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We Preach Christ Crucified: The Danger of Placing Your Faith in Strategic Planning and Ministry Trends

1 Corinthians 15:1-19

Listen as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of church issues from 1 Corinthians 15:1-19 in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.


While you’re looking it up, before I actually read the passage, I’m going to take a couple of minutes to fill in some things that fall out of what I said this morning. What I said this morning could easily have been followed up by five or ten hours on practical helps that are now available for people who want to do evangelism with biblically illiterate people. So let me give you at least a few hints here and there of some things that are available.

A tool that I’ve used for quite some years is “Two Ways to Live.” I adapt it a wee bit. It comes out of Australia, and it’s published by Matthias Media. If you go to the Matthias Media website you’ll find it. It looks very simple. Ideally, when they use it themselves, they train people so that it takes about half an hour to use it; it fills in and fleshes out a wee bit. You can find out a lot more about that entire pattern of training people to evangelize through the whole Bible storyline in six big steps through that tool.

Another one that is used quite extensively (although, in my view, even it still presupposes that people know more than is commonly the case) was developed at All Souls, Langham Place, London. It’s called “Christianity Explored” and was developed by Rico Tice. If you search “Rico Tice” or “Christianity Explored” you’ll be able to find it pretty well. That’s not a bad tool to use.

There are other patterns that have been developed and modified over the years. Some of you will be aware that one of the greatest English-language preachers in the twentieth century was Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I heard him many times, but his style was definitely of a certain period. He took eight years to get through the first eight chapters of Romans. Most of us who tried that would be boring for about seven and three-quarters of the eight years, but he could make it live all the way through.

On the other hand, I have also heard people go through the first eight chapters of Romans, evangelistically, in six to eight sessions. So you’re getting people into the Bible, but when you stop and think what they’re getting, after a general declaration of the love of God and the gospel, then there is this profound analysis of what sin is and the nature of the wrath of God for both Jew and Gentile.

Ultimately, in chapter 3, there is one of the most moving passages in all of the New Testament on the nature of the cross, in which God sacrifices Christ so as to be just and the one who justifies ungodly people. Chapter 4 stresses the exclusive nature of faith. Chapter 5, then, builds on the fact that we have been justified, what it means, and how is spells out.

By the time you get to chapter 8, we have the gift of the Holy Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance in anticipation of the new heaven and the new earth. The whole creation is groaning in travail, waiting for the ultimate adoption of sons. Meanwhile, we press on, and if we’re slaughtered as sheep, what difference does it make? Who can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord?

There’s a whole worldview in all of this. There’s a vision. There’s a comprehensiveness so that in one book you can summarize the whole of the gospel with detailed expository preaching. I’ve seen preachers do that with chunks of Luke and Matthew and John and Mark. It can be done. I’ve done it with chunks of the Apocalypse too.

I strongly urge those of you who are preachers to figure out how to do this more and more and more: build evangelism into your sermon, not by thinking of the gospel as something really small but by nestling it into the sweep of the storyline throughout all of Scripture.

In university missions, I’ve never put all of these together. Depending on how many sessions they give me, I try to go through huge chunks of the Bible. Next year, if the Lord gives me enough birthdays and other support, I want to go through, in an evangelistic setting of 14 sessions (it’s a special circumstance), the whole of the Bible. In each case, I will be dealing with a particular text, but then running right through.

The first is The God Who Makes Everything, Genesis 1 and 2. The second is The God Who Does Not Wipe Out Rebels, Genesis 3. The next one is The God Who Writes His Own Agreements, the Abrahamic covenant. (But in an evangelistic setting you don’t call it the Abrahamic covenant.) The next one is The God Who Legislates, the Ten Commandments and chunks of Leviticus.

You keep working through the whole Bible until you eventually get The God Who Becomes a Human Being, which is John 1, and The God Who Declares the Guilty Just. The final two, ultimately, are The God Who is Very Angry and The God Who Triumphs.

If you put that together into a sequence, each dealing with a text, they are getting more and more and more of the storyline. I think that most of us, as preachers dealing with increasing numbers of people coming to our churches who are remarkable biblically illiterate, need to commit ourselves to finding what resources like that are out there, adapting them, developing them, and so forth.

Colin Smith, who is pastor of The Orchard Evangelical Free Church in suburban Chicago, went through the whole Bible in a couple of years like that. It was more than evangelistic, but eventually those sermons came out in four volumes from Moody Press. He is broadly in the Reformed tradition as well. Those books have been of help to many people and a stimulus to think about these things.

If you are looking for a book to give to well-read skeptics who are pretty deeply committed skeptics, the one I’m now going to start recommending is just off the press. It’s by my dear friend Tim Keller and is called The Reason for God. He sent me an advance copy, and I’ve read it and passed it onto two or three others. It will be out in a week or two. You’ll be able to get it in bookshops or on Amazon.

Somebody has already commented, rather shrewdly, “This is a book for skeptics and for those who love them.” Isn’t that a great encomium? So get it, read it, and then figure out to whom to give it. Again, it’s called The Reason for God, by Tim Keller. Now let us turn, this evening, to 1 Corinthians 15. I’ll read the first 19 verses.

“Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance:

Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.

But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Today there are a lot of competing views about what the gospel is. There are many people who think of the gospel as a kind of stripped-down, simplified version of what the Bible says that gets people into the kingdom. Once people are into the kingdom, then you start the really big, life-transforming business: discipleship. Then you start training people to be decent American citizens and godly people. This is when you start getting out your Bible studies and so on.

In this view, the gospel is not itself the power of God; the gospel is the good news that flips you out of a destination to hell into a destination to heaven. If you can just believe Christ, that Christ died for your sins and so on, then that’s the gospel. After that, real discipleship starts. That view is profoundly popular all over the Western world, and it is profoundly mistaken. It is so bad and does such an enormous amount of damage that it needs to be challenged again and again.

There are other false views of the gospel around. Some people view the first and second commandment (“to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength and their neighbor as themselves”) as the gospel. You get those two right, and you have the gospel. Well, those two commandments are important. Jesus says so. They are the two most important, but they’re not the gospel. He doesn’t say that. In fact, you could argue that they are the most powerful ways of showing us our need of the gospel, but they’re not the gospel. They don’t save anybody.

What I want to do, in this session, is focus on these verses, as well as a few further on, to show how Paul is interested in articulating the gospel as, he says, “a matter of first importance.” That’s what he calls what he’s about to do. These are the matters of first importance.

