The Gospel of Jesus Christ

Where the good news begins

Who God Is

The gospel is news about God before it is news about you. Start anywhere else and the whole thing shrinks down to advice. Start here and it opens up.

God never began. Nothing made him, and nothing can add to him. Before there was light or time or dust, there was God, full and glad in himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons, the same in substance, equal in power and glory. He made the heavens and the earth out of nothing, not because he was lonely, but because it pleased him to show what he is like.

He is holy. That word means more than clean. It means he is set apart from everything he has made, other than us, higher than our best thought of him, perfect in every part of his being. The seraphim in Isaiah’s vision do not stand around discussing his holiness. They cover their faces and cry out.

And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

Isaiah 6:3 (KJV)

He is sovereign. He governs every atom and every empire. Nothing slips past him and nothing overrules him. There are no accidents. He is not a large version of us. He is the Lord.

He is good. He is generous with rain and bread and laughter and sleep, and he is generous with people who never thank him for any of it. Every good thing you have ever enjoyed came from his hand.

And he is the judge of all the earth. Abraham knew this when he asked in Genesis 18 whether the Judge of all the earth would do what is just. The answer runs through the whole Bible. He will. A good judge cannot shrug at evil. If he did, he would not be good. So the holiness that makes God glorious is the same holiness that makes our situation serious.

You cannot understand the cross until you have first understood the God who was offended.

The honest diagnosis

What Sin Is and What It Has Done

Sin is not mainly a mistake or a weakness or a bad habit. Sin is want of conformity to God’s law, and transgression of it. It is treason against the King who gave you breath.

The trouble goes back further than your worst day. God made the first man upright and placed him under a covenant of works, with life promised for obedience and death threatened for rebellion. Adam stood there not only for himself but for all of us who descend from him by ordinary generation. He fell, and we fell in him. That is why the world is the way it is, and why the nursery does not need to teach a child to lie.

So Scripture speaks about two things at once. There is the guilt we inherit from Adam, and there is the corrupt nature we are born with, and out of that nature come the actual sins we commit every day in thought, word, and deed. You did not become a sinner the first time you sinned. You sinned because that is what you already were.

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

Romans 3:23 (KJV)

Reformed Christians call this total depravity, and the word is often misunderstood. It does not mean every person is as wicked as he could possibly be. Unbelievers love their children, keep promises, run into burning buildings, and write beautiful music. What the doctrine means is that sin has reached every part of a man. His mind, his affections, his conscience, his will, his body. There is no clean corner left from which he can launch his own rescue.

That last point is the hard one. Scripture does not describe the sinner as sick and weakened but willing. It describes him as dead in trespasses, hostile to God, unable to submit to God’s law, loving darkness rather than light. His will is not in chains against his wishes. He is bound by his own wanting. Jeremiah 17 says the heart is deceitful above all things. Left to ourselves, we do not want the God who is there. We want a god we can manage.

If that offends you, sit with it a moment before you set it aside. Nobody is helped by a doctor who calls the tumor a bruise.

Sober words

The Wrath of God and the Judgment to Come

This section is not written with any pleasure. It is written because leaving it out would be a lie, and because the news that follows it means nothing without it.

God’s wrath is not a temper. It is not him losing control or taking offense the way we do. It is the settled, holy, measured opposition of a perfectly good God to everything that ruins what he made and robs him of the honor he is owed. A God who felt nothing about cruelty and betrayal and pride would not be worth worshiping.

Paul opens his letter to the Romans by saying that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness of men, and that people hold the truth down because they do not want it to be true. That is our case, stated by God himself.

Hebrews 9 says it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment. There is a day set. Every one of us will stand before God and give an account, and the standard will not be the average of our neighbors. It will be his law and his glory. On that day no excuse survives contact with the light.

Jesus spoke about hell often, and he spoke about it with tears in his ministry, not with relish. He called it eternal punishment and set it beside eternal life in Matthew 25. Hell is not a figure of speech. The suffering is conscious and it never ends. It is what sin actually deserves. We do not soften this, and we do not enjoy saying it. We say it the way you would say there is a fire in the house, because there is a door.

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (KJV)

The heart of everything

Jesus Christ, the Gentle King

Into that situation God did not send advice. He sent his Son. The gospel is not a program for self-improvement. It is the announcement of what a Person has done.

The eternal Son, who was with the Father before the world began, took to himself a true human body and a reasoning human soul, born of the virgin Mary. He did not stop being God. He did not become a hybrid. He is one Person in two natures, truly God and truly man, the natures joined without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation, forever.

