The Gospel

(Or the Best Explanation I Can Offer)

Most of us seem to have a pretty casual attitude about spirituality. Maybe we believe in God — or at least a higher power — but how we get to God is ultimately up to us. So we borrow our favorite parts from different belief systems. In a way, we approach finding God the same way we approach going to the grocery store. We pick our preferred lettuce, grab the tomatoes but leave the mushrooms, and walk away with a perfect salad built to our tastes.

But what if finding God isn’t like going to a grocery store? What if it’s more like going to the emergency room? Spirituality intrigues us because most of us recognize that something is broken in the human spirit. Even good people sometimes hurt others, and we often struggle to be the people we want to be. If you think of this brokenness like a disease, you don’t need to go to the grocery store for a salad. You need to go to the emergency room for the cure — and it has to be the right cure. I believe the Gospel is that right cure.

The message of the Gospel, which means “Good News,” is this:

God loves you.

But to fully understand His love — to fully appreciate it — you have to know what His love means for your life.

God is holy. This means He is completely separate, transcending everything else in existence. He is eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful, and everywhere at once. His character is otherworldly. He is completely righteous, completely loving, completely just, and completely good.

God is also the Creator of everything in our world — including you. God made you special, and that means you matter. God knows who you are and wants to have a relationship with you. He wants you to know His love, because it will completely change your life forever. Knowing Him is the greatest experience you could hope for. I’ll say it again: 

God loves you like crazy.

But there’s a problem:

We have all rejected God.

In our hearts and in our lives, we’ve chosen to live apart from Him. We do things our own way, and we ignore His plan for our lives. The Bible calls this rejection “sin,” and it’s the fatal disease behind the world’s brokenness. Sin hurts us, and it hurts others — but most of all, sin hurts our relationship with God. It’s like we’ve created a deep chasm between ourselves and God. Even if we only sinned once, it had a devastating effect on our relationship with Him.

This is usually where the Gospel loses people.

Maybe you’re saying the same thing I’ve said to myself: “But I’m a good person.” And in a way, you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s in our nature to compare ourselves to other people, and compared to criminals and murders and most politicians, you are a good person. But that’s a human standard, and human standards are incredibly low. Sin isn’t about how we compare to other people. It’s about how we compare to God — the eternally perfect, holy, and righteous God. If we think too little of our sin, it’s because we think too little of Him.

God knew that we would struggle to see our own sin, so He provided a test for us to give ourselves. It’s like a mirror that allows us to see ourselves as we really are. You’ve probably heard of it: The 10 Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17). Now, I won’t unpack all 10 with you in this letter. But let’s look at just a few of them.

The 9th Commandment is “Do not lie.” Have you ever told a lie? I have — lots of them. That makes me a liar.

How about the 8th Commandment: “Do not steal”? Have you ever taken anything that wasn’t yours, regardless of its value? This one gets to me when I think of all the music I used to download illegally. So now I’m not just a liar. I’m a lying thief.

The 7th Commandment says, “Do not commit adultery.” Now I don’t know your life, but I know mine, and I’m guilty of this one, too. No, I haven’t cheated on Ashley. But in Matthew 5:27-28, Jesus says that lusting after another person is the same as committing adultery in your heart. So that makes me an adulterer at heart.

And finally, the 6th Commandment: “Do not murder.” As far as I know, no one in our family has killed anyone. But Jesus had something to say about this commandment as well. In Matthew 5:21-22, He says that hating someone is the same as murdering them in your heart. So, I’m also a murderer at heart.

When I’m completely honest with myself, I have to admit that I’m a lying thief and an adulterer and murderer at heart. That’s only four out of 10 commandments — and I didn’t even go into detail about the worst things I’ve done. This is a humbling exercise, but I hope you get my point: None of us is as good as we want to believe we are. We are all sinners.

This is a problem because someday, we will all stand before the judgment seat of God and have to answer for our sin. If God judges us by the 10 commandments, we’ll all be found guilty. By sinning, we have cut ourselves off from the God of Life, so there is nothing left for us but spiritual death. When this life ends, we will fall into the chasm of our sin.

Hell is real, and we have all earned it for ourselves.

There are two arguments that come to most people’s minds at this point.

One is that we might be able to make up for our sin by doing good things. We can promise to avoid lying, stealing, lusting, and hating in the future. Instead, we will give to charity, pray before meals, treat our family right, and thank God for our blessings. Maybe then, God will tally our good deeds against our bad ones and decide we’re actually okay. The thing is — this idea has a lot more in common with Islam than it does with Christianity.

In Christianity, sin and righteousness aren’t measured in degrees. They’re binary. It’s all or nothing. In James 2:10, the Bible tells us that, even if we keep nearly all of God’s commandments and mess up on only one, that one mess-up is the same as breaking all of them. This makes our good deeds completely worthless. In fact, Isaiah 64:6 compares our good deeds to “filthy rags.” That’s all the good they do for us.