You’ll recall that last night, I said that one of the sad things pertaining to not a few in the emerging church movement is the focus on the periphery while they merely assume that which is central. If you focus your excitement on the periphery, then for your students or your parishioners or for the next generation, that becomes their center, and then the gospel itself can be weakened.

What Paul does instead is not sound prophetic on the margins; he is prophetic from the center. For him, the center is what he calls the matters of first importance, and it is all gospel related. That’s what I want you to see here. Do you see how he begins? Verse 1: “Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you.” Verse 2: “By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.”

Then he goes on and says that he had passed on to them the matters of first importance, a rhetorically powerful way of telling his readers to pay attention, listen up, and make sure they get the most important things right. As soon as they preparatory remarks are completed, the first word that appears is Christ, and he plunges right into what he understands the gospel to be.

What I want to do, then, this evening, is to outline that gospel for you in eight words, five sentences, and an eclectic summary. Now they’re all of different lengths. Don’t be discouraged; it’s not that long: just eight words, five sentences, and a summary at the end.

1. The gospel is christological.

The first word is Christ. It’s the first word that shows up after the introduction. The gospel is Christ-centered. The gospel is christological. Paul says, “As a matter of first importance, Christ died for our sins.” In other words, the gospel is not bland theism: belief in the existence of God. All kinds of people believe that; the Devil himself can believe that. So can Buddhists, ancient Greeks, Muslims, and so on. The gospel is not bland theism.

Nor is it impersonal pantheism: the belief that God and the universe are all part of the same reality. No, in the whole of the New Testament, again and again, we discover how absolutely central Christ is to understanding any of the biblical documents. Begin with Matthew. Already Christ is presented, in the first two chapters, as Immanuel, God with us.

He is given the name Jesus, Yahweh saves, for he will save his people from their sins. He’s the long-promised Davidic king who will bring in the kingdom of God. By his death and resurrection, he becomes the mediatorial monarch: the king who mediates all of God’s sovereignty to us. He insists, at the end, that all authority in heaven and on earth is his. It’s his.

In John, Jesus alone is the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through him. In the sermons in Acts, there is no name but Jesus given under heaven by which we must be saved. In Romans and Galatians and Ephesians, Jesus himself is the last Adam, the one to whom the Law and the Prophets bear witness, the one who by God’s own design turns aside the Father’s wrath and reconciles Jews and Gentiles to his heavenly Father and to each other.

In the great vision of Revelation 4 and 5, the Son alone, who comes from the throne, is able to take the scroll in the Almighty’s hand and break the seals. In the symbolism of the day, that means that he alone is able to bring about all of God’s purposes for judgment and blessing. Only the Son can do all of that. I could work on and on through the books of the New Testament.

As someone has well said, the gospel is not preached if Christ is not preached. The gospel is christological. Yet this christological stance does not focus exclusively on Christ’s person but on his death as well. “As a matter of first importance,” the text says, “Christ died for our sins.” Earlier in this letter, in chapter 2, verse 2, Paul says, “I resolve to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ …” Period? No, of course not.

He says, “I resolve to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” Here, in this chapter, Paul clearly ties Jesus’ death to his resurrection. This is the gospel of Christ crucified and risen again. In other words, it’s not enough to make a splash of Christmas and forget Good Friday and Easter. It won’t do.

People who talk endlessly about being intimate with Jesus, how Jesus is leading them, how Jesus is their friend, how Jesus guides them, and how precious Jesus is to them … yet none of it anywhere is tied to his death and resurrection … don’t have a clue what the gospel is. That’s just “God talk.” It’s cipher talk. There’s no gospel anywhere.

The gospel that Paul preaches as a matter of first importance is christological in this sense. Christ is never seen as a cipher, a God-man who comes along and helps us like a nice insurance agent: Jesus is a nice God-man; he’s a very nice God-man; he’s a very, very nice God-man, and when you break down, he comes along and helps you. That’s not the gospel. The gospel is christological in a more robust sense: Jesus is the promised Messiah who died and rose again.

2. The gospel is theological.

It’s God-centered. That’s a shorthand way of saying two things. The first one is very obvious; the second one needs unpacking.

A) As 1 Corinthians makes clear, as in verse 15, God raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

As the whole New Testament makes clear, God sent his Son to be our Savior. It’s not that the Father and Son are at odds on this, the Father wanting to condemn us all to hell and Jesus saying, “Whoops! No way. I want to save them.” This is the Father’s plan.

The gospel is theological, God-centered, every bit as much as it is Son-centered, Christ-centered. The Son comes to do his Father’s will. In Gethsemane, that is the issue for Christ, isn’t it? “Not my will, but yours be done.” That’s what takes him to the cross. So the cross and the resurrection are profoundly bound up not only with Christ but with the heavenly Father.

B) The text does not simply say that Christ died and rose again; it observes that Christ died for our sins.

It’s theological in that sense. In other words, the cross and resurrection are not nakedly historical events; they are historical events with the deepest theological freight that cannot be abstracted from the history.

I could take all the rest of the evening to unpack this one, but let me fill in just a wee bit of the Bible storyline in this regard. It’s astonishingly important. Let me come at it tangentially. What would you think of this as a summary of the gospel? This is very common today.

We’re made in the image of God. Regrettably, at the fall, we turned away in rebellion against God and incurred terrible loss and destruction. God, in his mercy, despite our self-destruction, has intruded himself, again and again, seeking to save that which was lost. For example, he comes along and chooses Abraham to start a whole new race. He comes through Moses to give his law and to provide an entire sacrificial system that teaches us something of substitution, the nature of death, and what holiness is. He speaks to us again and again through the prophets.

Ultimately, he comes to us in his own dear Son. Christ, by his death, conquers the Devil, beats back death itself, and already is reigning so that we are caught up into his reign as well and are already pushing back the frontiers of darkness in anticipation of the last day when Christ himself will return and there will be a new heaven and the new earth in resurrection existence. This will be the home of righteousness toward which we press, all brought about by Christ’s triumphant cross work and resurrection.

How am I doing? Do you like it? You know, repentance is the question. It’s deeper than that. This is very, very common. I’ve heard this summary again and again in the last few years from a lot of people who should know better. I’ll tell you what the problem is. There is no articulation in this summary of how the offense is, first and foremost, against God so that he stands over against us in wrath. In this entire summary, he stands over against us in love (which is true enough; the Bible says that clearly enough again and again).

