, that one of his descendants would sit upon the throne of Israel forever. (2 Samuel 7:12-13)

“And it is one of King David’s descendants, Jesus, who is God’s promised Savior of Israel! 24  Before he came, John the Baptist preached that all the people of Israel needed to repent of their sins and turn to God and be baptized. 25  As John was finishing his ministry he asked, ‘Do you think I am the Messiah? No, I am not! But he is coming soon—and I’m not even worthy to be his slave and untie the sandals on his feet.’ Acts 13:23-25 (NLT)

Principle: Frame the Gospel within the History of Israel

When we share the gospel with those who are not as familiar with the Bible, we must make the effort to explain how Jesus came in fulfillment of promises made to God’s people long ago. The gospel is not a philosophy that has meaning outside of real history. I have heard a serious lie regarding God’s Word phrased something like this: “It’s not true, but it’s the truth.” The meaning is that the gospel is not historically true, but it “contains” eternal truth. This reduces the gospel to “whatever works for you.” Nothing could be farther from reality. The gospel is historically grounded in fact. One day in the not so distant future, the actual risen Messiah King Jesus, the glorious Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, will return in the clouds with great power to judge all mankind. At that point in time, all the earth will come to realize that the gospel is grounded in historical fact. For now, we must help to convince people that…

the gospel is a narrative of God’s historical promises to Israel and their fulfillment  in real time.

As such, a proper gospel presentation will frame Jesus’ coming, ministry, death on the cross, resurrection, ascension, and future Second Coming in light of those promises and prophecies. It is important for gospel communicators to familiarize themselves with the the Old Testament and how it points to Jesus and the glorious gospel. That is how the early church presented Christ, and so should we!

If you are inclined to learn better how to do this, I suggest Scot McKnight's masterpiece, The King Jesus Gospel. I wrote a summary, which you can access by clicking here.

Share this post...

 

 

 

 

In Search of Holiness…

Through the centuries, Christians have wrestled with what it means to be holy or set apart. What does it look like? How do we achieve it? Ideas about holiness can be broken into two main sub-categories: holiness FROM and set apart TO. The Separate FROM position has a long history. Judaism focused on foods to avoid, people and things not to touch, and sins not to commit. Islam is much the same. Jesus turned all that on its head by declaring that the foods we eat and ritual hand washing, etc. do not affect personal holiness at all.

Jesus illustrated and taught a new way of holiness and living- being separated TO God and his will. That is the only explanation of why he left heaven to come to earth in order to die as God’s sacrificial Lamb for his enemies.

During a particularly dark time in the history of the West, the monastic movement was a reaction to society’s and the organized church’s corruption. Adherents to the holiness FROM philosophy fled from the world to achieve their version of contemplative holiness in isolation. On the positive side, God used it to preserve much of what was in danger of being lost, but the down side was that it was built upon a purely defensive “fortress” mentality.

Any time the church “fortresses up,” the Great Commission recedes to the bottom of the priority list.

Of course, their were exceptions among the monks, thankfully. Some were quite evangelistic.

Going farther down history’s road, members of the Methodist Holy Clubs, who were definitely evangelistic, were committed to asking one another rigorous questions that probed into what sins its members had struggled with during the week. On the surface this sounds like a very aggressive way to promote holiness, but I don’t recall Jesus ever doing this with his disciples. Do you?

Today modern ideas about discipleship frequently promote what is called “accountability,” a replay of the Methodist system, in which disciples are encouraged to find accountability partners with whom to bare their souls. Although this can be a good thing, it is decidedly focused on holiness FROM, not holiness TO, and I find nothing in the gospels and Acts to indicate it was a common practice in the early church.

Just to be clear, holiness viewed as separation FROM sin and the sinful world system is certainly a valid biblical way to look at things. Paul wrote:

Because we have these promises, dear friends, let us cleanse ourselves from everything that can defile our body or spirit. And let us work toward complete holiness because we fear God. 2 Corinthians 7:1 (NLT)

Serious followers of Christ realize that Jesus holds his followers to a high standard of righteous living, one which only the Holy Spirit can achieve in and through us. However, this same Paul knew that focusing on separation FROM sin and all that defiles people lends itself to the bondage of becoming overly sin conscious. Instead of victorious and joyful living by grace, it tends to promote what some have called a joyless sort of “sin management” and an isolated church. This is where some groups go off the rails with all sorts of lists of things that are forbidden.

Focusing on managing our sin will likely lead us into the gloom of despair, the coldness of cynicism, or nauseating hypocrisy, any of which demoralizes God’s people and repulses those who observe how we live for God.

To reinforce this point, Paul wrote in Romans Chapter Seven:

And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. 19  I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. 20  But if I do what I don’t want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it. 21  I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong.

Religious systems are always performance based, manipulative, and fear inducing. They offer no assurance.