The Gospel is the good news of what God is doing to redeem all of creation and to bring it into perfect harmony with Himself.
“This is a Gospel issue!” It’s a statement I’ve heard over and over again in the past few months. It’s not a new claim, but it does seem to be rising in our conversations as Christians try to position themselves to answer the fallout of the various crises plaguing our communities.
Whenever there is trouble, God’s people are called to the front lines. We are a city that is set on a hill, a place that welcomes the suffering. We are salt, a preserving entity amongst a decaying world. We are light, holding the truth of the Gospel out to a world that grows a little bit darker every day.
It’s in this last part that I am beginning to feel concerned. Our mission is clear: we must present the Gospel as the primary solution for every major crisis. But if we are not careful to define the Gospel as the central truth of God’s Word, we are liable to lose it in the shell game of ‘which issue is the most concerning today.’
I try to avoid making controversial statements. There is so much negativity and vitriol in the public discourse. I’m not interested in calling out false teachers or promoting a particular brand of doctrinal distinctives. I have committed my life and ministry to proclaiming the purity of the Gospel, which is offensive enough. I don’t need to add in extra layers of nuanced disagreements within the Church. But every once in a while, there is something so threatening to orthodoxy that I have to get up on a soapbox and declare, “This is a Gospel issue!”
Assuming the Gospel
I hear a lot of people claiming that a wide range of concerns are related to the Gospel, but they rarely articulate what they mean. There is an assumption among Chrsitians that we all agree on the basic principles and don’t have to keep repeating them. But by assuming the Gospel, we are allowing the recipients to fill in the blanks. Often this results in a confirmation bias. The speaker thinks they’ve done a great job explaining the Gospel, while the hearer walks away justified in their presuppositions.
Recently, I noticed a glaringly obvious assumption of the Gospel when people started sharing the parable of the lost sheep. The shepherd, representing Jesus, left the 99 sheep to search for the one that was lost. Unfortunately, this teaching has been used to affirm a complex social movement. While it seems to be a fairly innocent connection, it actually diminishes the original intent of Jesus’ words with devastating consequences. The lost sheep does not represent oppressed people groups, but sinners who are without Christ. And the act of saving does not mean elevating people out of subjugation, but bringing them into the Kingdom of God.
“What’s the big deal?” you might ask, “It may not be a proper rendering of the text, but it’s still an important issue.” Of course we don’t want to diminish the concerns of those who are hurting, but bending Scripture to fit with what we want it to say is not only dangerous, it’s blasphemous. The Gospel is a precise instrument to destroy sin at its source. If it applies to everything, then it becomes useless to anything specific and loses its cleansing power once it is diluted.
The same sort of argument could apply to an assortment of social causes which I won’t elaborate on here, but they are not exclusive to a particular position on the political spectrum. Neither is this a call to arms to further entrench ourselves into a defensive posture. It is a call for clarification. What is at stake here is the most sacred doctrine of the Church. At the very least, we must have a definitive answer to what the Gospel is, and what it is not.
Defining the Gospel
I have heard reports from seminary professors that one of the most alarming challenges they face in training the next generation of Church leaders is defining the Gospel. You would think that those preparing themselves for the pastorate would come into their post graduate studies with at least a working knowledge of the core principle of our faith. But different schools from various denominations have reported that the vast majority of those in ministry cannot adequately articulate a definition of the Gospel. If this is a problem at the highest levels of academia, then we should be aware of the challenges faced at street level.
The Gospel is the good news of what God is doing to redeem all of creation and to bring it into perfect harmony with Himself. In the Old Testament, this was seen in the faith of God’s people who longingly looked for the promised Messiah who would rescue them from their sin and the weight of oppression in a fallen world. In the New Testament, the mystery of Christ is revealed. Jesus, the very Son of God, dies in our place to pay the penalty for the sins of the world and absorb the wrath of God. He then rose from the grave to take His rightful place as the victor over sin and death. And we look forward to a day when Christ shall return and establish His kingdom on earth, even as it is in heaven. He is making all things new.
When we hear that, our heart resonates. It is instinctive that our spirit bears witness with the Holy Spirit that this is true. This is the message that unites us in one faith and one hope, with one Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. There is power in the Gospel for salvation, transformation, and restoration in regards to the hope we have of things to come.
Yet, it gets lost so easily, doesn’t it? When we assume the Gospel, we lose the Gospel. We become accustomed to hearing it so that we tune it out as background noise. We chafe at repeated recitations as if we already know it and want to move on to more practical applications. We allude to it so many times that it becomes an ambiguous word without any significant meaning anymore. We add unnecessary elements to it until it loses its potency. We should not think loosely of the Gospel, as though it applies to any or all of our attempts to set right every injustice in our world. For we could gain the whole world, and lose Jesus.
Guarding the Gospel
The implications of the Gospel are often worked out in different ways. The Apostle Paul was one of the most ardent defenders of the Gospel. He went toe to toe with Peter, when the chief Apostle excused himself from eating with Gentiles because he didn’t want to offend the Jewish Christians. Paul called his fellow Jews “dogs” when they tried to put physical restrictions on Gentile believers. He was not ashamed of the Gospel and he would not compromise on this particular issue.
But when the early Christians were fighting over meat sacrificed to idols and how many days a week they should be worshipping together, the audacious apostle would respond with, “Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). A much softer stance coming from the apostle who had built a reputation for himself as a verbal boxer. In this, Paul was protecting the integrity of the Gospel and the uniqueness of the Holy Spirit’s work on our consciences to move us from the shadows of darkness and into the light of God’s glorious truth.
Christians have been fighting over social issues ever since the Gospel began to spread throughout the Gentile world. No longer are we able to identify as a particular people group with national, genetic, or traditional qualifiers. We have been given a new identity in Christ. The Church became a home where people from all walks of life could gather on equal footing. Roman soldiers next to Jewish rabbis, rich landowners next to poor bond-servants, former prostitutes next to former Pharisees. Even Paul, who had previously persecuted the Church, would worship next to the relatives of martyred family members. This was the Church, working through their differences and sharing communion together.
I once pushed back on someone who claimed that if fellow believers would not vote as he did, they could not be Christians. Even though we were on similar footing, politically speaking, I still felt like he was applying a false standard for determining a person’s standing in Christ. His arguments were compelling, but his conclusion was wrong. While I agreed with his principles, I had to confront him on the precept of the Gospel.
If we divide on any issue, it should be the Gospel. Legalism is a virus that takes over our minds to convince us that we are right when we are actually depending on our own understanding and clinging to the shackles of self-righteousness. If we do not agree about something, our first response should be to make sure that we do agree on the Gospel. Then, we can work our way out from there to determine how our convictions have led us to different positions. We must be careful that we partner with people who share the same mission to see all things made new, not simply all things more comfortable or presentable.
Promoting the Gospel
This does not free us to disengage from our culture. We are not to be so heavenly minded that we serve no earthly good. We are a city that is set on a hill, salt to our communities, and a beacon of light that is holding forth the word of life. As we seek justice for all, however, we cannot confuse freedom from oppression with freedom from sin. Nor can we think that we are advocates for justice when we turn a blind eye to the needs of our neighbors. “But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him” (I John 3:17)?
We need to constantly be reminded of the fact that we are simply beggars who have found bread. We must first preach the Gospel to ourselves and remember how desperate we were for Christ. We must root out sin in our own hearts if we are going to see clearly to help our brother with the speck in his eye. We ought to wash each other's feet on a regular basis so that we can remind each other of the cleansing power of the Gospel. And we must cling to the hope that God will complete His work in perfect order. The best life we could ever live now, is one with an eternal perspective as our first priority.