What Is the Gospel？

This is the Gospel. It's not the only way to talk about the Gospel. It's just the way Paul's talking about it here. Our job as believers, among many other jobs, but ultimately, is to spread the Gospel to everybody who doesn't know the Gospel, all the people groups of the world. This is called missions, if you cross cultures, to try to get the news to them. Now, what's the news? Now, the reason I'm asking this is because so many people make missions so complicated. Endless discussions of contextualization, and way over the top, in my judgment, on some of them. Now, picture this way of thinking about the Gospel. The first thing we see here is that it is universally and absolutely relevant for every human being on the planet, no exceptions, with barely any contextualization. There was an Adam, you say to somebody who doesn't know. What is Adam? The very first human being. You are a descendant from him. He sinned, you're dead because of his sins. That is understandable. You may not agree with it, but you can say, as a human, you inherited that. The reason he died is because he sinned. You're a sinner. You're all going to die. Second stage in the Gospel presentation. The Son of God is like that Adam. He came to start a new humanity by rescuing people from this old humanity, and he came into the world, and he never sinned like your and my forefathers sinned. Never. Perfect obedience. We will one day stand with him before an infinitely holy God to face him because we've all sinned. His righteousness was performed in order that you might be counted as obedient and righteous and perfect through faith in him. So just as you were united to Adam and died because of his sin, you may be united to Christ and live because of his obedience. That word must be told everywhere with barely any contextualization. You've got to learn the language, man, father, origin. It'll blow their worldview out of the water, of course, just like it blows your worldview out of the water. We think, well, we white folks, Americans, been here 300 years and absorbed Puritanism, that we got the worldview, figured out our brain set in America just fits perfectly with this book, it's just like a hat. Wrong. This book blows American brains and every other culture, and our job is to say it because every human being you meet is in chapter 5. Your family is in chapter 5. Your kids are in chapter 5. Your parents, your colleagues at work are in chapter 5. Every human you see on the street is in chapter 5, and the same truth is true about every one of them, and the same gospel applies to every one of them, and it isn't complicated. It's just mind-blowing.