The gospel is rich truth that stirs deep love—or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Yet, as Ray Ortlund frames the conundrum in The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ, there is a deep disconnect in our churches between what we believe about the gospel and how we live out that gospel.
Ortlund’s recent contribution to the 9Marks Building Healthy Churches series is not a display of the doctrine of salvation. Greg Gilbert already did that well in What Is the Gospel? This book portrays how the beauty of Christ transforms the bride of Christ so that gospel doctrine creates a gospel culture.
The Gospel asks incisive questions that stimulate clear, well-constructed responses. Ortlund’s methodology is expositional. Each of the seven chapters illumines gospel implications of a key text (John 3:16; Eph. 5:25; Rev. 21:5; 1 Tim. 3:14–15; Gal. 2:14; 2 Cor. 2:15–16; Rev. 14:4). With the unpacking of each passage, truth exhorts us toward practice.
In the first three chapters, Ortlund, pastor of Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee, addresses three levels of gospel transformation: individuals, churches, and all creation. The final four flesh out the gospel transformation process. Gospel transformation is a counter-cultural, challenging, sacrificial, powerful, and beautiful process.
Gospel Disconnect
From the onset of The Gospel, Ortlund does not skirt the main dilemma: “A church with the truth of the gospel in its theology can produce the opposite of the gospel in its practice” (17). This problem grieves the church’s bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and it should grieve us too. The world observes the church and evaluates the validity of her gospel claim by the validity of the gospel love within her community. Do we measure up?
The Gospel: How the Church Portrays the Beauty of Christ
Ray Ortlund
According to David Kinnaman’s book UnChristian, 85 percent of young non-Christians perceive Christianity to be hypocritical. In other words, Ortlund’s observation of this gospel disconnect, then, is the widely held perception of outsiders looking at the Christian faith.
The only proper response, Ortlund asserts, is to cultivate gospel cultures that match gospel doctrine. The church must behave like it believes. Since the bride of God constantly falls short of the glory of God, however, the church must constantly be redirected and reconnected to the gospel of God. As Ortlund puts it, “The gospel is not the story of Christ loving a pure bride who loves him; it’s the story of his love for a whore who thinks he has nothing to offer and keeps giving herself to others” (45). Every local church needs Christ’s cleansing and must be given afresh to the exclusive love of Christ. The disconnect must be reconciled.
Gospel Culture Challenge
But to reconcile the gospel disconnect requires overcoming the hurdle of fostering an authentic gospel culture. Ortlund identifies a number of obstacles to a genuine gospel community: selfishness, outright disobedience, and tradition rise to the top of the list. You’ll want to be familiar with these and look for signs of their presence in your church’s culture. Ortlund also provides a helpful list of questions on page 84 to provide a pulse check.
A church that has gospel doctrine but lacks gospel culture is hypocritical, Ortlund observes, while a church with gospel culture but not gospel doctrine is fragile. One that expresses both, however, has power. That’s the kind of community we want to become and reproduce.
This means a church must check its doctrine; after all, if gospel doctrine is wrong, gospel culture will not blossom. “Not even gospel words were expected to work in automatic ways,” Ortlund observes (105). This is perceptive, for it’s possible some churches jump on the bandwagon because they think certain catchphrases will automatically produce gospel culture. But true adherence to gospel doctrine involves a countercultural perspective characterized by God’s power and not the wisdom of the world’s pragmatics.
Thus we must throw ourselves humbly before the Lord, turning to real transcendent power. The church must look outside of herself to God’s power. This kind of power—real power—comes from the transforming beauty of Christ. When Christ is altogether lovely, the Puritan John Flavel remarked, his bride takes after his loveliness: “He chooses us, not because we were, but in order that he might make us lovely.”
The Gospel trains churches to read and rewrite their cultures to being in step with the good news of Jesus. The book may be comforting or discomforting to read, but it will not lead you astray.