The Gospel: The Story We Live and Tell

Today’s reading begins Section I: The Gospel – The Story We Live and Tell. READ HERE

At the beginning of the ministry of Jesus he said, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The apostle Paul wrote: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation of everyone who believes” (Romans 1:17). This gospel is not a formula or set of religious ideas but rather a story that conveys good news and the power to transform lives. In the book of Acts, the apostles preached the gospel to diverse audiences, and we hear them tell a story. This is the reason that the apostles and countless Christians down the ages have embraced the gospel as the story we live and tell.

“It is the story (in the Old and New Testaments) that tells us who we are, what we are here for, and where we are going. This story of God’s mission defines our identity, drives our mission, and assures us that the ending is in God’s hands” [Cape Town Commitment]

In the beginning, God created the universe as a wondrous interdependence of spiritual and material reality, filled with meaning and mystery. All that God made was ordered and beautiful and good. God blessed all he made, that each part would exist for the flourishing of the whole. For every sphere—earth and sky and sea—God made creatures, giving them the breath of life and the ability to reproduce. As the culmination of creation, God made human beings, both male and female, in the image of God, enabling them to form relationships with himself and one another and giving them authority to care for his world.

The work and play of God’s human creatures, their marriage and child-raising, their arts and industry and patterns of collective life were to be for the benefit of all, and for the glory of God. Blessing received was to become blessing shared between peoples, and blessing returned as worship.

God accomplished this awesome act of creation by his Word through his Spirit.

When God blessed human beings, he warned them that the ongoing flow of life would cease were they ever to seek independence from him. Since God alone is life, that choice would be death.

Adam and his wife Eve joined in the Satan-led rebellion and so sin and death entered the world. Commissioned to fill the earth with culturally diverse peoples united in the worship of God, humanity filled the earth with violence, fracturing the unity for which they were made. Exiled from God’s holy presence and cut off from life, humans found themselves in bondage to self-will and enslaved to a meaningless existence.

But God is rich in mercy and love and would not abandon his sinful human creatures to their self-chosen bondage. Nor, as a just God, could he leave their rebellion unpunished. He set in motion his plan to rescue humanity from its helpless state through a coming Saviour and to restore them as one holy people made up of all peoples united in worship.