The gospel: something so simple, so important, and yet so hard for most people to define. What is it exactly? Stay tuned and find out on Unapologetic.Audio

TranscriptIt's been said that if you ask about a hundred people what the gospel is in a church at a given time, you'd probably get about 60 different answers. In my experience, that's pretty true. That's sad because the gospel isn't just up for individual interpretation. There aren't 60 right answers. There's one right answer, though we do need to acknowledge that sometimes people are legitimately talking about different things or maybe something more specific or less specific.

What we're going to do today is give a high level view and definition of what the gospel is and how should we think about that. Periodically over the next year, we're going to come back to this and look at different facets of what the gospel is. Because what I don't want is for us as Christians, when we talk with non-Christians, to end up defending something that's basically “minimum viable theism.” We don't want to just defend the idea that God exists out there or that the earth is old or young or those types of things, which we often get caught up on. What I want to be, myself, and I want for you to be is an evangelical apologist - someone who doesn't just defend the fact that God exists but is able to defend the idea that Jesus died on the cross and paid for the sin of people. That is important.

That's basically the only reason talking about the age of the earth or evil is important is because we ultimately want to get to the gospel. That is our end goal, not just talking about intellectual arguments and ideas like that, but the reality that Jesus came to earth, died, rose again for sin, and what that requires of people. That's what our aim should be in conversation.

What is the Gospel?

What is the gospel? First, let's look at some proposed definitions, and these are definitions that are other people have come up with throughout time. For instance,

The gospel is God's best for you now.

The gospel is good news.

The gospel is that Christ died in my place.

The gospel itself refers to the proclamation that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah is the one true and only Lord of the world.

Or as someone else said

My understanding of Jesus' message is that he teaches us to live in the reality of God now, here and today. It's almost as if Jesus just keeps saying, 'Change your life. Live this way.'"

Then others have said,

Preach the gospel at all times and use words when necessary.

There are a lot of different ideas there about the gospel and they are not all complementary. Some are contradictory with each other. I would say none of those actually captures the totality of what the gospel is. Now I'm not trying to make the gospel some really huge thing, but I do think that when we say “the gospel's good news”, well, yeah, it is good news, but “good news “is not the gospel. That doesn't work in reverse. You actually have to tell someone what that news is. You can't just say the gospel is good news. That's a description of it, not a definition of it.

How should we think about the gospel? Well, I've got 4 points, and these are not revolutionary. I didn't come up with these, but they are a very helpful way to think about the gospel. Here are the 4 points.

The gospel says something about God,

it says something about man,

it says something about Christ - Jesus Christ

it requires a response.

God. Man. Christ. Response.

Let's start with God.

God

What does someone need to know about God in order to understand the gospel? Well, they need to understand that God is creator. They need to understand this because that means man is not the highest authority. Man is not autonomous, but more than that, man…