“Inconthievable,” enunciates a character in one of our favorite movies, the Princess Bride. He says it so often that one of his collaborators in crime, played by Mandy Patinkin says, “You keep using that word. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” This had not occurred to the diabolical character who said it so often.
I sometimes think the word gospel is like that for the church. I hear people use it in so many different ways. We use it as an adjective to describe music or truth. Mostly, I hear people speak of the gospel formulaically as a message about how to get to heaven. This reminds me of the children in a foreign country playing marbles... with diamonds. They had no idea.
Neither did the Galatians. After Paul proclaimed to them the good news about Jesus Christ, they allowed themselves to be coopted into believing it was somehow about their performance. They reverted to legalism and missed the good news Paul had preached. It turns out, the gospel is not good advice, but good news. As Tim Keller puts it, “The good news is we were worse off than we thought and more loved than we ever dreamed.”
Jesus preached the good news of the Kingdom. When we come under the reign of Jesus Christ our King, we discover that we are loved not because of things we do for God but because of what he has done for us. This frees us from trying to control others with “Gotcha” legalism. We receive God’s love and share it with others, like beggars who have found bread and don’t want others to continue to be hungry.
The multifaceted gospel is so much more than the minimum requirements to get us into heaven. When we believe the good news about Jesus, we begin to be transformed by grace. The gospel offers continuity between our lives today and our eternity. When we believe God loves us we learn to love others better as well.
Horatius Bonar summed it up for us: “Remember that the gospel is not a list of duties to be performed, or feelings to be produced, or frames which we are to pray ourselves into, in order to make God think well of us, and in order to fit us for receiving pardon. The gospel is the good news of the great work done upon the cross. The knowledge of that finished work is immediate peace.” Let’s live in that peace and share it with others today!
