The 3 Circles: What?

Introduction

The feeling that tugged at my heart was nothing less than betrayal. The year was 2013. I was sitting in evangelism class as I was preparing to go into ministry. The professor was teaching about how to explain the gospel to someone who had never heard it before. Then, he showed us a simple illustration that made it clear and concise for someone attempting to grasp for the very first time what Jesus did. But as he explained it and I wrote down on my paper exactly how he showed us to explain it, I wasn’t feeling intrigued by the concept. I wasn’t feeling bored. I enjoyed the class. Rather, I felt like I had been betrayed. You’re wondering, why would you feel betrayed about that? Why would you feel betrayed in that moment? I had been raised in the church. I had confessed of my sin and professed my faith in Jesus Christ when I was six years old. But there I was 20 years later, and I had to go into a Master’s level degree program in order to learn how to easily, concisely, and effectively explain the gospel. The gospel is at the center of the Christian faith. If you remove the gospel from Christianity, it’s no longer, Christianity. In that moment, I could not believe that over 20 years, having attended 3 different churches, and having lots of Christian friends, I felt like I had been betrayed. And in that moment, I made a commitment to sharing a basic way to explain the gospel. Something so very basic that even I couldn’t forget part of it or mess it up. What about you? If this afternoon, an unbeliever came to you and asked what Christianity is all about, how would you explain it to them? You might say that you’d simply tell them your testimony. You’d share about what Christ meant to you and what he has done in your life. Well, that’s great, but there’s a difference between the story of your faith and the Gospel. Sharing our testimony is good. It’s engaging, and it helps show how you’d experienced the Gospel. But it, in and of itself, isn’t the Gospel. The Gospel is the central truth of Christianity about, well, Christ.

But explaining the gospel is not just for unbelievers. After all, it’s easy for us to forget. So easy that we also need to remind ourselves of the basic truth of the gospel. Today we’re starting a three part series that I’m simply calling the 3 circles. In this we’re going to look at a basic way to explain the gospel. Each Sunday will be a basic question. What? How? And who? Paul tells the Corinthians in verse 3 that he delivered what he first received. Well, around here, we talk about delivering to others what we first received. But why is it that we’ve had two professions of faith in two and a half years? Perhaps the hardest part may be simply understanding, what is the Gospel? After all, we hear the phrase, Gospel, used all the time. There’s Gospel music. There’s the social gospel. There’s a partial gospel. Today, next week, and the week after, we’re talking about the what, the how, and the who of the Gospel.

Creation

God says in Genesis 1:26-27, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The Gospel begins with God. The Gospel begins with the design that God created at the beginning of the world. God created male and female in the image of God. This is commonly referred to as the Imago Dei. Six times throughout Genesis chapter one, God looks at what he has made and says that it is good. But then we get to humans and things change. God looks at man and woman, and he declares them to be very good. When we see brokenness in the world, when we see aspects of this world that aren’t right. When we see Russia invading Ukraine or a gunman killing at an elementary school, we inherently know that this isn’t the way it was supposed to be. Something is wrong here. Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Creation itself reflects the one who created it, the one who created it very good.

Did you know that there are other creation accounts out there? I’m not talking about evolution, I mean other accounts of “gods” creating the world? Tremper Longman shares about how we can contrast the creation of the first man in Genesis 2 with the creation of the first human beings according to Mesopotamian tradition. Thousands of years ago, Mesopotamia was a collection of city-states that were located here Kuwait and Iraq are today. In both the Genesis 2 account and the Mesopotamian account, they start with dust or clay. Immediately after that the accounts begin to vary. In the Mesopotamian creation account, which is called Enuma Elish, humanity’s dust is mixed with the blood of a demon god who was killed for his treachery against the second generation of gods. Humans are demons from the time they’re born. According to the ancient author, Atrahasis, the second ingredient is the spit of the gods. The creation process according to Mesopotamian tradition fits well with the overall low view of humanity professed by that culture. According to Atrahasis, humans were created with the express purpose of relieving the lesser gods from the arduous labor of digging irrigation ditches. Contrast this with the biblical account in Genesis that teaches that human beings, male and female, were created in the image of God to have dominion and to rule over every living thing that has the breath of life in it. In terms of sharing the Gospel, the point is that God created humans very good. God created us in his Image. The first part of the gospel is the design of God, which was very good.

