How do you communicate the gospel?
In a recent article, Ed Stetzer shared some thoughts from a class he taught at Re:Train. Stetzer had cohorts during his class define the gospel, and here is one of the results:
Our glorious God created everything we know. We, his creation, rebelled seeking our own glory and deserving the full wrath of God. The gospel is the good news that Jesus lived the life we should have lived to the glory of the Father. He died in our place, for all our sinful, false worship. Through Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, we live a new life to His glory. As we behold the glory of Jesus we are transformed to look more like Him, united in the Church as His body through which his kingdom is advanced making all things new.
- Worship Cohort
See anything missing? They hit a bunch of key aspects of the gospel: God, glory, Jesus, sin, death, the Spirit, new life, the kingdom. But amidst all this they miss the most important thing: resurrection! According to their gospel we, by the power of the Spirit, live new lives through Jesus, who is dead in their gospel. How do we have life through a dead guy?
This may seem like semantic nit-picking, but I don’t think so. To ignore and leave out the resurrection from our gospel communicating is to leave out the very truth that St. Paul deemed the crux of our hope.
Gospel Outlines
Another interesting aspect of the article is the apparent dichotomy between a God-Man-Christ-Response and a Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration presentation of the gospel. Both are helpful in partially presenting the gospel, but both fall short in that they leave out much of the Old Testament narrative and the story of Israel. Gospel presentations, though inherently abbreviations, that leave out such huge portions of scripture should be viewed as suspect.
Here is my short attempt to present an alternative to the two aforementioned presentations:
God’s Creation
God’s story begins with God. This may seem obvious, but we often ignore what is right in front of us and then easily forget it. God is the beginning, the author, and the central character of the story. But who is this God? God is the faithful and loving creator. He is the greatest thing or person there ever was. He existed before there was anything else, and he wanted to share his greatness (the Bible calls this glory) with others.
The first chapter of the story opens with God creating a kingdom. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). God forms his world and then fills it with light, sky, water, plants, animals, and the most important part of his creation–us. He created us to enjoy being with him in his good creation. “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).
God’s Rejection
But conflict quickly enters the story.
The first man and woman that God made reject the good plan he has for them. Instead of enjoying life with God and how he designed things, they choose to do things their own way (the Bible calls this sin). They reject God and choose to live for their own glory and greatness instead of God’s. This choice to abandon God corrupts humanity and the rest of creation. Sin spreads like a cancer deep into the hearts of humans and brings death into the world. We see the effects of this all around us: death, disease, violence, injustice, and more.
What is worse is that this cancer of sin is buried deep inside of each one of us as well. It is woven into the fabric of our hearts. Each of us, in our own way, rejects God and we live for our own glory. God could have easily destroyed humankind for their rebellion against him, but, as we will see in the next chapter, he has a plan to fix this problem.
Because of the spreading rejection of God, the world spirals out of control. “The Lord (God) saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). But a central theme throughout God’s story is hope. When things look bad, he promises that there is still hope, and he places the hope of fixing the world on to a group of people that he chooses.
God’s People
God chooses a man called Abraham and gives him a great promise. “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 15:2-3). God gives Abraham children and is faithful to Abraham’s future generations. The rest of the Old Testament follows the story of God and his people, Israel. It is filled with God’s fatherly love and faithfulness to his people, his children, as he protects and provides for them. But they, like generations before them, are rebellious. They continually reject God and his plan to show his glory by blessing the world through them. What the story needs is a faithful Israelite, a true son of God.
God’s Son
There is hope at last! This chapter is the climax of the story. The first three chapters, the entire Old Testament, have been building toward this. This is how God is going to ultimately fix this world and the sin problem deep inside each one of us. God sends his son, Jesus, to save Israel and the rest of the world. Jesus lives to show how great God is and to reverse the brokenness of the world and the sin problem in us. Jesus heals the sick, raises the dead, and confronts sin in the hearts of God’s people. God is on the move to fix things, and Jesus is the center of all this.
Those that are threatened by this kill him. But more than that, in his death Jesus is the sacrifice for the sin and rebellion in the world. He takes the punishment from God that each of us deserve, which satisfies God’s anger because of our rejection of him. But God shows his faithfulness and love even more. God raises Jesus from the dead, demonstrating that Jesus was in fact God’s Son and his death was effective in paying the price for sin. God conquers and reverses the power of death in this resurrection. The world is now very different.
God’s New Creation
The story does not end there. God does an amazing thing in Jesus, but he we are still here! The rest of the New Testament tells the story of God’s new people, the church, spreading the message of who Jesus is and what he has done. Jesus is God’s solution to fix the world, and he has done this through his life, death, and resurrection.
God promised long ago that he was going to fix things, to make a new creation. God’s people expected this to happen at the end of time, but God has fast-forwarded this into the present with Jesus. Jesus is the beginning of the new creation. This may be hard to understand, but it is how the New Testament talks about the world we now live in. The future world that God has in store for us is breaking in to this world here and now through Jesus. He conquered sin and death and has the power of eternal life. Because of this he is the King, or Lord, of everything. In the beginning of the book of Acts, he ascends to heaven to rule the world from the throne of God.
