Gospel
This is the second entry in a mini series in which I’m trying to clearly and specifically name what I believe and why.
I have been mulling over my understanding of the Gospel for a while now. I think when we’ve been a christian or in church a while, our focus can shift from considering what the gospel is to consider what it looks like to live good christian lives that respond to it. But without a firm grasp of what the gospel is, how can living a life in response to it ever make sense or ever have meaning? I wonder whether a lack of depth in their gospel understanding is the reason why thousands of young people leave the church dissatisfied. Is it just that they’ve not been helped to properly see it as, not just “good news”, but the best news?
I’ve wanted to write a post spelling out what I believe the gospel to be for a while now. In fact I’ve started to 3 or 4 times already but each time I do I get stuck. I’ve found myself caught between an unhelpful rock and a frustrating hard place.
Because the gospel is deep: Its a rich, multifaceted, and hugely complex thing that has implications for the entirety of the created cosmos and every aspect of human life and experience. Uncovering all its subtleties and significance requires careful study and a decent understanding of the overarching story of God’s people through the whole Bible.
But I also firmly believe that the gospel is simple: possible to explain to and be understood by anyone, whatever their level of theological understanding. It is easily recognizable, by those with eyes to see and ears to hear, as “good news.”
The problem I think is that often gospel explanations fall one way or the other. They are either too deep or too simple. Case in point...
I, like many others used to wear a Four Points wrist band. The Four Points gospel goes something like this: God loves me, I have sinned, Jesus died to take away my sin, now I have a choice about what to do with this knowledge. The issue with this short and sweet explanation though is that although it includes some of the core elements of the gospel, it fails entirely to talk about the socio-political nature of what God is about, or the corporate nature of salvation for all creation, or what sin actually is and why its a problem and why Jesus had to die to take it away, and most unhelpfully of all, its hugely personalized.
If our gospel understanding is simply that “I’m apparently a bad person who could be going to hell for all eternity but thanks to Jesus’ inexplicable death I now get to live forever in heaven... Wherever that is...” that to me doesn’t read like something that’s exciting enough to build my life around! But my own attempts to explain a broader gospel that touches on some of these other aspects, end up long, and rambling, and at times unhelpful.
So is there a middle ground - a sweet spot between the unhelpful rock and frustrating hard place? A point where a deep and rich gospel can be explained in simple terms?
In grappling with this question things got messy. I very quickly became bogged down with comparisons between Jesus’s encounters with people, the multiple gospel sermons in Acts and Paul’s gospel accounts in his letters. I also kept running into concepts like penal substitution, justification, predestination, and universalism - the ins and outs of which I have the most minimal understanding of. My brain quickly became fried and the deeper I went the further I felt from finding the sweet spot I was looking for. I was stuck. So I used a lifeline and phoned a friend.
Barney, (seriously mate - massive thanks, you’ve shifted a mountain for me) is one of the smartest theologians I have the pleasure of knowing. He engages with the Bible and Christian thought on a whole other level to me. He’s the kind of guy who actually does know the ins and outs of the theological concepts I’ve barely heard of and can argue both sides of them. So when I asked him how he would explain the gospel in simple terms to somebody, I was surprised by his response:
“I wouldn’t explain anything... I’d ask them questions and get to know them.”
He explained that when Jesus was sharing his gospel with people, he never gave the same “good news” twice. Instead, his message was always personalised around the person(s) he was encountering. He also never talked about his death and resurrection - mainly because they hadn’t happened yet! Instead he spoke about (and demonstrated) who he was, who God is and what the Kingdom of God is like. And he always tailored things to what the person(s) listening needed to know.
I’ve just been reading Target by Rich Atkinson (a book I would thoroughly recommend to any and all youth workers) in which he explores this same idea:
“Jesus made the gospel simple, and so should we. The Good News doesn’t have to include lots of theology explaining how it all works. Young people simply need the bare bones... I’m not saying that young people don’t need to understand the whole process of Jesus’ death and resurrection at some point. It’s just that they don’t need it at the very beginning.”
Barney and Rich have got me thinking about an entirely different way of explaining the gospel. What if we broke the massive, amazing gospel down into simple “good news” statements? These can be many and varied. By themselves, they would express the relevant “good news” someone might need in a moment, and when put together they would provide a fairly simple, but broader understanding of the whole gospel.
So this is my first draft. The following is a list of gospel statements or truths. It’s not an exhaustive list but I think it’s a good start. I believe selecting an appropriate one that is tailored around where a person is at and what they need to hear at a particular moment can serve as a first tip-of-the-iceberg glimpse that makes them aware of the whole massive gospel that lies beneath:
Personal Promises:
God always loves you no matter what!
God has a plan for your life
God listens whenever you pray
God is wanting to speak to you and you can hear him yourself
If you want him to be, God is with you, even if you don’t feel it
God cares for you even when life sucks
God wants the best for you
God wants to bring you joy
God wants you to feel whole
God wants you to be part of his family/ community
God wants to help you in your difficult circumstances
God wants to help you make a positive difference in the world
God wants to invite you to live an adventurous life with him
What God is about/like:
God’s way of living makes life better for everyone
God always forgives
God wants to give us good things
God is a perfect father
God accepts everyone who wants to be accepted. Especially those no one else accepts.
God is more powerful than evil and demonic forces
God loves all nature and wants the best for it
God hates that people don’t know him
God hates that life can sometimes be really rubbish
God hates that the world can be such a terrible place to live
God hates that the world is such an unfair place
God hates inequality
God hates that bad things happen to people (whether they are good or bad!)
God hates violence, war and conflict
God hates suffering
God hates that people die
God wants the whole world to know about him
God wants to free people (from slavery, addiction, fear etc)
God wants to can and does save people from evil
God wants to, can and does heal people
God wants to, can and does provide for people
God wants to and is in the process of making the world better
God wants to and chooses to work with us to make the world better
Theological:
Jesus came so that you can understand what God is like.
Jesus died and was resurrected so that when we die we can be resurrected too
Jesus died so that we don’t have to be separated from God
So there you have it; my understanding of the gospel. Some of these ideas of course need further explanation but I anticipate that when used with people they are not designed as definitive statements but the beginnings of gospel conversations.
I’m currently in the process of looking through these statements with some of my youth. I’m getting them to think through if they’re understandable and clear, whether they agree or disagree with them and to think about who in their lives might need to hear what. I invite you into this dialogue too: please comment with your thoughts on this list. I’d love to know what you think!
As far as those that do need further explanation are concerned, in the interest of naming what I think I plan on expanding my thinking in future blog posts. But I’ve written enough for now so I’ll just finish here with a rather obvious statement...
Looking at the list I can’t help but be amazed by the gospel all over again. It really is “Good News!”
