A Startling Gospel Revealed

So before your begin to read please know that this certainly has to do with the English reading assignments for the week...it just takes me a while to get there.

My Bible study/small group has recently been reading a book by my pastor (“Good News for Those Trying Harder” by Alan Kraft), in which he explains how to stop “trying harder” at your spiritual life and instead interact with the gospel. In this book, he remarked that every Christian ought to “have the gospel preached to them every day”. One of the girls reasonably responded with—wouldn’t that get boring pretty fast? If hearing the gospel every day is a matter of reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John over and over and over and over, then yes, I imagine it would become extremely boring. As our study chewed on this idea, I felt in my spirit that something was missing. The gospel cannot simply be a physical account, a story which we know by heart, a page in a Bible, a sermon illustration. These things can catch our eye for only a moment before we pass on to more vibrant things—but the gospel...the gospel can renew lives, can complete souls. What it was—what the author of “Good News” was referring to—had to be, I said, what one might call “the living gospel”. The other members of the Bible study regarded me rather blankly. What do you mean by “living gospel”? What’s that?

Well, the gospel is alive, isn’t it? I don’t simply mean that once upon a time it was lived out—I mean, of course God lives, and Jesus lived and died and lived again, and everyone in the gospel accounts once lived. This is the obvious element, but perhaps it is the first idea one must get one’s heart around. I am a great believer in the idea that if one can breathe life into the characters of the gospel story, one can vicariously experience a three-dimensional gospel. One can get into the emotions and humanity of the gospel. This is perhaps interesting and beneficial, but it is not what I meant by a living gospel.

Let me try again to explain. The gospel is huge, thundering, and perfect. Its glory is that of God himself. If someone can wrap his or her mind around the full scope of the gospel, its horror and wonder, he can then catch some idea, perhaps, of a living gospel. Trying to illustrate what I mean: imagine that reading the Bible is like reading a biology textbook. Just as this textbook outlines the organs and chemicals and processes that work together to make up an amazing whole (a human being, in this case), so the Biblical gospel accounts outline the pieces, parts, and events that together create an amazing whole (the gospel). But reading in a textbook is nothing to actually looking at a human being—seeing the amazing intricacy of biological processes, only this time standing before you alive. Now say when you are singing in church, perhaps, or praying at home, and you are overwhelmed with emotion, you are worshipping God and maybe crying or raising your hands or kneeling or just sitting still, you are encountering the living gospel. It has brought the Bible story to life, just as a human being brings a biology textbook to life. But the gospel accounts are still important because you cannot fully appreciate the wonder of a human life unless you have first read the textbook.

It seems that reading “The Reason for God” by Tim Keller, and reading “Blue Like Jazz” by Don Miller can serve as an illustration of the scope of the living gospel. Keller, as a logical man with a logical argument to make, can approach the gospel and find it watertight against the most difficult attacks of human reason. The gospel is infallible, a man like Keller has no trouble defending it—but maybe he is biased, maybe he is trying too hard. Then we have only to look at C.S. Lewis before his conversion—a committed atheist who approached the gospel with cold logic and truth...and found more logic there than even in his atheism.

But on the other hand, the gospel completely defies logic, as can be seen clearly in Miller’s book. Miller, as a highly emotional and artistic person, was drawn into the gospel via a road that has nothing to do with logic, but with a filling of the emotional deficits in his soul. His gospel—as he illustrates—was one that would crawl into the dark where he was hiding and whisper to him until he was ready to get up and follow it.

So the gospel is alive. It can stand up and defend itself in a theological debate. It can follow us deep into our own darkness. It can wait patiently for a thousand years like a flower in the desert. It pursues us, woos us, and wins us if we but respond to it. So the wonder of the living gospel lies in how we are depraved and yet the gospel reaches out to us. It is a revolutionary concept that can never grow old or dull—a living gospel.