However, there’s no sense in which what we must have, first and foremost, is God’s forgiveness. We become self-destructive (that is a biblical theme), but there’s no sense in which the thing that makes God angry in the Old Testament, from one end of the Old Testament to the other, is idolatry: the de-Godding of God.

David understands this. He commits sin with Bathsheba and then arranges to have her husband bumped off because Bathsheba is pregnant and he’s going to get caught out. When he’s finally confronted by the prophet Nathan and repents, he writes Psalm 51 and says (addressing God), “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”

At one level, that’s a lot of blarney. He has certainly sinned against Bathsheba. He has certainly sinned against Uriah the Hittite, her husband. He has sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb, who eventually dies. He has sinned against the military high command; he used them in order to bump off a foot soldier. He has sinned against his own family. He has sinned against the nation.

It’s very difficult to think of anybody that David didn’t sin against, yet he has the cheek to say, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.” In the most profound sense, he has it exactly right. What makes sin sin, what makes it so heinous, is not the sociological damage, the horizontal damage, but the offense it is before God.

When you cheat on your income tax, God is the most offended party. When you watch porn, God is the most offended party. When you’re nurturing bitterness, God is the most offended party. When you’re unkind to your spouse, God is the most offended party. When you are prayerless, God is the most offended party. He stands over against us in wrath. What can I say? The whole Bible teaches that.

So whatever else the cross does (and it does a lot of things, including defeating Satan and overcoming evil in all kinds of ways), what it also does is put aside God’s wrath and reconcile sinners to himself. Unless you see that, you don’t understand what lies at the very heart of the cross. Not even close. That is what is bound up in passage after passage with phrases such as “Christ died for our sins” because there’s already a biblical assumption about what sin is.

That’s why when John the Baptist, and then Jesus himself, begins by preaching the dawning of the kingdom of heaven (“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near”) in Matthew and Mark, repentance is necessary because the coming of the King promises judgment as well as blessing. You must see that the gospel brings judgment as well as blessing. It does.

The Sermon on the Mount, which encourages Jesus’ disciples to turn the other cheek, also warns them to flee the condemnation of the gehenna of fire. The sermon warns the hearers not to follow the road that leads to destruction and pictures Jesus pronouncing final judgment with the words, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” All those descriptions of hell … weeping and wailing, gnashing of teeth, worms that don’t die, everlasting darkness … all of those metaphors come from Jesus.

When, on the day of Pentecost, Peter preaches, “God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ,” this is every bit as much threat as a promise. If Jesus, whom they crucified, is Lord and Christ, then they must answer to him. That’s why the text says they were cut to the heart and cry, “What shall we do?” That’s when Peter says, “Repent and believe.”

When Peter preaches to Cornelius and his household in Acts 10, the climax of his moving address is that in fulfillment of Scripture, God appointed Jesus “as judge of the living and the dead,” which we saw again this morning when Paul was preaching in Athens too. That’s where he got to Christ as the final judge. “Those who believe in him receive forgiveness of sins through his name.” Transparently, that is what is essential if we’re to face the Judge and emerge unscathed. That’s the point of the gospel.

When Felix invites the apostle to speak “about faith in Christ Jesus” (Acts 24:24) … about the gospel.… Paul, we’re told, discourses on “righteousness, self-control, and judgment to come” (Acts 24:25). Apparently, such themes are an irreducible part of faithful gospel preaching. Small wonder, then, that we’re told that Felix was terrified (Acts 24:25). The question becomes.… When you preach the gospel, how many are terrified? If nobody is ever terrified when you preach the gospel, then you’re not preaching the gospel.

Paul insists that judgment takes place “on the day when God will judge everyone’s secrets through Jesus Christ as my gospel declares” (Romans 2:16). Where is judgment in your gospel? You can’t make sense of the cross unless you see that judgment is part of it. You cannot make sense of it.

Writing to the Thessalonians, Paul reminds us that Jesus rescues us from the coming wrath (1 Thessalonians 1:10). This Jesus will be “revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thessalonians 1:7–8).

It is absolutely everywhere. We await a Savior from heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ, and what this Savior saves us from, in the context of Philippians 3, is the destiny of destruction. In Ephesians 2, “Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath, for we gratified the cravings of our sinful nature, following its desires and thoughts, but now we’ve been saved by grace through faith.” This grace thus saves us both from sins and from the otherwise inevitable result: the wrath to come. And on and on and on. I’ve merely scratched the surface.

This nexus of themes.… God, sin, wrath, death, and judgment … is what makes the simple words of 1 Corinthians 15 so profoundly theological. “As a matter of first importance, Christ died for our sins.” Once you understand the background of what sins means against the Bible’s storyline, there simply is no other way of taking it. Christ, by his death, sets aside the wrath that otherwise would be ours.

Parallel texts instantly leap to mind. “Christ was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.” (Romans 4:25) “Christ died for the ungodly.” (Romans 5:6) “The Lord Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age.” (Galatians 1:4) “Christ died for our sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” (1 Peter 3:18) Or, as Paul puts it, right here, “By this grace, by this gospel, you are saved.”

Once you see this, you cannot fail to see that whatever else the cross achieves, it must rightly set aside God’s sentence. It must rightly satisfy God’s wrath, or it achieves nothing. The gospel is theological.

3. The gospel is biblical.

“Christ died for our sins,” we’re told, “according to the Scriptures. He was buried; he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures …” Paul does not say here what biblical text he has in mind.

He may have had in mind the kind of thing that Jesus himself taught after his resurrection, according to Luke 24, when he explained to his followers what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. It’s a wonderful thought. Perhaps he was thinking of texts such as Psalm 16 and Isaiah 53, used by Peter on the day of Pentecost, or Psalm 2, used by Paul himself in Pisidian Antioch. I don’t know.

He may have been thinking of the Bible’s whole storyline, with the institutional sacrifices of the Old Testament, the Passover, because in 1 Corinthians 5, he’s already said, “Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us.” He may have been thinking of the kinds of categories you find in the epistle to the Hebrews. There was a Day of Atonement in the Old Testament, but Christ is now the ultimate Day of Atonement: he himself shed his blood, not now the blood of bull and goat, which can finally never clean anything.

