The gospel tells us, fifthly, about how to respond: by whole-hearted, life-long belief, faith, repentance, obedience, discipleship and service to Jesus Christ.
Which means the gospel involves both an announcement and an invitation. A declaration, and a summons.
The gospel is so simple that small children can understand it, and so profound that the wisest theologians will never exhaust its riches.
Not Perishing
Rather than ‘perish’ (John 3:16), we should commit ourselves completely to Jesus as the one unique Lord and Saviour — believing his claims, trusting his promises, receiving his benefits (fundamentally, forgiveness and transformation), turning entirely to God and away from evil, following Jesus, learning from him, serving him.
Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. Full-heartedly and single-mindedly, for the rest of our earthly lives.
‘Faith is credence and conviction regarding the Gospel message, and a consequent casting of oneself on the promises of Christ and the Christ of those promises as one’s only hope. Repentance is a change of heart and mind, leading to a new life of denying self and serving the Saviour as King in self’s place. Discipleship is a matter of relating oneself to the living, exalted Christ as both learner and follower, and to the rest of Christ’s disciples as one who longs both to learn from them and to give to them, and who knows that his master’s will is for him to be in their company.’1Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:229.
Three words, three distinct things. Faith casts itself on Christ. Repentance changes the direction of a life. Discipleship attaches you to a person and to his people.
The Best News Anyone Ever Hears
The gospel of Jesus Christ is news — good news. The best and most important news any human being ever hears.2The following is largely a reproduction – with amendments to paragraph headings and layout – of The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration © 1999 by The Committee on Evangelical Unity in the Gospel, as rendered in J. I. Packer and Thomas C. Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (InterVarsity Press, 2004), 185-195.
This gospel declares that the only way to know God in peace, love and joy is through the reconciling death of Jesus Christ the risen Lord.
It is the central message of the Holy Scriptures, and the true key to understanding them.
It identifies Jesus Christ, the Messiah of Israel, as the Son of God and God the Son, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, whose incarnation, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension fulfilled the Father’s saving will. His death for sins and his resurrection were promised beforehand by the prophets and attested by eyewitnesses. In God’s own time and way, Jesus Christ shall return as glorious Lord and Judge of all (1 Thess 4:13-18; Matt 25:31-32). He is now giving the Holy Spirit from the Father to all those who are truly his.
The three Persons of the Trinity thus combine in the work of saving sinners.
This gospel sets forth Jesus Christ as the living Saviour, Master, Life and Hope of all who put their trust in him. It tells us that the eternal destiny of all people depends on whether they are savingly related to Jesus Christ.
And it is the only gospel. There is no other, and to change its substance is to pervert and indeed destroy it.
It is so simple that small children can understand it, and so profound that studies by the wisest theologians will never exhaust its riches.
What Holds Christians Together
All Christians are called to unity in love and unity in truth.
As evangelicals who derive our very name from the gospel, we celebrate this great good news of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ as the true bond of Christian unity — whether among organised churches and denominations, or in the many transdenominational cooperative enterprises of Christians together.
The Bible declares that all who truly trust in Christ and his gospel are sons and daughters of God through grace, and hence our brothers and sisters in Christ.
All who are justified experience reconciliation with the Father, full remission of sins, transition from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, the reality of being a new creature in Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. They enjoy access to the Father, with all the peace and joy that brings.
What It Requires
The gospel requires of all believers worship — constant praise and thanksgiving to God, submission to all he has revealed in his written word, prayerful dependence on him, and vigilance lest his truth be even inadvertently compromised or obscured.
Because of the radical change Christ has brought us, Paul describes Christian worship as discerning with our renewed minds ‘what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect’ (Rom 12:1-2).3This paragraph and the following two paragraphs are slightly amended from the original.
And to share the joy and hope of this gospel is a supreme privilege. It’s also an abiding obligation, because the Great Commission still stands: proclaim the gospel everywhere, teaching, baptising, making disciples (Matt 28:16-28).
The Heart of It
This gospel, which God sets forth in the infallible Scriptures, combines Jesus’ own declaration of the present reality of the kingdom of God with the apostles’ account of the person, place and work of Christ — and how sinful humans benefit from it. The Patristic Rule of Faith, the historic creeds, the Reformation confessions, and the doctrinal bases of later evangelical bodies all witness to the substance of this biblical message.
Here’s the heart of it. Our holy, loving Creator, confronted with human hostility and rebellion, has chosen in his own freedom and faithfulness to become our holy, loving Redeemer and Restorer.
The Father has sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world (1 John 4:14). It is through his one and only Son that God’s one and only plan of salvation is implemented.
So Peter announced: ‘Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12). And Christ himself taught: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6).
Where We Start From
Through the gospel we learn that we human beings, made for fellowship with God, are by nature — that is, ‘in Adam’ (1 Cor 15:22) — dead in sin, unresponsive to and separated from our Maker.
We are constantly twisting his truth, breaking his law, belittling his goals and standards, and offending his holiness by our unholiness, so that we truly are ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Rom 1:18-32; 3:9-20; Eph 2:1-3, 12).
Yet God in grace took the initiative to reconcile us to himself through the sinless life and vicarious death of his beloved Son (Eph 2:4-10; Rom 3:21-24).
Note who moves first in that sentence. Not us.
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- 1Packer, Collected Shorter Writings, 2:229. ↩︎
- 2The following is largely a reproduction – with amendments to paragraph headings and layout – of The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration © 1999 by The Committee on Evangelical Unity in the Gospel, as rendered in J. I. Packer and Thomas C. Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (InterVarsity Press, 2004), 185-195. ↩︎
- 3This paragraph and the following two paragraphs are slightly amended from the original. ↩︎