What is the Gospel? Greg Gilbert did an incredible job answering that powerful question in his new book titled with that overwhelming question. I picked up this book on Amazon a few weeks ago when they made it a free Kindle download and read it all in one sitting this afternoon. As someone who considers themself pretty familiar with Scripture and the command to share the gospel, I really appreciated the fresh perspective on this divine calling. I also really appreciated Gilbert’s intentional use of tons of Scripture to prove his points. This book would be a great one to get in the hands of both believers and unbelievers. Here are some of my highlights…
- This book does not so much claim to break new ground as survey afresh some old ground that should never have been ignored, much less abandoned.
- In some ways, I’m glad to see Christians getting excited when a discussion about the gospel begins. It means they’re taking it seriously, and that they have deeply held thoughts about what the gospel is. There would be nothing healthy at all in Christians who couldn’t care less how we define and understand the gospel.
- An emaciated gospel leads to emaciated worship. It lowers our eyes from God to self and cheapens what God has accomplished for us in Christ. The biblical gospel, by contrast, is like fuel in the furnace of worship. The more you understand about it, believe it, and rely on it, the more you adore God both for who he is and for what he has done for us in Christ.
- This is the message on which we Christians have staked our entire lives, and it’s one that we believe demands a response from you, too. If there’s anything in the world that you cannot afford to ignore, it is the voice of God saying, “Good news! Here is how you can be saved from my judgment!” That’s the kind of announcement that demands attention.
- Tradition leaves us relying on nothing more than the opinions of men. Reason, as any freshman philosopher will tell you, leaves us flailing about in skepticism. (Try to prove, for example, that you’re not just a figment of someone else’s imagination, or that your five senses really are reliable.) And experience leaves us relying on our own fickle hearts in order to decide what is true—a prospect most honest people find unsettling at best.
- We are accountable to the God who created us. We have sinned against that God and will be judged. But God has acted in Jesus Christ to save us, and we take hold of that salvation by repentance from sin and faith in Jesus. God. Man. Christ. Response.
- Whatever else you think about the story of creation, the implications of this claim—that God created the world, and especially that God created you—are enormous.
- The gospel is God’s response to the bad news of sin, and sin is a person’s rejection of God’s Creator-rights over him.
- You see, nobody wants a God who declines to deal with evil. They just want a God who declines to deal with their evil.
- Most people have no problem at all thinking of God as loving and compassionate. We Christians have done a bang-up job convincing the world that God loves them. But if we’re going to understand just how glorious and life-giving the gospel of Jesus Christ is, we have to understand that this loving and compassionate God is also holy and righteous, and that he is determined never to overlook, ignore, or tolerate sin.
- Many Christians talk about sin as if it were merely a relational tiff between God and man, and what is needed is for us simply to apologize and accept God’s forgiveness. That image of sin as lovers’ quarrel, though, distorts the relationship in which we stand to God. It communicates that there is no broken law, no violated justice, no righteous wrath, no holy judgment— and therefore, ultimately, no need for a substitute to bear that judgment, either.
- The Bible is the story of God’s counteroffensive against sin. It is the grand narrative of how God made it right, how he is making it right, and how he will one day make it right finally and forever.
- Jesus himself knew from the very beginning that his mission was to die for the sins of his people.
- Faith is not believing in something you can’t prove, as so many people define it. It is, biblically speaking, reliance. A rock-solid, truth-grounded, promise-founded trust in the risen Jesus to save you from sin.
- The Bible teaches that the greatest need of every human being is to be found righteous in God’s sight, rather than wicked. When the judgment comes, we desperately need the verdict pronounced over us to be “righteous” rather than “condemned.” That is what the Bible calls being “justified”—it is God’s declaration that we are righteous in his sight, rather than guilty.
- Putting your faith in Christ means that you utterly renounce any other hope of being counted righteous before God.
- Do you find yourself trusting in your own good works? Faith means admitting that they are woefully insufficient, and trusting Christ alone.
- Do you find yourself trusting what you understand to be your good heart? Faith means acknowledging that your heart is not good at all, and trusting Christ alone.
- The biblical story line forces us to recognize that until Christ returns, our social and cultural victories will always be tenuous, never permanent. Christians will never bring about the kingdom of God. Only God himself can do that. The heavenly Jerusalem comes down from heaven; it is not built from the ground up.
- The church is the arena in which God has chosen, above all, to showcase his wisdom and the glory of the gospel. As many have put it before, the church is the outpost of God’s kingdom in this world. It’s not correct to say that the church is the kingdom of God. As we’ve seen, there’s much more to the kingdom than that. But it is right to say that the church is where we see the kingdom of God manifested in this age.
- The Bible actually gives us very clear instruction on how we should respond to any pressure to let the cross drift out of the center of the gospel. We are to resist it.
- How is it that I let the beauty and power and vastness of that gospel be crowded out of my mind so often and for so long?
- If you are a Christian, then the cross of Jesus stands like a mountain of granite across your life, immovably testifying to God’s love for you and his determination to bring you safely into his presence. It’s as Paul said in Romans: “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:31–32).
- Even as we slog through the trials, persecutions, irritations, temptations, distractions, apathy, and just plain weariness of this world, the gospel points us to heaven where our King Jesus—the Lamb of God who was crucified in our place and raised gloriously from the dead—now sits interceding for us. Not only so, but it calls us forward to that final day when heaven will be filled with the roaring noise of millions upon millions of forgiven voices hailing him as crucified Savior and risen King.