Paul may have been thinking of passages like that. What is clear is that Paul does not see the gospel as just bound up in nice little stories about Jesus. It’s nestled within the framework of the entire God-given biblical revelation or else it doesn’t make sense. It’s just mystical claptrap, God-talk. In that sense, the gospel is biblical.

4. The gospel is apostolic.

Of course, Paul cheerfully insists that there were more than 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. He even goes so far to say, “If you want to check them out, there are quite a few still alive.” It’s only about 20 to 24 years later when he writes this. He says, “If you want to check them out, go see. Some are dead, but go and talk to the others.”

In particular, he draws attention to the apostles. He says in verse 5, “… he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.” Then to those connected with the apostles: “Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles …” (Verse 7) “… and last of all he appeared to me … the least of the apostles.” Listen to his summary in verse 11. “Whether, then, it was I [an apostle] or they [the other apostles], this is what we [the apostles] preach, and this is what you believed.”

Iwethey. This is what you believed. The sequence of pronouns becomes a powerful way of connecting the witness and teaching of the apostles with the faith of all subsequent Christians. It is in that sense that the gospel is apostolic. The access we have to the apostolic teaching is precisely through the apostolic writings. That’s why we go back to the New Testament.

5. The gospel is historical.

Several things must be said here. First Corinthians specifies both Jesus’ death and his resurrection. In fact, in between, it actually stipulates his burial. The burial testifies to Jesus’ death (normally, you don’t bury people still alive) and the appearances testify to Jesus’ resurrection.

Jesus’ death and resurrection are tied together in history. The one who is crucified is the one who is resurrected. The body that came out of the tomb was the one that went into the tomb. You can see that by the scars that Thomas looks for. Jesus’ body, no doubt, was transfigured. It was transformed.

It was resurrected. It was changed. Yet, it had the telltale wounds. There was connection. The tomb was empty. “This resurrection took place on the third day,” we’re told. It was in datable sequence from the death. The cross and resurrection are irrefragably tied together, and they are historically grounded.

Some of you will know the name Carl F.H. Henry. He was the founding editor of Christianity Today when that was a great journal. On one occasion, he was in New York City with a lot of other journalists interviewing Karl Barth, who was a Swiss theologian who had come over to give some lectures. Barth, at that point, was a very big name that everybody knew.

Carl Henry asked Barth in the Q&A, “My name is Carl Henry. I’m editor of Christianity Today. Do you understand the resurrection of Jesus to be the kind of event which, if it had taken place today, would have been newsworthy by ordinary news reporters? Or to put it differently, would there have been anything to capture on film?”

Barth said, “Did you say Christianity Today or Christianity Yesterday?” Henry said, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever,” and sat down. But this becomes an interesting question now. What do we mean by saying that it happened? Did it happen in history? It is important to understand something of the relationship between faith and history.

Supposing (I don’t know how; I have no idea how) you could prove that Gautama the Buddha never lived. I don’t know how you could do that, but supposing you could, would you destroy Buddhism? Oh, no, of course not. The credibility of Buddhism depends, as a philosophical and traditional system, on its coherence, on its cultural acceptability. It does not depend absolutely on any discrete historical claim connected with the figure of Gautama the Buddha. You could remove him, and you would still have Buddhism.

So now you go to India. Suppose you could prove (I don’t know how; I can’t imagine how) that the great Hindu god Krishna never lived. Would you destroy Hinduism? No, of course not. In Hinduism, everything is bound up into one reality … good and bad, material and spirit … all in one big karmic system where you rise and fall in successive cycles of incarnation and so on.

There are millions of gods, literally, in this very complex universe. If you pulled out one of them, well, you can go down the street to a Shiva temple instead. There is nothing in Hinduism that finally depends, absolutely, on the historical existence of any particular god or any particular historical claim in the Bhagavad Gita, the most important of their scriptures.

Now you go down the street to your friendly neighborhood imam, and you want to know something about Islam. You ask the question very carefully, not because you’re in any danger (don’t misunderstand me) but because you want to make sure you’re understood. “Sir, do you think that Allah, had he chosen to do so, could have given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad?”

Probably initially, the question will be misunderstood, even if you’ve taken great pains to word it aright. Probably, he will say, “No, no, no, you don’t understand. We believe that Abraham was a great prophet and Moses was a great prophet and Jesus was a great prophet, but the greatest and most final prophet of all was simply Muhammad.”

You reply, “Sir, I understand that’s what Islam teaches, and you will understand that as a Christian, I don’t see things quite that way. But that’s not my question. My question is: because you confess that Allah is sovereign, had he chosen to do so, could he have given his final revelation to somebody other than Muhammad? Does anything depend, finally, on Muhammad?”

Once the imam has understood your question, he will quite certainly say, “No, of course not. Allah is Allah. Allah, blessed be he, is sovereign. He gives his gifts as he pleases. Nothing in Muhammad is the revelation. We believe that he received the revelation and communicated it, but there is nothing intrinsic to the person of Muhammad that attracts God to give him the revelation. Allah is sovereign.”

So although it is important, historically, for the thoughtful Muslim to believe that, historically, Muhammad was the last and final prophet and the greatest of them, yet interestingly enough, there is no distinctive historical claim bound up with Muhammad himself that is non-negotiable for the whole revelation to fall to pieces.

Now you go to Pastor Byron Yawn, and you approach him with equal respect and care (because you don’t know what he’s going to do either). You say, “Pastor Yawn, could God have given his final revelation to anybody other than Jesus?” What is he going to say? He’s probably going to wonder what planet you’re from, but at the end of the day, what he’s going to say is, “The question doesn’t even make sense because Jesus is the revelation. It’s not that he receives a chunk of revelation; he is the revelation of God. He is God made flesh.”

You cannot separate the historical figure from the revelatory claim. You cannot do it. So if Jesus never existed, Christianity is finished. Done. Washed up. It’s not just Jesus as the incarnation of the eternal Son that is the historical claim, but if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, the whole thing washes up. Isn’t that what Paul says?

Some of these Corinthians believed, somehow, “Yeah, I guess Jesus must have risen from the dead,” but deep down, they don’t have a category for resurrection from the dead. Deep down, they don’t really believe in resurrection from the dead. It was hard for a lot of Greeks to come to terms with that because they thought, well, “Material is bad. Why would God want to bring anybody back from the dead? If you’re dead and are immortal, then that’s good. Why do you want to come back?”

