TG3

“The Gospel of Jesus Christ is news, good news: the best and most important news that any human being ever hears.

This Gospel declares the only way to know God in peace, love, and joy is through the reconciling death of Jesus Christ the risen Lord.

This Gospel is the central message of the Holy Scriptures, and is the true key to understanding them.

This Gospel 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 from the dead were promised beforehand by the prophets and attested by eyewitnesses. In God’s own time and in God’s own 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 Savior, 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.

This Gospel is the only Gospel: there is no other; and to change its substance is to pervert and indeed destroy it. This Gospel is so simple that small children can understand it, and it is so profound that studies by the wisest theologians will never exhaust its riches.

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 organized churches and denominations or in the many transdenominational co operative 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 are 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 this brings.

The Gospel requires of all believers worship, which means constant praise and giving of thanks to God, submission to all that he has revealed in his written word, prayerful dependence on him, and vigilance lest his truth be even inadvertently compromised or obscured.

To share the joy and hope of this Gospel is a supreme privilege. It is also an abiding obligation, for the Great Commission of Jesus Christ still stands: proclaim the Gospel everywhere, he said, teaching, baptizing, and making disciples.”

Ligonier 

TG2

“The gospel is good news—the good news of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

The Bible depicts human beings, all human beings everywhere, as in revolt against God, and therefore under his judgment. But although God stands over against us in judgment because of our sin, quite amazingly he stands over against us in love, because he is that kind of God—and the gospel is the good news of what God, in love, has done in Jesus Christ, especially in Jesus’s cross and resurrection, to deal with our sin and to reconcile us to himself.

Christ bore our sin on the cross. He bore the penalty, turned aside God’s judgment, God’s wrath, from us, and cancelled sin. The brokenness of our lives he restores; the shattered relationships he rebuilds in the context of the church; the new life that we human beings find in Christ is granted out of the sheer grace of God. It is received by faith as we repent of our sins and turn to Jesus. We confess him as Lord, and bow to him joyfully.”

The Gospel 1

“In Christianity, the gospel (Greek: εὐαγγέλιον, translit. euangélion; Old English: gōdspel; Latin: ēvangelium Latin pronunciation: [e.vanˈd͡ʒeː.li.um]), or the Good News, is the news of the coming of the Kingdom of God (Mark 1:14-15). The message of good news is described as a narrative in the four canonical gospels.

The message of good news is described as theology in many of the New Testament letters. It relates to the saving acts of God due to the work of Jesus on the cross and Jesus' resurrection from the dead which bring reconciliation ("atonement") between people and God. The apostle Paul's gospel is of Jesus's death on the cross and resurrection to restore people's relationship with God. It may also include the descent of the Holy Spirit upon believers and the second coming of Jesus. Paul gave the following summary (translated into English) of this good news (gospel) in one of his letters to Christians in the city of Corinth: Christian theology describes the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ not as a new concept, but one that has been foretold throughout the Old Testament and was prophetically preached even at the time of the fall of man as contained in Genesis 3:14–15,^[1] which has been called the "Proto-Evangelion" or "Proto-Gospel".^{[2][3][4][5]”}

^Wikipedia 

I think we can agree that Wikipedia is not necessarily a hotbed of extremely conservative Christian theology.   

I saw something

I was driving around today and saw a display of doors painted in the colors of the rainbow stating that “God’s door is open to all.”, and then I saw “.,.Realm of God being a welcoming place of grace for all”.


Clearly the problem with both of these is the word “all”.    Unless both sentences use the word “all” to mean something other than what “all” usually means, we have people advocating that God’s door is open to and God’s Realm (I love the dodging of the more common term “kingdom), welcoming to people like Donald Trump, Adolph Hitler and everyone else encompassed by the term “all”.  

This is something that I’ve seen before.   When we see the rubric “marriage equity for all”, and drill down, we find that “all” really means “some”.  

This is an example of wanting to seem more inclusive than one really is,

We’re told...

..,that the only way to determine anything about Jesus is to look at His words to the exclusion of anything else.    Or to look at anything other than Jesus words (and only in the Gospels) as secondary and of lesser value.

Yet we have extensive writings by Peter, James and John who were arguably the three people closest to Jesus during His earthly ministry.

This raises some questions when we look at what those sources say about why Jesus came.

When they say things that “disagree” with the “SJ” interpretation of why Jesus came, are they wrong?
Did they just not pay attention?
Were they too stupid to figure out the right answer?
Did they not pay attention?
Were they just determined to make up their own gospel, despite spending 3 years in close proximity to Jesus?
Did they decide to ignore Jesus?

Again I’ll probably add more later.

If?

If we reduce the gospel to the one dimensional amelioration of poverty, hunger, and sickness then we seemingly set a standard that is fraught with potential problems.

1.   It encourages a focus on charity which is being shown to be harmful to the recipients in many cases.
2. It puts the focus on; the helper, the helped, the government, and possibly God in that order?
3.  It puts the focus on competition for who can do the most “good works”.
4.  It completely ignores the spiritual in favor of the physical.
5.  It’s attempting to achieve an unachievable objective.
6.  Is it better to gain a subsistence level objective than to lose one’s soul?
7.  It places the helper in a position of power over the helped?
8.  It’s following a model that neither Jesus, nor the early church followed.

I’ll probably add to this as other things occur to me.  

I'm curious

When we talk about slavery in the history of the US, we never seem to be able to extend the responsibility/blame to the UK or to those Africans who captured and sold their own in the first place.   Certainly not intending to absolve anyone of an appropriate degree of responsibility, but just wondering why we ignore so much in order to blame America.