Opening Address of a conference held at Monash University in 1990
What is the gospel?
The Archbishop of Canterbury has called us to a “Decade of Evangelism”. In WA our Archbishop has taken up the challenge with enthusiasm, and called the diocese to action. Whether action results the decade will reveal. EFAC in the West is keen to run with it, and we are delighted at this conference so early in the piece, and for the encouragement that brothers and sisters around the country are also ready to run with Canterbury’s challenge.
Jesus has called us to an era of evangelism. “This gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations and then the end will come.” We are that section of the Anglican Church which speaks most about evangelism. If we don’t use this opportunity to show a way forward in attractive, contemporary, engaging, effective evangelism we are missing an enormous opportunity.
Yet before we can turn our attention to making our evangelism attractive, Australian, engaging, and effective we must ensure at all costs that it is evangelism, that it is indeed the gospel, which we are telling forth.
At home, I sense an uncertainty among many. What is evangelism? For many in the Anglican communion this has long been an uncomfortable word, and now we are called to do it. What is the gospel we are to promote? This is the first and natural question. And what very easily follows is a process of defining or redefining the gospel, to make it something I can comfortably promote. And therein lies the danger that we may lose the evangel before the evangelism even begins.
I am excited about the prospects in WA. People will be wanting to do something. Evangelicals are ideally placed to show a lead. It is our hour if we choose to grasp hold of it. But if we do, how incredibly important it is that our gospel is God’s gospel and not “another gospel.”
We should be aware that there are powerful forces at work upon us when we approach the task of defining the gospel. Consciously or unconsciously we ask ourselves ‘What is that aspect of Christianity which most turns us on?’ Naturally, I feel this will be the thing which most appeals to others, and will therefore be our strongest selling point. So, we equate this with the gospel. In my early years as a Christian I alternated between explaining how we are saved by faith and not by works, or how the cross works as a substitution for the penalty due us for our sins, or i ran the two into one. to me these were the most powerful truths of Christianity, so they must be the gospel. I have vivid memories of my discomfort in beach mission coffee shops trying to explain to teenagers how you didn’t have to do anything to be saved, and then telling them what they had to do.
The world is littered with false, reduced or overloaded gospels: one focussed on predestination and the sovereignty of God, another on the Holy Spirit, on the love of God, on millennial views of Christ’s return, on healing and miracles, on various understandings of the spiritual life, on being born again, on the church, on social action, and radical obedience. Instinctively we all know the gospel has great authority. To gain that authority for our favourite doctrine is a seductive pressure. Sometimes a precious Christian truth becomes the gospel, sometimes a heresy, but whichever way it goes the danger is that God’s gospel is lost, the life-giving gospel, if not denied, is pushed into the back of the cupboard.
We must never forget what is at stake here. It is people’s lives. God’s gospel gives life, and it alone gives life. Recently we read in the news of an American who wants to have his head severed from his body and frozen in liquid nitrogen in the hope that at some later time, when medical technology is better able to deal with his problem, he may be unfrozen, given a new body and live again “The task of medicine,” he is reported to have said “is immortality.”
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. If medicine could find a drug which would add even 5 years to our average life most of the world would line up for it, even for the half life of our declining years. Yet God holds out to us immortality; new bodies, and an eternity of life and joy. “God has brought life and immortality to light in the gospel.”[1] We need have no fears of our gospel being irrelevant. Little wonder that the carriers of this life-giving message are seen to be beautiful:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who announce the gospel.[2]
But it is God’s gospel which is ‘the power of God for salvation for all who believe,”[3] not our truth of the moment. We must learn it from God, for it is his announcement. And that means we must open the Bible. How vital that we go forward into the Decade of Evangelism clear in our minds what the gospel is and determined that this will be our message.
What is a gospel?
Before we answer the question, ‘What is the gospel, I want us to ask, ‘What is a gospel?, i.e. What kind of message is it?
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the evangelizer – the gospel man’.
These words of Isaiah 52:7 are repeated in Nahum 1:15, in Romans 10:15, and are echoed in Ephesians 6:15. They give us as good a picture as we could ask of what a gospel is.