Think of it this way. What if we made this argument to a human judge in a civil court? “Yes, your honor, I broke the law. But I promise not to do it again. And I’ll even make a donation to your favorite charity to make up for it.” Essentially, this argument amounts to a bribe! Only a corrupt judge would go for it. If we wouldn’t expect this from a human judge, why would we expect it from God?

The second argument that people make at this point is that God is supposed to be a forgiving God. We think that, because God is loving, He should simply ignore our sin. But apply this idea to a human judge again. If a judge in a civil court decided to let a guilty criminal go free, he would be an unjust judge. Again, we can’t expect less from God than we would expect from a human judge.

We also can’t ignore that a judge who simply forgave a guilty criminal wouldn’t actually be a loving judge at all, because that decision would be incredibly unloving to the criminal’s victims. How can a loving God just shrug His shoulders at all of the pain and injustice in the world? A loving God would have to also be a God of justice.

People often ask how a good God could allow so much evil in the world. Well, in the end, He doesn’t. Every evil thing people do will someday be judged, and God’s wrath awaits those who do them.

Hell is real, so I have to warn you: God will not accept a bribe, and He will not ignore our sin. We are all helplessly guilty and justly subject to His wrath.

At this point you might be thinking, “Geez, Jimmy. What’s your problem?” I know, this letter has been pretty bleak so far. But it’s important we understand the reality of the human condition. We have to see ourselves clearly if we’re going to understand just how amazing God’s love for us is. And that’s what comes next: the Good News.

God provided a way out of the spiritual death caused by our sin — by taking that death onto Himself for us.

God wrote Himself into our story. He came to Earth as Jesus. He lived the perfect life we couldn’t live, and then He died on the Cross — the death for sin that we deserve. While we were still sinners, Jesus took our place and paid the penalty for our sin on our behalf. It was costly for Him to do this, but He loves us that much. Then, three days later, Jesus rose back to life, conquering sin and death forever! It’s like Jesus built a bridge across our sin, the only bridge that gives us a way back to God.

Put yourself back in that court room. You’re a guilty sinner standing before a righteous judge, awaiting his inevitable judgment — and suddenly a voice calls out from the back of the room, “I’ll pay the fine!” Jesus is that voice. A judge can legally let a criminal go free if the fine for his crime has been paid. Jesus fulfills justice in a way that sets us free!

It’s important to remember that Jesus is God. Fully man and fully God, He is both our Judge and our Savior. Because He is fully man, He was able to represent us — standing in our place as our substitute. And because He is fully God, He was able to pay the price for the world’s sins — a price that only God could pay.

So now there’s nothing to separate us from God! We don’t have to earn our salvation, because Jesus has already earned it for us. It’s a free gift called grace. And we receive that grace by putting our faith in Jesus — by crossing the bridge that Jesus built for us.

Faith means that you trust Jesus with your life more than you trust yourself.

If you were going to jump out of an airplane at 13,000 feet, you wouldn’t try to save yourself by flapping your arms. You’d put on a parachute. Putting your faith in Jesus is like putting on that parachute, trusting Him to save you because you know you cannot save yourself.

When you put your faith in Jesus and follow Him with your life, you will be forever changed. He will make you new, forgive your sin, and give you His own righteousness. He will give you joy and welcome you into a perfect relationship with Him. You can face anything knowing that He is always with you and that when this life ends, you will be with Him in heaven.

I don’t want you to miss how amazing this is. Remember how heavy and dark the first half of this letter was? Well this news is the exact opposite. The Bible tells us that God takes our sin and separates it from us “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12). There is literally nothing we could do that is too bad for Jesus to save us from it. Instead of being God’s enemies, He adopts us as His children. And when He looks at us, He doesn’t see our sin anymore, He sees the righteousness of Jesus. We can now approach God with complete confidence that we will be warmly welcomed.

The Bible summarizes the Gospel well in Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

You can experience new life in Jesus right now.

Just talk to Him and tell Him that you want it. Confess your sin to Him. Thank Him for dying in your place on the Cross. Tell Him that you believe He rose again. And make Him the Lord of your life.

God loves you. If you haven’t already, will you begin a new relationship with Him today?

To me, this is the most beautiful story imaginable — and it’s true. There’s no other belief system like it. Human history is filled with religious movements, each claiming to know the right way to God. It’s as if God is at the top of a mountain, and we are all at the bottom. And we think that, maybe, if we can follow all the right rules, we’ll be able to climb that mountain and finally reach God. We think we can earn our salvation if we just stay on the right path.

But Christianity stands out from the rest. It tells us that we don’t have to climb that mountain to get to God — in fact, it would be impossible if we tried. Instead, God comes down the mountain to us. We just have to trust Him.

So this is the Gospel. This is the most important message I could share with anybody. And now I’ve finally shared it with you.

What scares me is that there are so many people in our country who consider themselves to be Christians, but they don’t really know the Gospel. They think they are saved because they prayed a specific prayer, joined a specific church, got baptized as a child, followed a set of rules, or even because they simply believe that God exists. But that’s not the Gospel. Faith is not about anything we do for God — it’s just about what God has done for us.

It’s all about Jesus and whether or not we trust Him.