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

John 1:14 (KJV)

Think about what that means for a moment. He got tired. He had calluses. He wept at a grave. Hebrews 4 says we have a high priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses, tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin. He knows what it is to be hungry and misunderstood and betrayed by a friend, and he never once wanted anything he should not have wanted.

The obedience he offered

Our problem was double. We owed a debt of perfect obedience that we had never paid, and we owed a penalty for the disobedience we had piled up. Christ answered both.

For thirty years and more he kept the law of God perfectly, in the desert and in the synagogue and at the dinner table, loving God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself. Theologians call this his active obedience. He was not merely staying out of trouble so he could qualify for the cross. He was building the righteousness that would be credited to his people.

Then he went to Golgotha and suffered under the curse we had earned. That is his passive obedience, the word meaning suffering rather than passivity, since no one took his life from him and he laid it down himself. He was crucified in the place of sinners, bearing what they deserved.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Isaiah 53:5 (KJV)

Paul says it in a single sentence.

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

2 Corinthians 5:21 (KJV)

Four words worth knowing

Substitution

He stood where we stood and took what was ours, so that what is his could become ours.

Propitiation

His sacrifice absorbed the wrath of God against sin. The storm broke over his head, and now there is no storm left for those who are in him.

Redemption

He bought us out of bondage at a price, and the price was his own blood, not silver or gold.

Reconciliation

The enmity is over. God is not merely neutral toward his people. He is their Father.

And this was no gamble. When Christ died he was not making salvation theoretically available to everyone and actually certain for no one. He was laying down his life for his sheep, and he will not lose one of them. The cross did not make God willing to love. It was the outflow of a love that was already there.

Romans 5 says it outright. The love came first, and the cross proved it while we were still sinners and still his enemies.

Dead, buried, raised, reigning

He really died. His body was taken down and laid in a borrowed tomb, and his friends went home in the dark. Then on the third day he rose, the same body now glorified, and he ate fish with them and showed Thomas his hands. This is not a symbol of springtime. It is a report.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:

1 Corinthians 15:3-4 (KJV)

Forty days later he ascended, and he is not absent but enthroned. He reigns now at the Father’s right hand as Prophet, Priest, and King. He prays for his people. He rules the nations. He is gathering his church out of every tribe and tongue. He will return bodily, visibly, to raise the dead and judge the world and make all things new.

And here is the thing that gives this ministry its name. This King, with all authority in heaven and on earth, rode into the city on a donkey. Isaiah 42 says he will not break a bruised reed or quench the smoking flax. He has real power and he uses it gently toward sinners who come to him. Read more about how these threads hold together on the doctrine page.

From first to last

Grace Alone

If salvation depended on some small contribution of our own, the dead could not make it. Salvation is God’s work from beginning to end.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9 (KJV)

Before the world was made, God set his love on a people in Christ. He did not choose them because he looked ahead and saw that they would be humbler or more religious than their neighbors. He chose them freely, for reasons hidden in his own good pleasure, and he chose them to be holy. The name for it is unconditional election, and Paul works it out at length in Romans 9 and Ephesians 1.

Man by his fall having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, the Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace; wherein He freely offereth unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ; requiring of them faith in Him, that they may be saved, and promising to give unto all those that are ordained unto eternal life His Holy Spirit, to make them willing, and able to believe.

Westminster Confession of Faith 7.3

In time, the Spirit comes to those people through the preaching of the word and does what no preacher can do. He opens the ear and softens the heart. This is effectual calling, and it is not God dragging the unwilling. It is God making the unwilling willing.

Through Ezekiel, God promised to take out the heart of stone and put in a heart of flesh. That promise is what the Spirit carries out in the new birth.

That new birth comes before faith, not after it, in the same way that life comes before breathing. A dead man does not decide to become alive. But do not mistake the order for a delay. Everyone who is born again believes, and believes truly, with his own mind and his own will now set free to love what it once despised.

Two warnings belong here, and they point in opposite directions. Election was never given to the unconverted as a reason to sit still. Nobody knows he is not chosen, and nobody has ever come to Christ and been turned away on that ground. If you want him, that wanting did not come from your old heart. Come. And election was never given to the believer as a cold abstraction. It is meant as a pillow. Your standing does not rest on the strength of your grip on God. It rests on the strength of his grip on you.

What God calls you to do

Repentance and Faith

God commands all people everywhere to repent and believe. These are gifts he gives, and they are real acts that you perform. Both things are true, and you do not have to untangle them before you obey.

