“For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” Paul wrote to the Romans, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).
I join Paul in saying “I am not ashamed of the gospel.”
The gospel is good news, the best news anyone can hear. It is the message that the God of this world desires to have a real and personal relationship with you and me. The bad news is that each one of us has chosen to walk away from God and live for ourselves, thus breaking the relationship with God that we were created for (Genesis 3 , Romans 3). And the Bible shows us that there is nothing we can do on our own to fix that relationship with God (Ephesians 2). We are the guilty ones.
So what’s the good news? The good news, or the gospel, is that Jesus Christ came to fix what we broke. He lived the perfect life you and I are expected to live (1 Peter 1), but obviously haven’t and can’t. And He died the punishing death that you and I should have died because of our guilt towards the Holy God (1 Peter 3).
And the exchange He offers is His right standing with God for our sin and guilt with God (2 Corinthians 5). The reason He came was to fix the relationship we broke with God and make us right again through His life, death and resurrection.
If you don’t know that you have a personal relationship with God, where your sins against Him are forgiven through the death of Jesus and your are made righteous through His life and resurrection, that offer is for you TODAY. Jesus says, “repent and believe in the gospel” in Mark 1. To become a Christian, stop believing that you are good enough, or that you play any part at all in returning to God, but fully trust that Jesus Christ has done everything for you. You could simply pray from your heart, “God, I need Jesus to forgive my sins and make me right with you again. I cannot do it without you.”
And the Bible says, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).
If you are a Christian, if you have already been made right with God by faith in Jesus, what are you doing with the life you’ve been given? What are you doing with the gift you’ve received? I will write more about the ongoing role of the gospel in the life of a Christian, but I must ask myself “Am I going out and sharing the good news that Jesus saves with those who do not know Him?” Are you?
The ongoing role of the Gospel in the life of a Christian:
