gospel

Miracle focused messages propagates social vices instead of social virtues

And we neglect the glorious gospel when we fail to recognize his preeminence. How frequently we forget that everything is for him and about him. We forget that he is to be first, in our honor and in our worship. Whenever the gospel slips from our conscious thought, our religion becomes all about our performance, and then we think everything that happens or will ever happen isa bout us. When I forget the incarnation, sinless life, death, resurrection, and ascension, I quickly believe that I'm supposed to be the unrivaled supreme, and matchless one. It's at this point that I'm particularly in need of an intravenous dose of gospel truth. He is preeminent.

It takes big money to preach a big Gospel to a great big world. We have to have our own land. We have to pay electricity bills, water bills, generator bills, staff payment, security, the audit department needs money, and there are legalities that require money.

The Law saith, Where is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction? The Gospel saith, Christ is thy righteousness, goodness, and satisfaction.

Never be content with your current grasp of the gospel. The gospel is the life-permeating, world-altering, universe-changing truth. It has more facets than a diamond. It's depths man will never exhaust.

It's only when we understand [Jesus'] presence in the church as being the fulfillment of God's promise in Zephaniah 3:17 to "quiet you with his love" and "rejoice over you with singing" that a crucial aspect of our salvation comes into perspective. Jesus didn't coldly settle accounts for us. He doesn't bark us into improving ourselves. He united us to himself in the glorious communion he has enjoyed for eternity with his heavenly Father. He resides within us to heal the broken places and refresh cauterized hearts. He sings us into a new mode of existence.... When, as Paul does, we imagine Jesus singing nations into submission to his rule, our hearts come joyfully under the sway of a love that is infinite and powerful.

The greatest threat to Christ-centered witness even in churches that formally affirm sound teaching is what British evangelical David Gibson calls __he assumed gospel._ The idea is that the gospel is necessary for getting saved, but after we sign on, the rest of the Christian life is all the fine print: conditional forgiveness.

God did not become flesh and suffer an ignominious death at our hands so that we could have sprawling church campuses, programs, and budgets.

In his sermon on the baptism of the Spirit, Chamberlain points out Peter's focus in Acts 2. The amazing work of enabling the apostles to speak languages in which they had not been trained drew the attention of the crowd so Peter could address them. No doubt, they wanted an in-depth explanation. But Peter uses this incident to point to Christ and uses the attention he has to fully explain the Gospel _ NOT to sensationalize a gift of the Spirit.

And Sometimes they see themselves as the problem. this is close to the truth, but not close enough. The problem is in us, but it isn't in how we appear or even in how we behave. It's much deeper than that. The Gospel informs us that the real problem is sin, our unbelief in God.

If the focus of our testimony is our changed life, we as well as our hearers are bound to be disappointed.

God has made relationships His chosen delivery system for the gospel of hope.

If we were left to ourselves with the task of taking the gospel to the world, we would immediately begin planning innovative strategies and plotting elaborate schemes. We would organize conventions, develop programs, and create foundations_ But Jesus is so different from us. With the task of taking the gospel to the world, he wandered through the streets and byways_All He wanted was a few men who would think as He did, love as He did, see as He did, teach as He did and serve as He did. All He needed was to revolutionize the hearts of a few, and they would impact the world.

The kind of gospel that our churches are preaching sometimes are not powerful enough to change the very street where these churches are located talk less of the nation where they are

If we think the main mission of the church is to improve life in Adam and add a little moral strength to this fading evil age, we have not yet understood the radical condition for which Christ is such a radical solution.

The Gospel is entirely objective. The Gospel is completely outside of ourselves. The Gospel is not about the change which needs to be made in us, and it does not take place within us. It was completed in Christ, quite apart from us, almost two thousand years ago. The Gospel is not dependent on man in any way. The Gospel is distorted when we turn people's eyes to what is to be accomplished in them. We were not and cannot be involved in any part of Christ's historical, finished, redemptive work. The sinner must be taught to look completely away from himself and trust only in Christ and His work of salvation.

Breakthrough focused gospel leads to lies and deception

If there is one single molecule in this universe running around loose, totally free of God__ sovereignty, then we have no guarantee that a single promise of God will ever be fulfilled.