Repentance is not the same as feeling bad. Plenty of men have wept over consequences and never turned from a single sin. Judas felt terrible. Repentance is a change of mind that becomes a change of direction. It is not a one-time transaction either. It is the posture of a whole Christian life.

Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin, and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth, with grief and hatred of his sin, turn from it unto God, with full purpose of, and endeavour after, new obedience.

Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 87

Faith is not mere agreement with facts. The demons agree with the facts and shudder. Saving faith knows the truth, consents to it as good, and then rests. It takes Christ himself, not a doctrine about him, and leans the whole weight of the soul on him alone.

Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel.

Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 86

Hear the offer, because it is meant for you, whoever you are reading this. Christ is offered freely in the gospel to every sinner who hears it. Not to the reformed sinner, and not to the sinner who has cleaned himself up enough to be presentable. To sinners. You do not prepare yourself and then come. You come, and he does the cleaning.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

John 6:37 (KJV)

Read that last clause slowly. Never. There is no category of person who has come to Christ and been refused. Your sin is not a special case. The blood of Jesus is not running low.

How a sinner is declared right

Justification by Faith Alone

Justification is a courtroom word. It does not mean God makes you good. It means God declares you righteous, and he declares it on a ground outside of you.

Here is the great exchange. Your sin was reckoned to Christ at the cross, and his perfect obedience is reckoned to you when you believe. Reckoned, credited, imputed. Not infused into you like a medicine that slowly improves your condition, but placed to your account so that God looks at you and sees no charge outstanding and a righteousness he himself accepts.

Justification is an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardoneth all our sins, and accepteth us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.

Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 33

Faith is not the reason God accepts you. Faith is not a work that earns anything, and it is not a small merit that God generously overpays. Faith is the empty hand that receives. If a beggar takes a gift, nobody praises his fingers.

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:

Romans 5:1 (KJV)

Keep justification and sanctification distinct, and never separate them. Justification is an act. God does it once, it is complete, and it is the same in every believer. It changes your standing. Sanctification is a work. It goes on all your life, and it runs uneven. It changes your character. Both come from union with Christ, and neither can exist without the other. But only one of them is the ground you stand on.

Confuse the two and assurance dies. If your acceptance with God rises and falls with your obedience this week, you will spend your life either despairing or pretending. The believer who understands justification can look honestly at a bad week, hate what he sees, confess it, and still know that he is not one inch further from God than he was on his best day. The verdict was never about him.

Your worst day does not disqualify you, and your best day never qualified you.

What follows

The Life That Comes After

Nobody is justified and then left alone. God takes his enemies, forgives them, and then brings them into the family and sets about making them like his Son.

Adoption is the tender part that many Christians skip past. He did not only acquit you. He named you. The God whose holiness once terrified you now hears you call him Father, and he is not annoyed by the interruption.

Then comes the long work of sanctification. Sin is dethroned at conversion, but it is not yet dead, and the fight is real. You will find old appetites still alive in you. You will have days of sharp progress and stretches of dull struggle. That is not evidence that the gospel failed. It is the normal shape of the Christian life, and the law now serves you as a rule of life, showing you the path of love rather than sentencing you to death.

God has ordained ordinary means for this, not spectacular ones.

These are given to the church, so find one. Not a livestream and not a podcast, but a congregation of real believers with faithful preaching, the sacraments rightly administered, and elders who know your name and will watch over your soul. The Christian life was never meant to be lived alone.

And you will be kept. Perseverance does not mean that believers never stumble badly. It means God finishes what he starts. Paul says in Philippians 1:6 that he is sure of it. Those truly united to Christ will be held to the end by the power of God. Assurance grows as you look mainly at Christ and secondarily at the fruit of his Spirit in you, and it rests on a promise already spoken.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

Romans 8:1 (KJV)

A word to you

Come to Him

If you are not a Christian, you have read a lot of words, but it comes down to a Person. You are a sinner, God is holy, judgment is real, and Jesus Christ is a Savior fit for exactly this. He lived the life you have not lived. He died the death you deserve. He rose, and he is alive right now, and he has never once turned away a sinner who came to him empty-handed. So turn from your sin and trust him. Not tomorrow, not after you improve, now, as you are. Ask him to save you, and go looking for a faithful church that will help you follow him.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew 11:28-30 (KJV)

If you already belong to him, then take the same road again. Christians do not graduate from the gospel. We go back to the cross with the same empty hands we brought the first time, and we find the same welcome.

He is a King. He has all authority. And he is gentle with those who come.

If you want help with what to read or where to go from here, look at the next steps. If you would rather talk with someone, there is a way to reach out.

Where to go next What we believe