The importance of grasping the gospel

The focus of the New Testament is Jesus and His work. That is what I said in Sunday's sermon on Luke 10:38-42. The person and work of Jesus are communicated through the apostles' preaching and writing. In my sermon text, I made the following comments in talking about sitting at Jesus' feet and listening to His word, although I said them somewhat differently:

As God the Son, He served us. As Matt. 20:28 says, “[T]he Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and give His life a ransom for many.”

God the Son humbled Himself and became a man. As a man, He lived a perfectly righteous life in order to be the perfectly acceptable sacrifice for our sins in His death on the cross. That perfect life enables Him to be our righteousness. His righteousness is credited to the account of all who trust in Him and His death for their sins. He died in our place on the cross, receiving from His own Father the punishment that we should have received. For all who place their faith in Him and His death, their sins are wiped clean forever and the condemnation they should have received is lifted. That is the gospel. That is good news.

The vastness and depth of the gospel makes it like a deep ocean we can swim in throughout our lives and never get to the end or the bottom of all its reality. We should be constantly in a state of listening to Christ through His Word to learn the meaning and scope of the gospel, to understand more fully all the benefits we have received by His life, death and resurrection.

As I understand the Bible, the gospel of Jesus – which has His life, death and resurrection at the center, which is about who He is and what He has done – is at the heart of true change even for Christians. The gospel is not just about entering the Christian life. It is what the Christian life is about.

As I was telling a friend last week, I think we, as Christians, don’t understand the gospel and its benefits to us like we should. And that lack of understanding impairs us. Yes, as Christians, we undergo trials and suffering. We should expect them. Yes, as Christians, we can have physical or chemical problems that affect us emotionally. We should seek physicians’ help to see if those problems have such root causes.

But day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we can live lives – even as Christians -- marked by despair, dissatisfaction, criticism, defeat,anger, envy and insecurity. We can feel like we are often unaccepted by God. We can believe our acceptance by God is based on our performance. So we resolve to work and serve harder in order to gain His acceptance, thinking that acceptance is based on our merit when it is based only on the merit of Jesus.

So how do we change this? How do we understand who Jesus is and what He has accomplished for us? How do we grasp the fullness of the gospel’s benefits?

We sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to His word.

We listen to His word now by spending time in God's Word. You can find in my January 1 blog post some suggestions on spending time in the Bible this year -- with the goal of knowing Jesus and His gospel more fully and applying the perfect accomplishment of His work more completely. Knowing Him and His gospel is one step toward true change for us. It also can glorify God and exalt Jesus.