What is the Gospel? DNOW

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Excited to be here tonight.

I am excited to be here with you this weekend.

Introduction

Tonight, I want to start where everything starts in Christianity… The Gospel.

What I want to do is I want to take a bit of a dive into what the Gospel is, why it’s needed, how it happened, and what to do with it.

I think there are times where we, the leaders of the church, with the best of intentions have Gospel conversations with people or try to send out people to share about the truth of the Gospel before they even really know what it is.

Very simply, here is my goal tonight.

I want to share the Gospel in a way that will call you to action on it if you have never gotten saved.

I want to remind you of the truth of the Gospel so you renew your reverence for Christ.

And I want to empower you with the truth of what Jesus did and the revelation of the grace and mercy that God showed in orchestrating that plan.

Let’s Pray

God’s Perfect Design

In order to truly understand what the Gospel is, we must start from the beginning.

In Genesis 1, we walk through the story of creation.

God works for 6 days and creates everything that ever was, is, and is to come.

In this creation everything is perfect.

Read Genesis 1:31 “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

But that’s not how it stayed for long.

The Fall

God created Adam to work the grounds and created Eve to be Adam’s partner in the work.

He gave them free reign over all of creation but gave them one simple rule.

Read Genesis 2:16–17 “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.””

At this point, there was no pain, death, cancer, sin, sadness, anger, or anything bad.

Everything was perfect. More so than we could ever hope to imagine on this side of Heaven.

But of course, Satan couldn’t let it stay that way because he has to just mess everything up doesn’t he?

Eve was walking through the garden one day and here comes the serpent. Look at how he approaches things with Eve:

He starts with doubt.

In verse 1-5, Satan plants the seed of doubt in Eve’s mind.

He knows that if he can get her to start questioning what God has said, he has a chance to get her to sin.

He looks for things that are pressing, tempting, shiny, or stressful to attack.

And he is good at what he does and needs only a sliver of an opening to start to play his game.

He asks in Genesis 3:1 “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?””

Are you sure that is what He meant?

Let’s think about that for a second.

Surely He didn’t mean that for you right?

Once that seed of doubt is planted, he moves to deception.

Read Genesis 3:6 “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

He created the slight glimmer of doubt, and in that moment of questioning, started to create deception about who God was and what His intentions were.

Once Eve started to believe in Satan’s narrative over God’s command, breaking that one rule started to look delightful to her.

And once something starts to look delightful or attractive, we struggle to think about anything else right?

When deception gets to that point, disobedience is sure to follow.

Read Genesis 3:6 “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

Satan had his hooks in, it was too enticing to turn down, so she took the fruit and she ate it.

The moment that her teeth pierced the skin of the fruit, EVERYTHING changed.

The perfection of God’s design was no more.

Eve’s sin brought on Adam’s sin.

Eve’s sin also brought on your sin and my sin.

And into the world came, sin.

For a moment, I’m sure Satan thought he had won, but that was far from the truth.

Our Problem

As sin entered into the world, it brought upon each of us a sin nature.

Now let’s define sin so we understand what we are talking about here.

Sin is anything we do or don’t do that is not pleasing to the Lord.

Sin is of course lying, cheating, stealing, etc.

But sin is also choosing to be disobedient, choosing to not help someone that is truly in need, or choosing not to love someone like Jesus did.

Sin can be both an action and an inaction.

Sin has BROKEN our relationship with Christ.

Sin has SEPARATED us from God and living inside of His perfect will.

Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Now just so we understand, raise your hand if you fit into the category of ALL people.

Yes, we have all sinned.

Some are afraid to tell you that, but if we are going to be real with who we are and where we are, then we have to understand that we all have a sin problem.

And because of that sin problem, we have an eternity problem.

Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Sin is very much transactional.

Just like when a law is broken, there is a punishment to pay.

When we choose to sin, there is very much a punishment to pay.

And that punishment is death.

Before the fall, death didn’t exist.

After the fall, death became a guarantee for almost everyone.

For those of us that have sinned, death is very much a guarantee.

But the death being talked about here is more than just physical death.

The death here is eternal death or eternal separation from God.

Because of our sin that is all that we deserve.

And in our sin, we find our brokenness.

Brokenness

Our sin causes us to live in brokenness.

Our sin runs the same course that it did with Eve.

We doubt God’s Word.

Man that verse didn’t really apply to me.

Those things are for the strong Christians, I’m new to the faith so it’s ok if I mess up some.

God’ is bigger than my sin so He will just forgive me.

We are deceived into thinking that whatever those choices are are ok.

Hey if I only do it one time that’s ok.

Everyone else is doing it so it’s ok.

I won’t get caught.

Then, when satan has his hooks in us, we give into disobedience.

We choose to do the things that make us feel good or gain us favor or popularity with others.

We choose to fit in rather than stand out.

Our sin nature and our previous sins allow us to justify our problems.

Man I’ve always struggled with that so what’s one more time.

And then we start to accept our sins and other’s sins that look like ours.

But here is the worst part, in our brokenness we start a sin ripple.

Imagine walking up to a beautiful, peaceful lake up in the mountains.

The surface of the water is still and the water is crystal clear.

You look down and you see a rock sitting right beside your foot.

You are tempted to pick that rock up but you don’t want to upset the beauty of the water.

You wrestle with that choice.

Ultimately, you give in, pick the rock up, and throw it as far as you can.

It hits the water there is a splash at the point of impact and ripples start to flow the point where the rock entered the water.

The beauty and peace of the water has been upset.

Sin does the same thing.

It upsets the beauty and the peacefulness of the water.

But also, sin never acts alone.

Look back at the story of Adam and Eve.

Read Genesis 3:6 “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

Eve sinned in the moment she ate the fruit, but then Adam, who was also there chose to sin too.