But the Bible never says there’s something intrinsically bad with matter. We can corrupt matter the same way we can corrupt spirit, but ultimately, our hope is a resurrected existence with bodies. Jesus resurrected body could be touched and handled. He ate food! However spectacular his resurrected body was, and discontinuous with his pre-grave body in some sense, nevertheless, it was a body.

Now Paul says, “Listen. If you insist on saying that there is no resurrection from the dead, then not even Christ is risen from the dead. And if Christ is not risen from the dead, there is no Christianity. Your faith is in vain.”

Two or three years ago, the then Anglican archbishop of Perth in Western Australia was also, at the time, the primate of the Anglican Church in Australia. He was interviewed at Easter and was asked, “Supposing evidence was found that proved, really beyond any serious cavil, that they had discovered Jesus’ tomb and the tomb was full, and Jesus, with all the appropriate scars was still there somehow, in a mummified body or the like. If it was really Jesus’ body, what would that do to your faith?”

He replied, “It wouldn’t do anything to my faith. I believe that Jesus rose in my heart.” Paul’s perception is a little more robust. Sometimes, we sing such rubbish too. “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.” What a load of rubbish! I don’t want to deny that there is a sense in which we experience the resurrected power of Christ within us, but if you are grounding your faith in the resurrected Christ in your experience, then what you’re cutting it off from is the witness of history.

Paul does not write to the Corinthians and say, “Here’s the matter of first importance. You have experienced Christ resurrected in your heart. Whether his body, like John Brown’s, is still moldering in the grave doesn’t make any difference at all.” He says, “Don’t you see? There are witnesses. You can still go check them out. The tomb was empty. We saw him and touched him: in ones and twos and threes and sevens and twelves and five hundred on a hill in Galilee. “If Christ has not been risen,” he says, “your faith is still in vain.”

Most Muslims believe that Jesus didn’t even die on the cross. Some do, but most don’t. They think it was a switch. Some think it was Judas Iscariot that died, but there was some kind of switch. Jesus didn’t even die. That is not, first and foremost, a theological question. That’s a historical question.

Look at all of the historical evidence for Jesus’ death on the cross … forget the resurrection for a moment, just the death on the cross … not only Christian records (and they’re all within eyewitness memory), but even pagan records of this man Jesus who died on the cross. Over against that, you pit the putative revelation of somebody who comes along seven centuries later. That’s a historical question. It’s a historical question before it’s a theological question.

Likewise, in the domain of the resurrection, if Jesus has really died and risen again, it changes everything. We’re not offering a competing theological system that is abstract, ethereal, and non-testable in any sense, so whether you opt for Confucianism or Buddhism or Taoism or Shintoism or Islam or whatever, it doesn’t really make any difference. It’s just something abstracted from genuine reality. You may hold it very sincerely, but it’s abstracted from reality.

No, Christianity is announcing events which we claim took place in history. If they didn’t take place in history, walk away from Christianity. If they did, then God have mercy on your soul if you walk away from them when they actually happened, because they changed everything. That’s why Paul says, “Listen to this. This is crucially important. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you’re still in your sins.”

By that, he’s presupposing that everything else in the Bible is true: we’re lost, we’re standing guilty before God, and so on. If Christ has not been raised, we have no reason to believe, then, that his sacrifice has been accepted on our behalf or that we have resurrection life. So we’re just damned. We’re just condemned the way that the rest of the Bible insists.

But then Paul adds, “Your faith is futile. Your faith is in vain.” This is the South; I know that. There are more Christians around. But if you just walk on the streets of Nashville and ask ordinary blokes what is meant by faith, what will they say? If you ask them to define faith, “What do you think faith is?” what will they say?

Well, you might get some right answers here and there from people who go to decent churches, but let me tell you, you’re not going to get any right answers in the streets of Chicago and certainly not in New York. You might not get too many here either. Usually, what people mean by faith in Western culture is one of two things. Either faith is a synonym for religion: there are many religions, and there are many faiths. It’s just a synonym for religion.

Alternatively, faith is a personal, subjective religious decision or commitment. It has nothing to do with real truth or real reality. It’s truth for me. I commit myself to something. It’s a religious claim. It’s not tested by history or science or anything else. It’s a personal subjective religious commitment.

What Paul says is, “If the object of this faith is not true, the faith itself is futile.” Did you hear that? Now faith is more than believing the truth. I mean, the Devil himself believes the truth, but that doesn’t mean he has faith in a saving sense. Faith is more than simply believing truth, but it’s never, ever less.

Not once does the Bible use faith in this second sense that I just uncovered from the streets of Nashville. Occasionally, it means something like religion (rarely, but once in a while), but never does it mean personal subjective religious choice. It has a variety of nuances in the New Testament, depending on the context, but never does it mean that.

Here, Paul says (although he would also acknowledge that faith involves an element of trust and relying completely on faith’s object and so on; yes, that’s all true) that faith, whose object is not true, is invalid. So if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead when he didn’t, then it’s useless faith. In fact, he goes one step further and says, “You are of all people most to be pitied.”

Unlike the bishop of Perth, Paul doesn’t say, “Yes, but believing has transformed my life.” He says, “If you believe something that isn’t true, then quite frankly, your life is a joke. You’re just to be pitied.” That’s very strong language. That’s why, in the Bible, faith is strengthened by the articulation and defense of the truth. In the Bible, you don’t increase faith by simply saying, “Believe, believe, believe. It doesn’t matter whether there’s any evidence. Believe, believe, believe. Don’t ask questions. Just shut up and believe.” Never.

“ ‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord.” He gives evidence to Thomas. Paul actually lays out the historical witnesses here because the only access that you and I have to history is the access that anybody has to history: namely, witness. That’s why the witness theme is so important in the Bible. The first witnesses bore their testimony to the truth, and we’re invited to believe the truth.

I know we’re so blind and so stupid and so perverse that it takes the particularly illuminating work of the Holy Spirit to make us see that it’s the truth. I know all of that. Yet at the same time, the actual access that we have itself is witness to what happened in space-time history … attested by God in his Word, born into our mind, no doubt, by the Holy Spirit … yet, at the end of the day, a historical claim. Our faith depends on the validity of that historical claim. In other words, the gospel of God is historical.