They take us back to the world before telephones and radio, TV, fax machines, and regular postal services, to the world of runners, couriers, and heralds. Today we hear news every day of our lives, 5:30, 6:30, and 7pm, and on the hour every hour if we want it, and if you happen to miss that you can always dial 0055-12351 and get Newsline. Instant news! The world is criss-crossed with news media networks. We forget that once upon a time news was not so easy to come by.
In 490BC a courier named Pheidippides ran 75 miles from Athens to Sparta to request help to fight the Persians. The Spartans were in the middle of a religious festival so he ran the 75 miles back to carry the bad news that no help would come for at least 5 days. The Athenians engaged the Persians alone at Marathon and defeated them. Then, it is said, Pheidippides set out to carry the news back to Athens. 23 miles later he reached Athens and delivered his gospel: “We’ve won!” Then he fell over and died! He was the original marathon man. In Hebrew they would call him the Mebassar, in Greek the Evangelizer or gospeller.
They were a common institution in the world of the Bible. There is a marvellous story in 2 Samuel 18 about two such couriers racing to get there first with the news. There was great honour and a large reward for arriving first with important news. In fact, the original meaning of the word euaggelion was the reward you gave such a courier. In this case David has fled from Jerusalem and the army of his son Absalom has come out to crush him. His own tiny army goes out to meet them in the forests of Ephraim, but they insist David stay behind in Mahanaim. You can imagine David’s state of mind as he waits for news. The watchman calls out to the king that he can see someone running in the distance. “If he runs alone he carries besorah, ‘gospel’, —news, ’’ says the king, and when the runner is close enough to be recognized, the watchman cries out, “It is Ahimaaz the son of Zadok,” and the king cries out with relief. ‘He is a good man, he will carry a good gospel’. And he did, three words: “All is well!” David’s kingdom was safe. Absalom’s coup had failed.
In both Hebrew and Greek “gospel” is momentous news. It is not necessarily good news, sometimes it will be bad news, but it is never trivia news. It is announcement news, the kind of news that runners carry, sometimes over hundreds of miles: messages of victory and defeat, announcements of the rising and falling of kingdoms, and the going and coming of kings.
What is the gospel in the Old Testament?
Isaiah prophesies the coming of such a gospel-courier for God’s people in the end time. Israel has been conquered and occupied by the enemies of God. The people were dispirited, humiliated, poor and sin-sick. God, their true king, was far from them. They lamented in the words of Isaiah 63:19 “We have become like those over whom you never ruled.”
But then would come the messenger, and although he may come with his feet filthy and blood-caked from his long run, they would nonetheless be beautiful feet for the message he would carry:
How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of the gospeller. Who announces peace. Who evangelizes good. Who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’ Listen! Your watchmen lift their voices; Together they shout joy. When the Lord returns to Zion, they will see it with their own eyes.[4]
This promise became one of the mainstays of Israel’s hope. When God sends his Messiah with salvation for his people, he will herald his coming on the mountains of Judah with the voice of the gospel courier. It is intriguing to discover in the Gospel of Luke, that when Jesus sent out the 72 through Samaria, and into the hill country of Judaea with instructions to announce that the kingdom of God was at hand, he ordered them to carry nothing, to greet no one on the road, and not to wear shoes.[5]
The gospel which is pre-evangelized in the OT is the future announcement that God has returned to his people to rescue them from all their enemies and is now present to rule them in the person of his messiah.
The gospel of Jesus
The Jews of Jesus’ day eagerly awaited the trumpet blast that would signal their liberation, and their ears were strained for the voice of the gospeller.
Blow in Zion on the trumpet to summon the saints, Cause to be heard in Jerusalem the voice of the evangelizer …[6]
Messiah would come the enemies of God would fall, the reign of Satan would be finished, the scattered captives of war would be gathered, tears would be wiped away, sins forgiven, the hungry fed, the sick healed, and the dead raised; Israel would become glorious, and God’s government would be established in Jerusalem in the hands of David’s son over all the world for ever.