Now just for a moment let’s dive into this.

Adam sinned because he also ate from the fruit He was commanded to.

So, the first ripple was Adam’s sin.

Read Genesis 3:8 “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.”

The second ripple was that they chose to try to hid themselves from the presence of the Lord.

At this point, what reason did they have to hide themselves?

God created them.

God provided the absolute perfect situation to live in.

God dwelled among them.

Because of their sin, they try to remove themselves or hide themselves from the presence of God.

But that wasn’t the last ripple either.

Read Genesis 3:10 “And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.””

Not only that, when God asked where they were they responded that they had fear.

Never before had anyone known fear, but in that moment, because they sinned they feared.

Then they admitted their nakedness.

Never before had they known of their nakedness, but their sin led to that knowledge.

Read Genesis 3:12 “The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.””

The Adam chooses to blame Eve for causing him to sin instead of taking ownership of his choice.

Read Genesis 3:13 “Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.””

Then Eve blames the serpent instead of herself for her choice.

And as you continue to read the rest of Genesis 3, you see more and more ripples.

When we choose to sin, there is always a sin ripple.

We have to hide our choice.

We tempt someone else to sin.

It pushes us further from God.

We have to lie about it.

And likely, even if we tell ourselves that it’ll just happen once, it’ll happen again which exponentially multiplies the ripples.

Because of our sin nature, we not only thrown one rock into the perfectly peaceful lake I just mentioned, we continuously throw rock after rock after rock into the lake such that we have no hope that the surface of the water will ever become peaceful and still again.

But God…

Hope in The Gospel

You may be saying, that’s a pretty rough picture you are painting there and you are right.

And I want you to understand that what I have described to you is the worst thing that I can ever hope to explain to you.

You are born into a situation where the only outcome within yourself is hell and eternity apart from God.

That’s it.

But that isn’t the end of the story.

Because that isn’t where God stopped.

He didn’t just watch Adam and Eve sin, kick them out of the garden and then hit the reset button.

Read Romans 5:8 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Read John 3:16 ““For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Read Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Read 1 Peter 3:18 “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,”

God didn’t leave us to just die for eternity.

No God loves us far more than that.

God love us so much He sent His only Son to die for us.

His son was the only righteous one, who knew no sin.

He son was perfect and blameless, but yet he took on the weight of all of the sin of the world past, present, and future when he died nailed to that cross.

And because of that sacrifice, because of the death in the flesh that day, God made a way for us to also conquer death.

For all we deserved was death, but God, in His grace and mercy gave us the free gift of eternal life with Him.

That is the Gospel.

That is the Good News.

Now how do you receive that gift?

Repent and Believe

It’s a simple three step process.

Step one, you must repent of your sins.

Read Mark 1:15 “and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.””

This is not a call to go back over every single sin you have created and ask for forgiveness for them.

This is a blanket repentance that is more a revelation of your sin and a condition of your heart.

It means that you are realizing the way that you have been living has not been pleasing to God and it’s asking for forgiveness so that you can be made clean by the blood of the cross and then approach God with this request for salvation.

Step two, you must believe in the Gospel.

You must understand and believe that the story of the Bible is true and that Jesus did in fact do everything that Scriptures tell us to.

I am a believer that at the moment of salvation, you need to be able to define sin, the need for salvation, through who you are saved, and what He did that made salvation possible.

But I want to caution you.

There are many preachers out there that stop here.

There are many preachers on you Instagram Reels in the pulpits of Mega-Churches that just tell you the repent and believe that’s all you have to do.

Let me share some of the words of the book of James, James 2:19 “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!”

Even the demons believe that Jesus is who He says He is and did what He said He did.

That’s the easy part.

As a matter of fact, the majority of the people that you talk to would tell you that they believe that to be true.

Both of those things are easy to do.

Of course I can ask God to forgive me for everything.

Of course I can believe Jesus died on the cross.

But, it takes more than that.

Step three, you must surrender and submit your life to the Lordship of Jesus.

You must give up control of your actions, your future, your everything in order to walk in obedience to God.

Now that is a scary thing to think about isn’t it?

But listen, we are talking about walking in obedience to the God, whom by just His words, created all things.

The God who has proven time and time again to be gracious, merciful, and loving.

The God who has known what was going to happen in every situation before it ever happened.

We aren’t talking about aligning yourself with a political party, sports team, or random belief system.

Submitting to God means that you are submitting yourself to the author the everything.

Submitting yourself to the Lordship of Jesus Christ means you are submitting to the one who conquered death.

Submitting the Holy Spirit’s indwelling into your hear means you are taking guidance from the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to be with you always to the end of the age.

You aren’t submitting to something flawed, you are submitting to perfection.

And look at what Romans 10:13 says, “For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.””

Everyone who submits in this way and calls upon Jesus to be their savior will be saved.

When you truly, authentically, make that choice, no one is turned away no matter what you bring to the table.

Conclusion

The Gospel is the Good News of what Jesus did in the grace and mercy of God.

And the Gospel is the foundation of everything in Christianity.

If it were not true, then the Bible would be a nice story book.

But I know that it is absolutely true.

I know what life was like as a lost person with no hope for eternity.

I know what life is like as a follower of Jesus Christ with a God who cares for me deeply and personally and meets my every need in a way that I never deserve.

In order become a Christian, you must understand and respond to the Gospel.

In order to grow in Christ, you must understand and respond to the Gospel.

In order to share about Christ, you must understand and respond to the Gospel.

It’s the lifeblood of everything we do in Christianity.

And here tonight, at this very DNow, the Gospel is available to each of your to wrestle with in whatever way God is leading you to.

Share the Gospel

Call for a response to reflect on the truth of Gospel.

Pray