Heart of the Gospel

If I were to ask you what the gospel is, if you have been in church for the last several years you would probably say something like "The gospel is the good news of Jesus Christ" or "The gospel is God offering Jesus as our Lord and Savior" or something like that. While those responses are true, I ran into a debate this week that made me think through what the gospel is and how does it play out in real life.

In the debate that was shared with me, one person said the gospel above all else is revealed, propositional truth. It is such a common thought to me that it slips by my mind without even questioning or thinking about it. "The Bible is God in verbal propositional form" was drilled into my head in college and I have come to accept it. However, my friend who heard that phrase shuttered. He argued that to leave the gospel at propositional truth is to sell it short. He'd rather us say that the gospel above all else in an invitation to a redeemed relationship with your creator. Hmmm…now I am going to have to think a minute.

If I were to say the gospel boils down to revealed propositional truth I would be intending that to mean that the gospel shares and affirms Christ's life, death, the human story, humanities need for a savior and the solution Christ provided. The gospel is a statement of what has happened, as well as directions for living and for salvation. I know many would take the definition farther and say the gospel is the truth of what has happened historically, and is the true story of how humanity is separated from God and Christ's offer to bridge that gap. Great stuff, but I can see how my friend would see this as something less than the whole story. In fact, my friend said, " To leave the Gospel at propositional truth is, in my opinion, to sell it short. I don’t believe that God heaped the sin of the world on his son so that we would believe something was true but to restore a relationship between creator and creation. We don’t give God glory by saying we believe something, we give him glory by letting him love us to the point where we are changed from the inside out and begin to reflect his glory in the way we live our lives." Wow - that really strikes a chord with me. I would not say I disagree with it, but I would admit it makes me uncomfortable (and I show my moderness). Haven't we been taught all of our lives that to accept Christ all one has to do is believe that he died on the cross for our sins, and accept his sacrificial gift for us? That is definitely belief based. Where in my friends definition does it call us to make a willful choice to submit to God as Lord and Savior? Does he really intend to do away with the modern way of approaching salvation so completely?

At the heart of it, the question arises - so what? Why does it matter what we view as the heart of the gospel? Two immediate answers come to mind. 1) How are lives transformed? Are lives transformed because they hear something and believe it to be true or are lives transformed as they enter into a relationship and experience that relationship within the guardrails of Truth? So many pastors and teachers are out there teaching that belief/education leads to a change in actions. If you know how bad partially hydrogenated oil is for you, then you will not partake of foods containing that, or if you know your body is Christ's temple then you will take care of it, etc? There is a whole lot that I intellectually know but do not do. Personally I think lives are changed as we interact with God, and with God's people. Try describing God. You can list his attributes and that is a valid description of God, or you can describe God by telling who has been to you in different times of life and that will have a richer meaning. Not to say that God's attributes are not valid, but rather that how we experience God shapes how we view God even more than the truth we know about God. I know this gets into a touchy area, because we have to remember to keep our experiences of God within the context of what we know to be true about God. Point being, I think we have greater opportunity to see transformed lives through sharing the gospel as an invitation to connect with our creator, rather than presenting the gospel mainly as propositional truth. As I mentioned earlier, I want to see that relationship evaluated within what we know to be truth, but I'll trust that if we are truly in relationship with Christ that he will bring us back to those core truths.

The second reason our answer to the question matters so much is, how do we structure the church? If we believe the heart of the gospel is propositional truth then we will create environments accordingly and if we believe the heart of the gospel is relationship we will structure our church environments differently. I trust that by being intentional, we can do both!