Let us never forget the gospel
“I’m just so angry that I keep struggling with this... I feel like it’s been so long, and I’m exhausted. I thought I would have moved on by now.” A few weeks ago, I sat crying on my living room floor as I spoke those words to my roommates. I was referencing some very deep and very painful wounds that I carry around because of my own personal sin and the sin of others done against me. I’ve been a Christian for nearly a decade, and there is a great temptation to believe the lie that we can one day become self-sufficient enough that we can outgrow our need for the gospel. As we live our lives self-sufficiently, we don’t experience any victory over sin and we live our lives as victims to our circumstances and the reality of our own sin.
Jesus offers a life more abundant than that.
Before we get into how the gospel is meant to change our lives daily, we first must establish what the gospel is. I’m on staff with a college ministry where I share the Gospel and teach college women about the truths of God’s word every single day. During the first meeting with a new student, I will usually ask them to articulate the gospel. More often than not, though they attend a large SEC school in the South and likely grew up in church, they are not able to clearly define what the Gospel is. The gospel, summarized in four simple points, is this:
Creation - We were created by God to know him in a personal relationship.
Fall - Adam and Eve rebelled against God and chose to go their own way instead of trusting God, so their relationship with God was broken. Mankind for all time afterwards suffers the consequences of turning from God and is unable to experience a relationship with him.
Redemption - Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for our sin, and by believing in him and trusting in him for salvation, we can know God again in a personal relationship and receive eternal life through Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection. There is nothing we could’ve done to save ourselves from our sin, but by believing in Jesus, we are restored to a relationship with God and can receive eternal life through knowing him.
Response- We must respond to the gospel once we have heard it - either to accept it for salvation or reject it and continue to go our own way, which leads to eternal separation from God.
So, how is accepting the gospel meant to affect our lives? Recently, my counselor challenged me by asking if I knew what it looked like to trust God moment by moment and truly believe him for what he says. I’ve been a Christian for almost nine years, so in my head I know the logical answers. I know that memorizing Scripture helps me to fight off the lies I battle daily, I know that reading God’s Word is the means by which I know him, and I know that Christian community points me to Christ. She took it a step further:
“What you have to do is invite the Lord into your life in each moment you need him. For example, when you’re feeling lonely, pray like this: ‘Lord, I know that you never leave me, so I’m never really alone. I know that you were lonely many times in your earthly life and that you fully experienced loneliness as you hung from a cross and were separated from the Father. Thank you that I never have to experience that kind of separation from you. Amen.’”
And though I’ve been a Christian for nine years, I’ve rarely thought about praying that way - in a way that remembers each emotion that Christ has felt as his own and then choosing to believe that he understands my needs intimately. He is not too far above me that he is unacquainted with the ways I fall short and need his grace and help.
Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly, says, “Our tendency is to feel intuitively that the more difficult life gets, the more alone we are. As we sink further into pain, we sink further into felt isolation. The Bible corrects us. Our pain never outstrips what he himself shares in. We are never alone. That sorrow that feels so isolating, so unique, was endured by him in the past and is now shouldered by him in the present.”
That is the gospel, isn’t it - that Christ became a man and dwelt among sinful people, experiencing every human emotion and eventually dying on a cross for my sins and the sins of the world so that I might be reconciled to God and spend eternal life with him? The gospel makes us remember that “we do not have a great high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses but in every way has been tempted as we have, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
To remember the gospel everyday is to remember that the one who created you and knows you more than you even know yourself desires to dwell with you, and has rescued you from a debt you could never pay on your own- the debt of your sin - and has imputed you with his righteousness.
All throughout history, God has been pursuing his people, beginning with the nation of Israel as seen in Jeremiah 32:37-29: “Behold, I will gather them from all their countries to which I drove them in my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them.”
Christ pursues you even today. How will you respond?
In The Gospel-Centered Life by Robert H. Thune and Will Walker, they write, “At the root of our visible sins lies the invisible struggle for righteousness and identity. In other words, we never outgrow the gosepl. As Martin Luther wrote, ‘Most necessary is that we know [the gospel] well, teach it to others, and beat it into their heads continually.’ As we realize our tendencies toward pretending and performing — our attempts to build our own righteousness and identity — we must repent of sin and believe anew in the promises of the gospel. This is the consistent pattern of the Christian life: repentance and faith, repentance and faith, repentance and faith. As we walk this way, the gospel will take root more deeply in our souls, and Jesus and his cross will become ‘bigger’ in the day-to-day reality of our lives.”
Christ meets us where we are - even in the midst of our sins - and invites us to respond in surrender, repentance and faith. So, how will you respond?