In the words of the Apostle Paul, there is nothing more important than the gospel.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…”
(1 Corinthians 15:2–4 ESV)
Everything we do at HBC is centered on the gospel. So, the natural question is – “What is the gospel?”
In a broad sense the gospel is the entire plan of God to redeem humanity in His Son, Jesus Christ – covered in Genesis to Revelation. In another sense, it is the facts of Jesus Christ – His deity, His sinless life, His death, His resurrection. This presents a bit of a conundrum – how do we clearly state the gospel to cover all that?
We have found that there are four helpful parts to God’s big story of the gospel that help us get our arms around it.
- God. God exists as all-knowing, all-powerful King and Creator. [Psalm 19:1-6] He created the world and everything in it perfect and free from sin. His creation is sufficient enough that we have no excuse to deny His existence. [Romans 1:18-32].
- Man/Sin. Yet humanity rejected God as King and Creator and made ourselves both king and creator of our own set of rules. In so doing this, we unleashed sin, sickness, death, and evil into the world and fractured our relationship with God. We are spiritually dead ourselves, separated from him because of our sin [Isaiah 59:2], objects of his wrath [Ephesians 2:1-3; Romans 5:12-14]
- Christ. In God’s unparalleled mercy and grace, he had a plan in place already to save us from His wrath and restore our broken relationship. The entire Old Testament looks forward to the coming of the Messiah, a Savior who is revealed to be Jesus. [Isaiah 53;Luke 24:25-27, 44] This plan was to send His Son, Jesus, truly man and truly God into the world to live a sinless life and die on the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. God raised Jesus from the dead after 3 days to show that the sacrifice was accepted. [Ephesians 2:4-7; Romans 3:21-26]
- Response. The above facts of the gospel are not effective unless we respond individually in two ways: Repent of our sin and believe the gospel of Jesus. [Mark 1:15; John 3:16-18] We are then given new life in Christ, forgiven, justified, adopted into God’s family, and we persevere in the faith. [1 John 1:9; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Matthew 24:13; Ephesians 4:1].