Fall

International Business Times reported in August of 2012, that vacationers at the beach in Terracina, Italy were shocked when a car pulled up next to a man who had just left the water and shot him multiple times. The man was Gaetano Marino, leader of the Camorra crime family. He was known as “Stumpy” because his hands had been blown off nearly twenty years previous when a bomb he was attempting to set for someone else went off prematurely. Police said they believed the killing was part of a struggle for control of the cocaine business between rival mob factions. Marino was part of a “family business” that placed him on the path that resulted in his death. When we set out on a course of action, there are consequences. Many get in trouble when they are influenced by people who put them on the wrong path. Though they never intend to end up in great danger, they begin walking an evil road, which always results in destruction in the end. Each one of us starts out in need of a rescue from the path we start on. Paul says in Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” A few chapters later he says, “for the wages of sin is death.”

So God made us every good, and then, everything falls apart. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the one tree they weren’t allowed to eat from. Paul summarizes this well in Romans 3:10-18, where he says that, “as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” That’s a fun passage, isn’t it? The early church father, Augustine says it like this, “Sin comes when we take a perfectly natural desire or longing or ambition and try desperately to fulfill it without God. Not only is it sin, it is a perverse distortion of the image of the Creator in us. All these good things, and all our security, are rightly found only and completely in him." Adam and Eve took a natural desire, the desire to eat, and they fulfilled it by setting aside what God said, and we’ve been feeling the consequences to this day. Our Westminster Shorter Catechism Question 14 says, “what is sin?” The answer is, “sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.” Sin is separation from God, and it occurs anytime we do, say, or think something that we should not have done, or we don’t do, say, or think something that we should have done. Sin separates us from God. However, our sin also points to how great of a God we have. One of our greatest barriers to understanding who God is, and his great work, is understanding the depth of our sin. For Adam and Eve, when they ate of the fruit, they died spiritually, and they started to die physically. Today, each one of has a death sentence, which is why the second part of the gospel is that we are all sinners from birth in need of a savior.

The Cross

Paul writes starting in verse three of 1 Corinthians 15, “for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” We were created very good, in the image of Almighty God. And then, we stumbled into sin. Therefore, each one of us are born in need of a Savior, which is nothing that we could provide or get for ourselves. Rather, God sent one to us. Christ came. Christ died. Christ rescued us from our sins, and now he reigns within our hearts and within our church forever.

Carl Medearis shares about a visit to a missions school at a large church in Waco, Texas. He decided to try a similar test in a class-sized proportion. “Tell me,” he said to the group, “what is the gospel?” A young lady raised her hand. “The free gift of God.” “Good,” he said. He went to the chalkboard and wrote gift from God. “Somebody else?” “Freedom from sin,” a man called out. “Eternal life,” said another. “Keep going,” Carl encouraged them as he stayed busy at the chalkboard listing the items as they came in. Items such as freedom. Righteousness. Moral purity. Grace. Unconditional love. Healing and deliverance. Redemption. Faith in God. New life. After five minutes or so, the chalkboard was filled with a list of things that were believed to be the gospel. “Excellent,” Carl said. “Did we miss anything?” The room was silent for a minute. he could see heads turning. I could hear pages rustling. Everybody seemed to think there was something significant missing, but nobody wanted to volunteer to name the missing item. Finally, after the second minute of silence, a girl near the front raised her hand and asked, “how come none of us mentioned Jesus?” The silence of an “oops” filled the room. “Exactly,” Carl said. They closed the session and went to a break. Point made. The Gospel is the work of Jesus sent by the Father to die and raise again for sins, applied in lives by the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

To recap, God created each one of us very good, in the Image of God. But then sin entered the world, which is why we see so much suffering, death, and pain in the world. Then Jesus was sent by the Father to die and raise again for sins, and his work on the Cross is applied in our lives by the Holy Spirit. That’s it. That’s the “what” of what we believe. It’s the message that Paul delivers on his many missionary journeys in the Bible, and what we are to deliver to those around us who don’t know Christ.

A pastor was passing a big department store. Knowing the owner, he followed a sudden impulse to go in and talk to the owner about salvation. Finding him, he said: “I’ve talked beds and carpets and bookcases with you, but I’ve never talked my business with you. Would you give me a few minutes to do so?” Curious, the business owner led him into the private office, and the minister took out his New Testament and showed him passage after passage that showed his need to accept Jesus Christ. Finally the tears began to roll down his cheeks, and he said to the pastor: “I’m seventy years of age. I was born in this city, and more than a hundred ministers, and more than five hundred church officers have known me as you have, to do business with, but in all these years you are the only man who ever spoke to me about my soul.”

I sat in that classroom in 2013 feeling betrayed. Wondering how I could possibly have gone over twenty years in the faith without ever having been taught how to explain the gospel in a clear, simple way to people. Today we’ve talked about the what of the Gospel. Next week, we’ll talk about the how. After all, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:3, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” Let’s follow Paul’s lead as we learn the what, the how, and the who of the gospel.