Some thought that when messiah came, he would stand on the roof of the temple aannounce his kingdom.[7]Down at Qumran the monks were rehearsing their battle formations…. Then “Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying, ‘the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the gospel,’” [8] This is how Mark summed it up. Luke tells us that Jesus came to Nazareth to the synagogue and read from Isaiah 61,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to gospel the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release for the captives and recovery of sight to the blind to release the oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. [9]
To this reading Jesus added only a simple statement: “Today this saying is fulfilled in your hearing.” In doing so he transformed the reading from a prophecy of what the gospel herald would do when he came at the end of time, into the herald’s actual announcement of the arrival of the kingdom that very day in the synagogue. For those who had ears to hear, Jesus was fulfilling the role of the end-time gospel herald.
If that is true, Jesus’ gospel was far more than a sermon or a message, it was an event. Let me ask you to imagine a little scenario. We hear on the news tomorrow morning that the Prime Minister wishes to make a special announcement to the people of Australia at 8pm tomorrow evening. It will be broadcast live on all stations and on all channels. It is rumoured to be something big and unprecedented, something that will affect every man and chid in the country. All are urged to listen. When the Prime Minster speaks, he does not speak for long but says that in view of the trouble the country is in, he has decided to dissolve parliament and hand over all authority in the country to his son, who will now be supreme ruler, and he urges all citizens to follow him and give him complete loyalty. We laugh, the thought is ludicrous, but were such a thing to happen, and such things have happened, I guarantee you we would be alarmed and excited, and I doubt whether we would be able to carry on with our scheduled programs. Also, I venture we would also be polarized.
Jesus gospel, the gospel of God, was just such a message. The content of the gospel had repeatedly been spelt out in the OT. The people only waited for God to do what he had promised to do. In effect all Jesus’ gospel announced was ”It’s time,“—“Today” — “At hand.” Small wonder that multitudes flocked from all over the country to hear and see for themselves, True it was not immediately apparent who Jesus meant this Messiah would be, but for those who had eyes it was clear enough. “The Sprit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me.” Jesus was not only the gospel-herald. For those to whom the secret of the kingdom was revealed he was also the king.
Such a message, I said, is more than a message, it is an event. The coming of God’s gospel to the world in the summer of AD 28 was an event like the raising of a British flag in Sydney on 26th January 1788, or the Australian flag on the rocky crags of Gallipoli on 25th April 1915, it was a claim to sovereignty, only his was a claim to sovereignty over the whole world, and over the life of every human individual.
I don’t need to tell you that a flag in enemy territory is a very provocative thing. So long as it remains there it represents a challenge, a claim to sovereignty. A counter-attack must come.
Across the park and down the hill from where I live stands a brewery. For many months a distinctive red, gold and black flag fluttered over the site Everyone wondered what would happen. People took sides. So long as it remained, it proclaimed to everyone who drove by, that that land was under the control of the Aborigines who camped around it. But, before dawn on the 10th October 1989, the police moved in bulldozed the camp, fenced off the area, and removed the flag.
Jesus’ gospel also precipitated a crisis. The people of Nazareth angrily challenged his right to claim such things and tried to stone him. He walked through the midst of them. Wherever he went “evangelizing the kingdom of God” —for that, he said, was why he had been sent— he answered the challenges to his kingly authority by casting out demons, healing the sick, forgiving sins, stilling a storm, feeding the hungry, even raising the dead, and all along the way welcoming sinners into friendship with God, and into citizenship in his kingdom. There has never been anyone in all history, before or after Jesus who ever did anything like what he did. Nor has anyone before or after him had such an audacious message. But although, again and again,his challengers were stunned to silence, there hatred only grew.
With the help of the Twelve Jesus carried the gospel into every village of Galilee, and then, with the 72 before him, he turned his face towards Judaea and Jerusalem. The final challenge was for Jerusalem itself. Jesus entered the city amidst the hosannas of his followers, and you may be sure if the kingdom of God had a flag, they would have been waving it. He cleansed the temple – “my father’s house,” he called it. Mark makes it clear that he occupied it with his followers. No one was permitted to carry anything through or conduct business.[10] Every day Jesus was there seated teaching people – the Messiah, the Son of God, seated in his Father’s house declaring his Father’s gospel and teaching his law, truly the King amongst his people. The flag was now flying in the heart of Jerusalem over the temple of God.
What would happen? Would they allow him to stay there with the Jews arriving from all over the world for the Passover festival, hearing him, and then, carrying his law to the ends of the earth? If so, the government of God is a fact. Or would they remove him?