There’s another way of clarifying this one. I’m spending more time on this one than all the rest of them put together because it’s so important in our generation. Let me get at this another way. At Trinity, where I teach, we have a seven-person New Testament department. Seven of us teach New Testament full-time plus three to seven part-timers (adjuncts, PhD students, and that sort of thing). It’s not uncommon for us to have to be finding somebody new to fill in when somebody has retired or gone off on a sabbatical. So we’re interviewing people pretty commonly.

A couple of years ago, we were interviewing someone who had a solid theological background, was genuinely confessional, and had pastored very fruitfully. He had preached the gospel for about 10 years, went off to Europe and did a PhD, and now was coming back and beginning to look for a teaching post.

In terms of the confessional things that he was saying and even the critical things (“Do you really believe that Paul wrote the Pastoral Epistles?” An awful lot of people don’t believe that anymore. Or “Do you really believe that Peter wrote 2 Peter?” A lot of people don’t believe that anymore. The list of all of the things that people don’t believe anymore because they’re scholars is really quite long!), he navigated all of those things quite safely and could give good reasons for them.

Somewhere along the line, we said, “Now supposing a student came to you and said, ‘I have some really difficult historical problems. I don’t see how Matthew and Mark quite fit together here.’ How do you handle this particular question?” We gave him two or three examples. “How do you fit together John and Luke in two or three places, for example? How do you handle that? What sort of approach do you take?”

He said, “Well, Matthew inevitably is looking at things from his perspective,” and he gave a kind of Matthean theology of his understanding of what took place. “Mark, Luke, and John do the same thing.” Well, in one sense, that’s true. We’re all perspectivalists. There are only two kinds of perspectivalists in the world: those who admit it and those who don’t. We’re finite, so, inevitably, we don’t see the whole thing. We only see a part. In one sense, Matthew sees a part, Mark sees a part, and so on. But that doesn’t quite address the question.

The question is, “How do you put them together in this particular place where their perspectives seem to conflict?” He came back with, “Well, I think that it’s important to unpack the Matthean theology as the Matthean theology is, the Markan theology as the Markan theology is, the Lukan theology as the Lukan theology is …” I pushed him very hard on this one, and he would never get beyond that point.

Because I’d known him for quite a few years and because I was flabbergasted at this, I confess that I said, “You will not join this department unless I’m dead or until you repent of such astonishing folly.” I finally got his attention. He wasn’t getting the hints! He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You are trying to save people by the ideas of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Even while you confess that those ideas are true, you’re not going to what those ideas refer. Those ideas are about Christ. It’s not Matthew’s ideas that save you. It’s Christ who saves you!

You must understand, although Matthew bears witness to Christ and it is important to make sure that you understand Matthew’s ideas and Matthew’s text as well as possible, at the end of the day, your defense so brackets out Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the historical Jesus to which they refer that you’re ducking the hard theological questions and ending up with a salvation by ideas instead of a salvation by Christ. You can’t do that!”

Mercifully, he saw it, and he backed off. He blanched, in fact. He said, “I just didn’t realize what I’d done here. This is terrible.” He was already teaching in another seminary. I told him to go back and teach there for five more years and then we’d look at him again. There are different ways of denying the historical claims that lie at the very heart of everything. We’re not just saved by ideas. The gospel is historical.

6. The gospel is personal.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are not merely historical events and theological events. It sets out the way of individual salvation. Remember how Paul begins in verses 1 and 2: “I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved.” It’s personal.

A historical gospel that is not personal and powerful is merely antiquarian. It’s interesting in history departments. That’s not the point here. At the end of the day, it’s personally believed, personally received, and it saves us personally and individually. It’s possible to argue for all the right things historically yet still not actually trust Christ and still not actually be saved. In reality, the gospel is personal.

7. The gospel is universal.

If we go a little further into 1 Corinthians, we find Paul demonstrating that Christ is the new Adam (verse 22, verses 47 to 49). Paul doesn’t develop this the way he does in Romans; nevertheless, if Christ is the new Adam, this is a comprehensive vision. The new humanity in the new Adam draws in people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation. In that sense, the gospel is universal.

It’s not universal in the sense that absolutely everybody will be saved. Paul himself says much too much against that. On the other hand, this gospel is gloriously universal in its comprehensive sweep. There is no trace of racism or the like. Rather, this is in line with Jesus’ instruction that the gospel will be preached in all of the nations (which means the tribes of the world) and then the end will come.

8. The gospel is eschatological.

That’s a big word, but we can’t get around it. It comes from the world eschatos, which means last. The gospel is bound up with last things in two senses.

A) The gospel not only saves us now, but it is preparing us for the new heaven and the new earth.

We’re waiting for Christ to come back. Christ is already reigning, but he is coming back. We have hope for the final transformation, the consummation at the end: a new heaven and the new earth and resurrection existence for us.

B) The gospel is eschatological in another sense.

All along, the understanding has been that Christ is the final judge at the end, but now, because he’s already borne our penalty, he pronounces the verdict at the end, on us, already. He comes to poor broken sinners like you and me, and he says to us, “Not guilty. Justified,” which is a sentence that belongs to the end. It’s an eschatological sentence, but it comes to us because the debt has already been paid.

So what Paul preaches, then, as a matter of first importance, is that the gospel is christological, theological, biblical, apostolic, historical, personal, universal, and eschatological. Now much more quickly, let me add in five sentences.

First, this gospel is normally disseminated in proclamation. That’s why Paul says in chapter 15, verse 1, “The gospel is what I preached to you.” Then he adds verse 2, “The word that I preached to you.” Verse 11: “The gospel that was preached …”

Now preached, in the New Testament, does not necessarily mean Sunday mornings at 11 o’clock behind a wooden desk. What it does mean is announce or proclaim. It’s good news. It’s not, strictly speaking, invitation. It’s not, strictly speaking, plea. In the first instance, it’s proclamation. It’s announcement. It’s heraldic declaration of good news. That’s what it is.

That means that there is content, and this content is to be announced as wonderful good news that people and nations need to hear. I wish I could unpack that theme at length, but I don’t have time. The gospel, however, is normally disseminated in proclamation, which you can do in Starbucks as well as in a building like this.

Secondly, this gospel is fruitfully received in authentic, persevering faith. So Paul says in verse 11, “This is what we preach, and this is what you believed.” Or again, already in verse 2, “By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.” In other words, there are some forms of so-called conversion, of believing in Christ, that aren’t really real. They’re not authentic. They don’t persevere.

