Gospel deficiency is the major crisis of the evangelical church. The good news has been replaced by many things, most often a therapeutic, self-help approach to biblical application. The result is a Church that, ironically enough, preaches works, not grace, and a growing number of Christians who neither understand the gospel nor revel in its scandal.
There are lots of good reasons to reclaim the centrality of the good news of Jesus in our preaching and teaching and writing and blogging, and I’ve come up with four basic arguments for (what I’m calling) The Gospel Imperative, but perhaps defining our terms is in order. It’s no good going on about making the gospel the center of our worship and discipleship if we are not on the same page for what the gospel actually is.
Like many others, I affirm that the gospel is big. I favor a robust gospel, a good news proclamation with many facets and ramifications. It is everywhere in the shadows and in the light of the Old Testament Israelites’ desert wandering, and it encompasses the brilliant kingdom landscape of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It is in God’s gracious covering of the freshly fallen Adam and Eve (and in the cursing of the serpent) in Genesis, and it is in the awesome return of the tattooed, sword-wielding Jesus 65 books later in Revelation. I agree with Tim Keller, who argues that the gospel is “both one and more than that.” It is certainly “more than that.” But it is also “one,” which is why a nutshell like “The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23) can work well.
While acknowledging that the gospel is about the inbreaking kingdom of God setting a fallen world back to rights, the gospel I am speaking about here is the “essential” gospel, which is the news that Jesus has died to make atonement and risen bodily to establish his Lordship and has thereby murdered sin and conquered death.
Pretty powerful stuff, ain’t it? And yet many of our churches consider this news, which eternal angels still long to gaze into, merely introductory stuff.
Here are four basic reasons for evangelicalism’s reclamation of the gospel:
1. Because We Are Forgetful
Forgetting God’s goodness is part of our fallen DNA. The Bible demonstrates this vividly. Studying the Gospel of John with some friends once upon a time, we puzzled initially over the way the disciples believed in Jesus after his turning water to wine. Now, of course that would be cause for belief, but John’s Gospel tells us just one chapter earlier that Jesus’ self-attestation and his ability to know them (he reads Nathanel like a book) cause them to believe in him. Which was it?
Well, it’s both. Certainly Jesus gives us endless reasons to worship him as Lord, but I am convinced that he does this graciously as we endlessly “forget” his Lordship. In the Old Testament, God sets the enslaved Israelites free in a mighty act of deliverance (that whole Red Sea parting thing) and one day later they’re complaining about not having anything to eat. And that’s just the beginning. God keeps providing; the Israelites keep grumbling.
We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us. We are fickle, self-righteous, forgetful people. Yet we serve a steadfast, gracious, faithful God. Many preachers are fearful of highlighting the gospel every time they speak for fear of it appearing stale. But gospel redundancy is a good thing! We need it. We need the gospel every day (His mercies are new every morning) because we forget it and we sin every day.
Do not aid your community in its forgetfulness by relegating the gospel to the periphery of your proclamation. We need to be reminded of it constantly.
2. Because It is the Power to Save
We all want to grow the kingdom, right? We all want to seek and save the lost, right? We all want to lead as many people as possible to salvation, right?
Then, why, for the love of God, do we preach all manner of behavior modification, none of which could save a single one of us, when only the gospel saves?
Paul writes in Romans 1:16, ” I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.”
Yet if we could label our churches with the Nutrition Facts found on your can of soup, I reckon many would say in the fine print, “Not a significant source of gospel.” Are we ashamed?
If the gospel is the power to save, shouldn’t it be the meat of the message, not saved for the add-on invitation or for a special service every few weeks?
3. Because It is of First Importance
If holding the gospel as the power to save doesn’t push us toward greater gospel-centeredness, certainly Paul’s claim that it is of “first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3) should do the trick. But, again, we hold off on the gospel. We make it occasional or half-hearted, thereby ascribing it lesser worth than our very important and self-devised Six Steps for Successful Living.
In a recent White Horse Inn podcast, the fellows warned listeners to beware the preacher who says, “Well, of course the gospel.” The point here is that they are highlighting so much of what they do that is not the gospel and then when asked about the gospel’s absence, they say, “Well, of course the gospel.” In such churches the gospel is implied. Which means it is an afterthought. An implied gospel is a gospel FAIL.
The gospel should not be implied. It is of first importance. It should be the clearest, most prevalent message and theme of all a community’s worship and focus.
4. Because It Glorifies God
The gospel is not advice. It is news.
It is not “Do more, be more, try more.” It is the message that the work is done.
The gospel does not say “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” It says “It is finished!”
Our flesh hates this contrast. We hate it because the gospel says to us “You can’t do it; you are unable; you are deficient.” And we don’t like to hear that. Nobody wants to hear that we are incapable of saving ourselves, that in our insidest insides we are broken and cannot repair ourselves.
But this is what the gospel forces us to admit. And because it forces us to admit we are sinners deserving punishment with no inherent means of rescue, it forces us to admit that only God can save us, which forces us to reckon with the gospel truth that salvation is God’s work, not ours. God gets the credit. Grace means getting what we didn’t deserve, and the gospel of grace announces that “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).
When we insist on preaching about our efforts and making the gospel an afterthought, we have begun glorifying our works, glorifying ourselves. But when we center on the gospel and revel in its proclamation, we are glorifying God, because we are holding Christ’s finished good work more important than our insufficient good works.
The gospel is the hope of the world. It is my hope and it is yours. It should be our prayer and our humble insistence, then, that the people named for the gospel live and preach true to their name once again.
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November 20th, 2009 | 8:16 am | #1
How many formerly gospel preaching churches have really become lost? Certainly historically many once gospel oriented denominations have lost their way, but say in the last 20 years how many have (either denoms or churches?)