You know the story. On the eve of the great feast day the police struck. In a late night trial they judged him a blasphemer and deceiver of the people. At dawn they had him before the Roman governor, and at 9am led out to be hung on a cross.
God himself had said through Isaiah that he would raise up the King-Messiah as an ensign – a flag – to rally the nations.[11] Jesus with his kingdom gospel had planted that flag on Israelite soil, and then in the heart of the City of the great King. But now it will be run up on a rough wooden pole, but only to jeer at it and at the end of the day to tear it down, and lay it to rest forever.
Will it remain down? That is the question. Imagine: the guns are silent nothing moves on the beach, the flag lies torn down and bloodied in the sand. Night falls. The sun rises and the dead are buried. It sets again, and the first light of the third day reveals the stone rolled away, the tomb empty, and the gospel flag fluttering in the early morning breeze.
Death, the last enemy, has proved itself powerless against this gentle kingdom. Jesus is risen!
Jesus returned to Galilee to where the gospel began. There on the mountain he restated and reaffirmed the gospel he had been sent into the world to announce:
All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit And behold I am with you always to the close of the age.[12]
What was Jesus’ gospel? It was God’s simple, sensational announcement, couriered from heaven by is Son, that the time had come to establish his government on earth, and that his Son is the one appointed to save his people and rule all things for ever.
Our gospel
The apostolic gospel we must announce today is the same gospel Jesus brought, but it is also different. It is the same because it is the announcement of the arrival of the same kingdom. It is different because the event it announced has developed to a new stage.
If I may develop an analogy, this time from world history: the allied invasion of Europe in 1944 involved a pre-evangel – “one day the Allies will come and liberate this land, we do not know when” – then an evangel – 6thJune 1944 the Allied flag is flying on axis territory radios are crackling announcing liberty to the occupied and calling the enemy to lay down their arms, troops are pouring up the beaches, enemy strongholds are falling, that is like Jesus’ original kingdom proclamation.[13] The flag of the kingdom is flying, demons are being expelled, the sick are healed and the poor are being gathered and reunited with their God. But the D-Day gospel provokes an incredible counter-attack and the question is, who will finally rule the world? That question is not decided until Berlin falls and Adolf Hitler is dead. That is like Jesus’ final battle with the powers of darkness on the cross, where the NT makes it very clear Satan was irreversibly defeated, the place of mankind in God’s kingdom was secured, and a hole was punched in the wall of death. At this point the gospel changes its form slightly. As far as WW11 is concerned Europe now belongs to the Allies, the decisive battle has been fought and the war is won. The war was won, but the war was not finished. Now the gospel of the kingdom of the Allied powers must be carried to every town and hamlet of the world. The terms in which it will be declared will focus on the great victory that has just been won, not on the landing on the beaches of Normandy a long time before. But it is the same gospel, and it is capable of provoking the same violent response Now, however, it is not the outcome of the war and the existence of the new government which is at stake, but each person to whom the gospel comes, will he surrender to the new order, or destroy himself in senseless and futile opposition? The apostles‘ gospel, our gospel, is just like that. We are sent into all the world to announce that Jesus has conquered death and hell and claims sovereignty over every man woman and child on this planet.
In what terms do we announce the gospel today?
I ask this question because the gospel is obviously much more than a formula. So far, I have tried to identify the precise centre of the gospel by asking what kind of a thing it is, and how it began and developed. But there is always the danger of reducing it to a pat formula to be repeated rather than a world-shattering reality to be entered into and be transformed by. How is the gospel to be spoken of and explained and introduced into the various situations of life? And how do things like the incarnation, the cross, the resurrection, and second coming relate to the gospel—and human sin, and our deepest needs, and repentance and faith, and conversion and renewal of life?
When you examine the NT you find the gospel is preached in a variety of ways with various different focuses. How is it that Acts focuses so often on the resurrection, yet in 1 Corinthians Paul speaks of the gospel as “the word of the cross,”and says that he preached “Christ crucified?” How is it that to the Jews in Jerusalem Peter spends most of his time arguing that Jesus is Lord and Christ, but Paul to the Athenians arguing against idolatry? In Thessalonica, judging by what happed there, he talked about “another king,” and spoke a lot of Jesus’ return. In 2 Corinthains 3 the gospel has to do with “the glory of God in the ace of Christ,” in Romans it is tied in with the way in which God puts people right with himself. It appears the first gospel preachers had enormous flexibility in declaring the gospel, and so presumably should we, so long as we understand the heart of it, and never lose sight of exactly what it is we are doing when we are gospelling.