However, “If you haven’t believed in vain and hold firmly to the word that I preached to you, this is the way you are saved.” Genuine, saving faith is authentic and persevering. In other words, their faith in the word, the gospel, that Paul preached must be of the persevering, authentic sort. You find that in many passages in the New Testament. Let me just read one other.

In Colossians 1:22–23, we’re told, “God has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.” The gospel is fruitfully received in authentic, persevering faith.

Thirdly, this gospel is properly disclosed in personal self-humiliation. This is quite moving. When the gospel is properly understood and received, people respond to it the way the apostle does. Do you see what he says in verse 8? Yes, the risen Christ appeared last of all to him, but that doesn’t make him say, “Yes, well, he came to the others and then, as the capstone, the last one, he came to me.” That’s not the tone at all, is it?

In fact, the final resurrection, to Paul, evokes a sense of his own unworthiness. “I’m the least of the apostles,” he said. “I persecuted the church of God. In fact, I’m just like an abortion, a bloody mess.” That’s what he means. How could it be otherwise? Jesus had purchased Paul’s redemption at the cost of his own blood and had graciously forgiven him of his sins, including the sin of persecuting the church.

God revealed himself to Paul on the Damascus road at the very moment that Paul was expanding his efforts to damage Christ’s people. Even in the wake of his conversion, if Paul says that he worked harder than the other apostles, as he does, he then adds that can only be true because of the grace of God that was with him (verse 10).

Listen. Humility, gratitude, dependence on Christ, contrition: these are the characteristic attitudes of the truly converted. These are the matrix out of which Christians experience joy and love. When the gospel truly does its work, proud Christian is an oxymoron. It’s a contradiction in terms. This gospel is properly disclosed in personal humiliation.

Fourthly, this gospel is rightly asserted to be the central confession of the whole church. I don’t have time to unpack that one, but it is very important.

Fifthly, this gospel boldly advances under the contested reign and the inevitable victory of King Jesus. He himself is the one who says, “All authority is given to me in heaven and on earth,” but that doesn’t mean that there is no one contesting him. Look around. In this chapter, we’re told, in verse 25, that Christ “must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet.” All of God’s sovereignty is now mediated exclusively through Christ. That’s why some people call this chapter the chapter of the mediatorial King.

All of God’s authority is mediated entirely through Christ, and he must reign now, completely, until the last enemy is destroyed. But, transparently, that reign is being contested. It’s contested by the Devil. It’s contested by pagans. It’s contested, God help us, by Christians. One day, however, the last enemy will be destroyed. The very last enemy is death itself, and no one will ever, ever contest him again. Not ever. This text says that God will be all in all, for the gospel is boldly advancing under the contested reign and inevitable victory of King Jesus.

Those are my eight words and my five sentences, but there’s one small additional summary that needs to be made. One of the striking results of all of this is how cognitive the gospel is, how much it is tied up with knowing things. It’s not just sort of sentimental experience or a mystical absorption into “godness” or something. There are propositions to be learned: who Christ is, what the death and resurrection are about, what evidences there were, and so on. There’s an awful lot of cognitive material here, isn’t there?

There is good news. News is cognitive. That’s why we just loathe it when we click on something on the Internet, for example (on a news source whose headline promises some significant bit of information about something), and you get there and realize that there’s absolutely nothing there. It’s just words and words and words, but nothing cognitive. You know that you’ve been had by a headline. The gospel is news. It’s good news, and it’s cognitive. There’s a lot of stuff to learn here.

I understand that, yet something else must also be said. This chapter is chapter 15, and before you read chapter 15, you’re supposed to read chapters 1 through 14. In other words, chapter 15 is set in the context of the book. As everyone knows, Calvin insists that justification is by faith alone, but genuine faith is never alone. Genuine faith is inevitably accompanied by a transformed life.

We might add that the gospel focuses on a message of what God has done and is doing, and must be cast in cognitive terms to be believed and obeyed, but this gospel never properly remains exclusively cognitive.

In the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians, the gospel, the word of the cross, is not only God’s wisdom, which the world judges to be folly, but it’s also God’s power, which the world judges to be weak. The first four chapters find Paul pained at the divisions in the Corinthian church. There were different factions associating themselves exclusively with one hero or another.

“I’m of Paul, myself.”

“I’m of Apollos, the preacher.”

“Actually, I belong to Peter. He was the original.”

“No, no, no. The real original is Christ. I belong to Christ.”

It’s probably the most supercilious rant of them all. What the apostle works out is how this is a betrayal of the gospel itself, a misunderstanding of the nature of Christian leadership, a tragic and bitter diminution of the exclusive place of Christ and what the gospel is. That’s the whole burden of the first four chapters. Chapter 4 shows, in a spectacular way, that there is no place for triumphalism in the church of the blood-bought. The church is led by apostles who eat everyone’s dirt at the end of the procession.

In chapters 5 and 6, the gospel of Christ, the Passover Lamb, prescribes that believers must, in line with Passover, get rid of all yeast. This is a symbol-laden way of saying to get rid of all evil. In that particular context, not least in the domain of sexual sin. Where the gospel triumphs, relationships are transformed. The result is that lawsuits, bringing brothers and sisters in conflict with one another before pagan courts, become almost unthinkable. Casual sex is recognized as a massive denial of Christ’s lordship; it’s a denial of the gospel.

In chapter 7, complex questions about divorce and remarriage are worked out in the context of the priorities of the gospel and of and transformed vision brought about by the dawning of the eschatological age. I wish I had time to unpack that for you.

Chapters 8 through 10 wrestle with how believers must interact with the broader pagan culture all around, not least with respect to food offered to idols. The central example of the apostle himself demonstrates, in dramatic fashion, what cheerful and voluntary self-restraint looks like for the sake of the promotion of the gospel. And on and on and on.

In other words, the gospel of Jesus Christ transforms. It is powerful to transform. I want to tell you that it is easily lost. Oh, I don’t mean in the sense of losing your salvation. I just mean the gospel is so easily corrupted.

This past year, we began a new organization at Trinity called CCI, Christ on Campus Initiative. One of our faculty members, a church historian by the name of Scott Manetsch (a fine brother and a churchman through and through), is connected with a small foundation. He developed this organization to produce essays for biblically illiterate college undergraduates on all kinds of topics that would be biblically faithful, attractively written, and not too long (13,000 to 15,000 words long).

