gospel

The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.

Sensual indulgence weakens the mind and debases the soul. The moral and intellectual powers are benumbed and paralyzed by the gratification of the animal propensities and it is impossible for the slave of passion to realize the sacred obligation of the Law of God, to appreciate the atonement, or to place right value upon the soul.

The idea of sin being able to deceive us, suppressing truth so that we believe a lie, should send shivers down our spines. It is one thing to deceive other people. That is scary enough. It is even more frightening when we realize that each lie we tell leaves us more self-deceived. All practiced sin teaches us to believe lies. WE don't often consider the boomerang effect of our deception. In the end it will get us.

We do some of our best work in evangelism when we make sure people understand the wrath of God against them, that their plight is desperate because God is angry. The problem of unreached and unengaged peoples is not that they don't have the gospel - that's the solution. Their plight is that they face a God who is rightly angry with them because of their sin. ("Cross", p. 35)

Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others.

The gospel of becoming a good believer limits the pursuit of God

There are only two ways that God__ justice can be satisfied with respect to your sin. Either you satisfy it or Christ satisfies it. You can satisfy it by being banished from God__ presence forever. Or you can accept the satisfaction that Jesus Christ has made.

We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity__ rebellion from God.

There is nothing new under the sun but that of the Son. Man's rebellion against God has always been because he would rather fall in pride than rise in humility.

It__ not that I didn__ understand or believe the gospel before. I did. But the truth of the gospel hadn__ moved from my mind to my heart. There was a huge gap between my intellect and my emotions. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards likened his reawakening to the gospel to a man who had known, in his head, that honey was sweet, but for the first time had that sweetness burst alive in his mouth.

The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.

There Is Only One Gospel... But The Preaching Is Different.

Without love even the most radical devotion to God is of no value to Him. Let me make sure that sinks in_ You can gain all the spiritual gifts in the world. You can take the most radical steps of obedience. You can share every meal with the homeless in your city. You can memorize the book of Leviticus. You can pray each morning for four hours like Martin Luther. But if what you do does not flow out of a heart of love - a heart that does those things because it genuinely desires to do them - it is ultimately worthless to God.

If Satan really wanted to face Jesus Christ in a battle, he will be facilitating the End of the Age by helping to spread the gospel to the whole world. This must be fulfilled for the End to come. Matthew 24:14

Any attempt to reduce the Bible to a guidebook for how to live is not only wrong, it's also idolatrous. It replaces Christ at the center with something else, with moralism. The point of the Word, the goal of Christianity, is not to teach you how to be a good person, or a good man. The goal is repentance and forgiveness, given freely to sinners, because of the substitutionary death of the God-man, Jesus.

What we need today is men who take a stand on the Word of God and stop trying to fit in or preach a socially acceptable Gospel ...We need men like Caleb, when they see the giants of Atheism, Political Correctness, Social Pressure to alter the Bible and a polluted education system and say "we are well able to overcome it.

Beneath all the rhetoric about relevance lies a profoundly disturbing possibility - that people may base their lives upon an illusion, upon a blatant lie. The attractiveness of a belief is all too often inversely proportional to its truth... To allow "relevance" to be given greater weight than truth is a mark of intellectual shallowness and moral irresponsibility.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life neither angels nor demons neither the present nor the future nor any powers neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38