There have been times in my life when I have tied myself in knots trying to explain the gospel; when I first tried it on my father I thought it was a matter of explaining the logic of substitutionary atonement. He didn’t think it was very logical at all that someone should be punished for someone else’s crimes, and by the time I’d finished with my contorted explanations I think I was beginning to see his point.
But when you grasp the simple heart of it: the gospel is heaven’s announcement that God’s kingdom has arrived in the person of its Lord and King, Jesus, to whom every knee must and shall bow, and that it is announced to secure our allegiance, (that we may enter that kingdom by believing in its king – then you can unfold it and adapt it in ways appropriate to the people you are talking to.
In Romans 10:9 Paul says, “If you confess with your lips Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead you will be saved.” You cannot get a simpler expression of the heart of it than that: “Jesus is the risen Lord” – believe it and you are saved. It seems too absurdly simple to be possible. But let’s unpack it a little to see how it falls out.
Notice first of all that this is more than a formula. For Paul it was an experience and a discovery which turned his life around. There he was, hurrying to Damascus to clean out a pocket of Christianity. Suddenly a light flashes around him, he falls to the ground and hears a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He knows it is the God of Israel whom he has worshipped all his life who is speaking to him, yet this God is a stranger to him, he is persecuting him. “Who are you Lord?” he asks, and received the extraordinary reply, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.” It is all there. Later he describes his gospel to the Galatians:
I make known to you brothers, the gospel which was announced by me, that it is not according to man, for I did not receive it from a human being nor was I taught it, but I got it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.[14]
Paul had wanted to wipe the memory of Jesus of Nazareth from the earth. It was unthinkable that Jews should hold as the King-Messiah one who had been rejected by the leaders of all parties as a blasphemer and had died with the stigma of crucifixion upon him, and the curse of hanging, but suddenly he sees and hears the voice of the But it is important next to see that this gospel begged many questions, which, when Lord God Almighty and sees the glorious form of the risen messiah and is told “I am jesus.” This vision was how God announced the gospel to him, for it revealed Jesus truly alive and now God’s glorious ruler of the universe.
The terms of the gospel
It is important next to see that this gospel begged many questions, which, when they are answered, unfold to help us see the gospel in its beauty and fulness.How is it possible that someone who died amidst the filth and shame of crucifixion could be the king of kings and Lord of lords? Crucifixion was expressly designed to ridicule the aspirations of anyone who saw himself as a rival to the emperor. It was Rome’s way of having the last laugh: ‘Hail king of the Jews! Look at you now; you can’t even brush the flies away! Ooh pooh, what’s that running down your legs?’ For Paul it was biblical proof of the curse of God that a man should die hanging on a tree. The answer? There are many answers to the meaning of the cross, for it is indeed the great crossroads at which God and man and Satan and the law collided in a head-on four-way collision. Satan pushing Jesus to the limits of temptation to break his faith in God and make him another failed Adam, loses him forever and sees a son of Eve win through to reclaim the lost kingdom for God and human beings. Human beings proudly about God’s work are unmasked as God-murderers, desperate to resist his intrusion into their space. God in Jesus, bearing their angry rebellion without retaliation, praying for their forgiveness as they drive the nails into his hands, is finally seen as he really is, not the slave driver and spoiler of people’s fun, but our lover and champion, prepared to go to the uttermost limits of humiliation and death to be reconciled to us. The law crying for justice against human beings whose sins are heaped up to the sky is satisfied as the king offers himself in place of his people, and they pass forgiven into the now established kingdom of God, which is the kingdom of Christ, which is the kingdom of man. All these things and more happened at the cross.
The cross is not the gospel; it is the gospel’s foundation. There would be no gospel without the cross, only a flag which fluttered for a while in Satan’s kingdom, caused a short stir, but departed without breaking the hold of evil on human beings. However, as we announce the kingdom we can hardly go far without revealing the means of its establishment, and as we unveil the king the first thing we will see is his crucified hands. The Christ we proclaim is Christ crucified.
