Blog

by Charlie Wolcott

Every few years, I keep coming back to the theme of getting the message right that we as Christians are supposed to be giving and then pursuing the life that this message gives us. I have taken many different angles on this from identifying true and false teachers, what it means to be a Christian, and the authority and integrity of Scripture. While writing my previous series on the backstory of the kings, my church’s teaching elder made a comment about the Gospel that I had never thought about with any real depth: that the Gospel is not just for sinners who repent, but it is also for those who have been sinned against. So those comments dislodged this theme of getting the central message of Christianity correct once again. I want to take my time describing the Gospel, describing who it is for, and describing how to correctly preach it and how to offer it to the lost, the dying, and the born-again.

This post is the introduction, and I want to highlight the major themes I will be addressing. For the last two hundred years, the Gospel has been all but reduced to a quick 4- to 5-part summary. While the summary hits all the highlights and you can do a lot of quick street evangelism with it, the summary is NOT the full Gospel. It is a summary of it; it is the cliff notes. I will cover the summary over the next few weeks, but the summary must be unpacked. This summary usually has the form of creation, sin, Jesus/cross, and consummation at the end of all things. This hits the highlights, but it’s hardly comprehensive. And let me remind you: there is no possible way for any human to ever comprehensively hit the Gospel. I cannot do it and I am not going to try either. But one thing we do need to do is stop feeding people the cliff notes and start giving them the real thing, the full course.

I will first address who the Gospel is for. The Gospel is for every person on this planet, but more specifically, what kind of people and how does it reach that kind of person? The Gospel gives hope to the broken, the weak, and the hopeless. It gives strength to the believer. It gives healing and justice to those who have been sinned against. It also hardens the heart of the wicked to their own destruction. It also continues to refresh, rebuke, strengthen, and equip the believer. Let me make this clear: on this earth, no one ever ‘graduates’ or ‘moves on’ from the Gospel. I will deal with each of these categories and more in greater detail, and I do hope that there is healing for some in these posts.

After addressing that, I am going to address how we present the Gospel and how we are not to present the Gospel. This will include methodology as well as how to call people to respond to the Gospel. One of the problems with modern evangelicalism is that we have completely lost the vision and purpose of sharing the Gospel. We’ve gone from preaching God’s message as God gave it to “get as many people into our circles as possible,” and we’ve done that at the expense of the very message we are commissioned to give. And I am going to take a hard jab at some of our well-known apologists for this one, because in their attempt to give rational and logical defenses for the faith (which is not wrong), they openly state that they seek to “lower the bar” so people can “get in.” But one cannot reason with an irrational person. The spirit-born cannot use logic on the sinner who has rejected logic. Logic only works on those who are seeking truth. But worse than that is seeking to change the requirements for being a Christian to letting in as many as you possibly can and literally changing what it means to be a Christian in doing so. That is not presenting God’s message as we are called to. That is something far more sinister, and we need to be aware of those who profess the faith and who do that.

Then toward the end of the series, I’ll address what it means to have a Gospel worldview. This is more than just a Biblical worldview, where we see everything through the lens of Scripture, but seeing through the lens of the Gospel. I will make it clear that you cannot have a Gospel worldview without first having a Biblical worldview. And I will be the first to admit that I have not made a true transition from a Biblical worldview (which is absolutely necessary) to a Gospel worldview. And with this, I will have to address a very controversial topic: primary and secondary doctrines. This must be addressed because we have a culture where people will make anything they want to be “secondary” when what they want to believe goes against Scripture.

Let’s get back to the true Gospel, the message that God gave us for the hope of salvation, and let us proclaim it correctly, joyfully, and honestly, letting God deal with the results. We are not to be ashamed of the Gospel, and the majority of those who profess to be Christians are indeed ashamed of it for many different reasons. I’ll be addressing those reasons and more through this series.

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