Perhaps my perspective is limited, but I have been a member of three churches in 30 years(sorry Frank), one in each town I have lived in. None of them have “lost the gospel”. One of them is even approaching mega church size – for Wisconsin, that is.(Blackhawk Evangelical Free Church, Madison, WI) and another is the largest SBC church in Wisconsin (Jacobs Well, Eau Claire)
More so, as part of building churches with Builders for Christ, I have come into contact with many other churches, and certainly from my interactions with them and visiting them, they all hold to the gospel and preach it.
How much of this is just so much hand wringing and not actually factually based? Again – I speak of the past 20 years or so, not what has happened to many denominations during the past 120 years.
Just asking
November 20th, 2009 | 11:04 am | #2
My anecdotal experience is opposite of yours, dac.
It’s okay if you think this sort of thing is just hand-wringing. Many of us know otherwise.
November 20th, 2009 | 11:31 am | #3
To agree with Jared here, my last two churches preached what I now see as pure idolatry. One focused on the church and its ability to improve life and the other on the church and its ability to improve self. That may seem similar, but they would have argued against each other vehemently.
And since Jesus saved me, I have begun to see the difference starkly. I knew leadership in both of these churches. These men would cry over their devotion to Jesus, to the kingdom of God but would usually only tag on a presentation of the gospel as four or five minutes on the end of every sermon.
Further, I would posit that a church that does not present the gospel, in more than a secondary ’side item’ way, is not truly focused on the importance of the gospel. There are plenty of churches that are remaining gospel centered and some that are becoming gospel centered but in my anecdotal experience, it is way easier and far more successful to downplay or move away from “Christ alone.”
If you use the gospel as a device for qualifying what else you preached, you can’t say you preached the gospel.
Great article Jared.
November 20th, 2009 | 12:20 pm | #4
Gabe, thanks.
I know there are great churches out there with appropriate tunnel vision for the gospel. I’d never dispute that. I even think there’s some good signs and reasons for optimism.
When someone says “It’s not like this in my church,” I think that’s great. When someone says, “It’s not like this enough elsewhere to constitute a problem in the church,” I tend to think they are severely blessed to never have encountered it or severely blind to not have seen it.
We have a lot of work to do so far as evangelicals don’t even think gospel-deficiency is a problem!
Admitting we have a problem is the first step toward recovery. :-)
November 20th, 2009 | 4:24 pm | #5
I wonder whether Dac’s definition of gospel centered is really the same as Jarod’s? I suspect that’s the more likely explanation of the difference of opinion. There are churches who emphasize grace, who preach the gospel regularly to non-believers, who are committed to the doctrines of grace, whose sermons always speak of Jesus, the cross and grace and yet STILL when it comes to application it consists of little more than exhorting people to think about the information given and/or do stuff. You can speak of grace all you like but if you don’t clearly link moral instructions to that grace and expose the idols of the human heart related to our obedience they will still think you’re telling them what to go away and do.
November 20th, 2009 | 4:25 pm | #6
Jared, sorry for the typo I’m your name
November 20th, 2009 | 4:30 pm | #7
Oh not again. Now my iPhone seems to have decided that when I type “in” it’s gonna convert it to “I’m”. Sorry
November 20th, 2009 | 6:20 pm | #8
[...] just read an excellent article over at First Things on their new evangel blog. The title of the blog is “Dude, Where’s My Gospel?” The author, Jared Wilson, [...]
November 22nd, 2009 | 2:08 am | #9
[...] Dude, Where’s My Gospel? Jump to Comments This is an excellent post on the gospel and why we need it in the church. You can read it here. [...]
November 23rd, 2009 | 7:48 am | #10
jared,
I have really enjoyed your blog entries. You and I see eye to eye(I think) on a lot of things. I think where the Acts29 guys and me would part ways is the overarching idea of “contextualization”. My question is, as was the question on this week’s White Horse Inn, when does contextualization put the “language of Zion” in the closet? Shouldn’t our pastors be encouraging us to learn big words?
BTW, I’ve never heard you preach and am not applying this directly to your ministry.
November 23rd, 2009 | 8:05 am | #11
Danny, good question.
The Acts 29 guys I know, read, and listen to all use “big words.” They’re all theologically robust. Check out Ray Ortlund, Jr. sometime. Even Driscoll hammers on penal substitution and the like. They are generally more wordy and less contextualized-into-dullness than the happy-clappy, Hawaiian shirt wearing seeker crowd, anyway.
I do hear you, though. There is a point at which we’re not doing church any more and just kind of chatting about church in a ginormous coffee shop. :-)
I would just argue that most Acts 29 fellows don’t fall into that description.
Fwiw, I am not an Acts 29 pastor/planter, despite having many connections to those who are, and my preaching isn’t usually characterized as lacking in the big word department. :-)
November 23rd, 2009 | 8:21 am | #12
There is, of course, nothing wrong with the big words the Bible uses. The problem is getting people to understand the big words.
It’s a little weird to get bent out of shape about “big words” when any oaf can use the words “Heisman Trophy” and “first down” in a sentence. The problem is not that there are technical terms: it is that we aren’t interested in them and have no passion for what they represent.
November 23rd, 2009 | 10:10 am | #13
Jared,
What’s wrong with Hawaiian shirts? :)
November 23rd, 2009 | 11:29 pm | #14
Frank Turk wrote:It’s a little weird to get bent out of shape about “big words” when any oaf can use the words “Heisman Trophy” and “first down” in a sentence. The problem is not that there are technical terms: it is that we aren’t interested in them and have no passion for what they represent.
BINGO right on the money Frank. And so we simplify and simplify thinking simplifying and dumbing down will make them more interested in the topic! Until there’s not really much left of the original topic to be interested in.
Neglecting/abusing the sheep and entertaining goats.
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