The second question which must have overwhelmed Paul as he groped his blind path to Damascus is “Where do I stand in relation to this gospel?” And his answer was, “the chief of sinners.” He had begun his journey believing himself a righteous and God-pleasing man; he ended it knowing that for all his law keeping he had not escaped the disease of his own heart. He needed to be saved and only God could do that. But on what terms would God be willing to receive a man who was “a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man?” What must I do to be saved? And the answer was, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved”; nothing more (Acts 16.31). In fact, Paul must have realised that in revealing his Son to him God had already accepted and justified him, he needed only to believe and receive. God’s mercy is so great that sometimes it even runs ahead of our faith and creates the very response it asks for, ”It is the gift of God….“ (Ephesians 2.8) So, the fact of our sinfulness and our justification by the grace of God received through faith are not exactly the gospel, but the gospel reveals our guilty state and brings us justification and peace with God when we believe it.
Thirdly, how do we know that the gospel is true? How do we know that God has given Jesus the name which is above every name? The answer is the resurrection. “God has set a day on which he will judge the world in justice by a man whom he has appointed and has given proof of this to all people by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17.30–31) For Paul the proof stood right before him, the risen Jesus in ascended glory; for us the proof lies in the testimony of those who saw him. Sufficient to say that this testimony is so strong that a non Christian Jewish scholar declares himself convinced that God did raise Jesus from the dead, though he seeks another explanation than that he is Messiah. In some ways you could almost say the resurrection is the gospel, for it was God’s way of reversing the judgement of human beings, and holding his Son up to the world as its risen conquering Lord. That is why Paul can state the gospel in these words in Romans 1:3-4: ”descended from David according to the flesh, but designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness from the moment of his resurrection from the dead.“ If the resurrection is God’s declaration that Jesus really is Lord and Christ, we see how important it is for Christians to both preach and prove the resurrection.
We could go on relating more and more things to the gospel. The fact is, everything relates to the gospel. Just as Jesus was raised to become the cornerstone of the community of the future, so for the first Christians, the gospel became the cornerstone of all life and thought . The gospel was not just the instrument by which people were saved, it was also the principle by which they sought to rule their lives and structure their world. When we see Paul rebuking Peter for “not walking a straight line towards the truth of the gospel” when he stopped eating with Gentiles in Antioch,[18] we see that the gospel has implications that flow out into all of life. I do not have time to explore this path further now, but it is vital to know that it is there, if the gospel is to grow and bear fruit in the way it is meant to.
The Australian emphasis
There have been times in my life where I have viewed the gospel as a kind of magic formula; if only people could be got to hear it, God would do the rest and they would become Christian. It didn’t matter much whether they were an atheist or a nominal Christian, an Australian, an African, or a Jew. There is truth in this; God is able to leap-frog the obstacles people place in his path. Nevertheless, I don’t think it is a sensible approach to evangelism to ignore where people are. We have seen that the early evangelists had considerable flexibility in their handling of the gospel, and they tailored it to the people they were addressing. The aim is not simply that people should hear the gospel but that they should also understand it, and see that it is true.
For Australians to confess ”Jesus is Lord” they must first believe that there is a Lord and see this as a meaningful thing. This means being challenged over their complacent attitude to the question of God’s existence. They need to see that belief in God is not a matter of personal preference but of truth, and that there is real evidence that God is real, that he is involved, that he has spoken, and that he has entered human life as a man. They need to be reminded that if it is not true, their own lives are meaningless and their struggle for significance is futile. They need to be introduced to the fact God has a plan for the world and that it involves them. They need to realise that unless God does something, there is no solution to the agony and suffering of this world. We speak of the problem of evil and suffering and ask whether there is a God, and if there is, whether he cares. The answer is that he has shown his hand in Jesus Christ and revealed his purpose to put an end to all that is wrong by means of this man, the Messiah, who will rescue the world from all its ills and rule it for God forever. To men and women who live in a world that seems chaotic and purposeless this should be good news; just the fact that there is someone who will sort out the whole mess is good news.
If our countrymen are to grasp the fulness of the gospel it is essential that we be able to fill this out, not all at once, obviously, but as we are able. And when we grasp this we will see how vital is our Sunday by Sunday preaching of the great salvation plan of God, and our Bible study groups, as well as the personal witness of our church people, and the more focused times of mission.