In the past, they would have been turned into little booklets, but undergraduates don’t read booklets anymore. They get the information from the Internet, or they don’t get it at all. The question is how you pay for this as you go along if you distribute these things for free. Well, what we got was the foundation, which then paid for the writers and miscellaneous expenses. Then they come to me, the editor of this project, and I prepare them, eventually, for the Internet.

We post them on The Gospel Coalition website. Because they are in locked PDF files, they’re free. We want them to be circulated. We hope that, in time, the Navigators and Campus Crusade and InterVarsity will take them over. They’re taking them over in places in Britain. As many people as want to take them over can do so.

Put them on your church website. Distribute them. They’re free! We want people to read them. So we’ve now commissioned about 10 of these and will be adding about five a year. The first one is already posted (you can click on the CCI link on thegospelcoalition.org), and the second one is in hand.

The second one, for example, is by Craig Blomberg, who has written on all of these new gospels that people are talking about … the gospel of Judas and the gospel of this and the gospel of that … that somehow are designed by the press to make the gospels of the New Testament seem irrelevant or compromised or half-baked.

As part of preparation for this, one of the things that we did before we commissioned these essays was to fly into the Trinity campus six campus workers from around the country. Just watching these people come in from their different places was fascinating. We insisted that all of them be mature. All of them had at least one theological degree; three of them had PhDs. They had been working on university campuses, as full-time Christian workers, for years (none fewer than five years, some as many as 25 or 30 years). These were experienced people.

The guy that came from the Ivy League schools came in, believe it or not, in a three-piece suit. If you think I’m too stuffy, you should have seen him! We had a guy come in from California. Inevitably, he came in in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt. They all came into the Trinity campus, and we brainstormed together. We asked: What are the things you’re finding on campus? What are the most urgent needs? What are the blind spots? What does the biblical illiteracy look like?

I pride myself on thinking that I know what’s happening on campuses, because I try to do one or two university missions a year, but I was bone ignorant compared with these people. They were right on the sharp edge all across the board. They were just very interesting people and helped us a great deal.

One of the most interesting contributions was by a young woman. She and her husband work on a campus together. This is in a particular ministry on this particular campus (it’s an Ivy League campus) where the commitment is this: If a student joins their organization, they have enough workers that they put them into one or one and a half hours a week of individual one-on-one Bible study every week over the four years that they are there. Boy, does that put them ahead!

I’ve had some of these graduates come to Trinity, and they’re just head and shoulders above everybody else. They’ve been taught the Word of God carefully. They’re thoughtful. They understand so much more. They’ve read things. They really are way up on those who simply go to one big meeting a week or the like. Because of this she has probed what people think much more closely than others. She says, “As I see it, young women today have three paramount goals, pressures, or directions in their lives.

There are exceptions, of course, but this drives things. They are:

1. ‘From their parents, from their own ability, and because this is an Ivy League school: “Never get less than an A.” ’

Of course, not everybody feels that. Some go to universities that aren’t quite so hard-driving, and the aim is to get through with nothing more than a C+ and make sure you have a lot of fun. I know that. Some are there on a sports scholarship.

But you have to understand, this is an Ivy League school. There’s a lot of pressure along these lines to never get less than an A, which means, of course, that a lot of people are going to be disappointed because Ivy League schools give out a lot of letters other than A’s. So the potential for failure, right there, is already huge.

2. ‘From their parents, from the surrounding culture, and from their peers: “Be yourself.” With a footnote usually thrown in: “Make sure you do some nice things for other people. You know, go and help out on a Katrina team or something somewhere along the line but, ‘Be yourself.’ Don’t let anybody squeeze you into their mold.” ’

How you put the first one and the second one together is already a challenge on occasion. Nevertheless, now you have two goals.

3. Very few will openly admit this, but it is as important as the other two. ‘From Madison Avenue, from their peers, and from the pressure of social dynamics: “Be hot.” ’ After all, there are only so many guys out there, and some of them are creeps. That begins to affect how you dress, what kind of relationships you have, how you relate to the opposite sex, and so on.”

Believe me, I’m not picking on young women here. I have similar stories and similar dynamics from young men and old men and all the rest. I’m just using this one to make a certain point that we’ll get to.

She says, “That’s who they are. By and large, that’s who they are. Then some of them become Christians. Because these are the forces that drive them already in their background, when they become Christians, inevitably, they want to become really hot Christians, really good Christians, and really mature Christians. They want to lead the best Bible studies, go to the most prayer meetings, be known as one of the leaders of the group, and so on.

There are huge pressures again to succeed, to prevail, and to be on the top. This leads to another layer of inevitable failure because, although they have begun by understanding that the gospel saves them by grace through faith, with all of this social pressure in the background … to get A’s, to be themselves, to be hot, to be looked up to … the gospel gets transmuted into the same shape.

They have to be the best Christians, the ones that everybody looks up to, the most disciplined. They have to lead the best Bible studies and the best devotions. This continues until, finally, their acceptability before God, and in the Christian group, depends entirely on works.”

As soon as you understand what the gospel is … you really do understand well what the gospel is, and you’re thankful for it … you’re only a whisker away from letting it slip through your fingers again because you start patting yourself on the back for what a fine understanding of the gospel you have.

We are so perverse! Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that it’s not important to have good devotions, to learn how to go to prayer meetings, and seeking to excel as servants of Christ. Don’t misunderstand me. But that must be done, if it’s a gospel-driven thing, out of grateful adoration in the wellsprings of grace. It must be done out of gratitude and thanksgiving, offering ourselves up to God without any overtones of thinking that, somehow, this will put us amongst the elite of the elect.

It is so easy to begin well with grace and then, finally, to fail to see that the gospel not only gives us an insurance ticket out of hell but that it shapes properly all of our lives and our direction: what we mean by discipleship, by our transformation, by our motivations, by our character, by our priorities, all deriving from grace. The disciplines themselves are part of holy joy before the Lord in gratitude for what Christ has done, not one more duty that has to be done to show that I’m the number one Christian in the group.

The gospel of God … rightly preached, rightly understood, rightly proclaimed, rightly believed, rightly absorbed in our lives … is the power of God that transforms. It’s the power unto salvation. Salvation does not mean freedom from legal guilt alone. It’s the power unto wholeness, unto completeness. That’s what the gospel is, and that’s why the chapter ends, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

 

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.