But when we see all this we still have not seen the most important thing. Our listeners have not yet seen the heart of the gospel. If the first evangelists had explained all these things to their Jewish hearers, the response would probably have been, “Yes brothers that is wonderful. These are the things we learned at Sabbath School, but what about this gospel you say you have?” Then the Christians would have said – and let me use Paul’s words – “JESUS is Lord; God has established his kingdom in Jesus.’
The confession, “Jesus is Lord” is meaningless if we do not know who Jesus is. It is not Allah or Buddha or Bhagwan or Krishna we are confessing as Lord God, but Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the crucified one. And let me tell you, if it is good news that God is going to put the future of this universe in someone’s hands, it is magnificently good news that that someone is Jesus. Can you think of anyone else you would prefer to be ruled by? Any one of the world’s present leaders? Or one of its leaders from past history?’ Would you like to have the eternal welfare of God’s creation in your hands? Most of us cannot manage our own lives and families, let alone the universe. To know that the future of the world is in the hands of a man who touched lepers and healed them, and ate with outcast sinners, and made them better than the righteous, and loved the people who hated him to the point of letting them kill him rather than retaliate against their madness, and prayed for them as he suffered agony, and triumphed over death—isn’t this wonderful news? And to discover that this Jesus is not some kind-hearted archangel assigned to the restoration of planet earth, who may one day be replaced by a tougher and less forgiving prince, but God himself become a man, that God touches lepers and eats with tax collectors and sinners and loves his enemies, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, why the news gets better and better.
In 2 Corinthians 4 Paul speaks of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.”
What we preach is Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.
So if we need to explain to our fellow Australians that there is a Lord and what that means, how much more do we need simply to show them Jesus. The gospel is meaningless without Jesus. At best it is a cold doctrine, but it comes to life when the man is seen, who we are claiming is God’s appointed king. When I was in India I asked P.T. Chandapilla about reaching Hindus with the gospel. “They despise the church,” he said, ‘but they find it hard to speak against Jesus.” In the city of Madras which is officially 7% Christian, 14% of people answered in a survey that they believed Jesus to be the only true God. When Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wanted to preach the gospel, what did they do? They wrote stories of Jesus. My friend Steve Williams ran a Bible class in London for seekers. They simply read through the gospel of Luke together and stopped when someone wanted to ask a question. As they saw more of Jesus one after another they quietly committed their lives to him, until by the end of the year half the group were Christians.
The greatest tragedy of modern Christianity is that it has lost sight of Jesus. It has lost sight of the glory of God! The Gospels are our text book for Sunday School but we don’t know how to use them with adults. I attended a well known and well respected evangelical church for three years and the only sermons I ever heard on the first three Gospels were explanations of why this particular reading did not conflict with justification by faith, although it seemed to. If we did nothing for the next ten years but learned again how to talk about Jesus and retell his story we will have done a great deal, and led many more to love him.
If in our preaching of the gospel we do not hold up Jesus, we have not preached the gospel. If people in responding to the gospel are not responding to Jesus, they are not believing in the gospel. If they are not attracted to Jesus, they will not find his kingdom, no matter how much they may like the church, or some of our doctrines, or our moral standards, or our religious experiences. So let’s show them Jesus.
When men and women, Australian men and women, begin to grasp God’s stupendous plan to save the universe and place it under the lordship of a human king, and when they see more clearly the face of the man he has chosen, and his outstretched crucified hands they will not only bow the knee, but they will do it with glad and trusting adoration.
[1] 2 Timothy 1:10.
[2] Romans 10:15.
[3] Romans 1:16.
[4] Isaiah 57:7-8.
[5] Luke 10:4.
[6] Psalms of Solomon 11:1-2
[7] Pesikta Rabbati, The Light of the Messiah.
[8] Mark 1:14-15.
[9] Luke 4:18-19.
[10] Mark 11:16.
[11] Isaiah 11:10.
[12] Matthew 28:18-20.
[13] Mark 1:24.
[14] Galatians 1:11.
[15] Acts 16:31.
[16] Ephesians 2:8.
[17] Acts 17:30-31.
[18] Galatians 2:15.