The Gospel
THE GOSPEL
The Cross Becomes Inevitable
Matthew 10:28; Luke 14:26; Acts 20:22; Galatians 6:14
The effect of the gospel is to deepen and widen one’s sympathies. This means that your sympathies have been so widened that life will touch you on a wider front. So the process of your Christianization is the deepening of your capacity to suffering. Each new friendship you form, each new convert you win, each new injustice in the social order you come in contact with, each new sin in others to which you expose yourself, each new task you take on yourself, will become a possible suffering point. Through the gospel there is a sensitizing of the soul and a universalizing of the sympathies of that sensitized soul. The cross thus becomes inevitable.
Victorious Living
(Week 43, Wednesday)
“For They Were Afraid Of”
John 19:38-44; 20:19-23
How crippled, how unsatisfactory, how far short of human need would our Christianity have remained, if the Gospel had stopped at the pre-Pentecost stage! And yet that is where most of our Christianity has stopped.
Abundant Living
(Week 22, Friday)
Adjusting Our Vocabulary to Fact
Luke 4:22; Acts 6:10; James 3:1-13
We must reclothe the eternal truths of the Gospel in the language that each age can understand. But even that will not do, if the reclothing is just adopting the words of a new age. The words must have content, reality in them, or they will say nothing.
Abundant Living
(Week 43, Sunday)
An Open Universe
Mark 11:23-24; 2 Timothy 1:12-14
Our gospel is not primarily resolution—a whipping up of the will. It is primarily faith—a surrender of our will to the will of God. Linked with Almighty Resources, you can now add resolution, for the resolution now is not an anxious fretting—trying in one’s own strength and power—but a restful, confident resolution to take infinite resources.
The Way
(Week 36, Friday)
John 1:29-34
Here are the two characteristic things in the Christian gospel: clearing the way between humanity and God by the atonement; clearing the way between humanity and itself by the indwelling. One is atonement; the other is attunement. We need to get right with God and to get right with ourselves, to be at one with God and at one with ourselves. The Christian gospel makes it possible to live with God and to live with ourselves, therefore with others. If you won’t live with God, you can’t live with yourself, and hence you can’t live with others. The gospel makes you live, in every direction and in ever portion of your being.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 6, Sunday)
Many Religions—One Gospel
Romans 8:3-4
Religions are humanity’s search for God, the gospel is God’s search for humanity. There are many religions; there is but one gospel.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 2, Thursday)
Unable to Adapt Themselves
Luke 9:12-17
We have a total gospel for the total need of a total humanity, and we must totally apply it if we are to survive.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 28, Monday)
Guilts Upset the Body
Jeremiah 33:6; Malachi 4:2
The most blessed fact of the Christian gospel is the offer of divine forgiveness. This is the most healing fact that can steal into the depths of personality. It pervades one as a sense of release and well-being.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 34, Thursday)
The Gospel Is God’s Search for Humanity
John 1:9-13
The gospel doesn’t begin with God, it begins with Jesus.
The gospel then begins with the incarnation. All religions are humanity’s search for God; the gospel is God’s search for humanity; therefore there are many religions, but one gospel. All religions are the Word become word; the gospel is the Word become flesh. Therefore all religions are philosophies; the gospel is a fact. Philosophies may be good views; the gospel is good news. The gospel is not primarily a philosophy—it is a fact. The philosophy grows out of the Fact. The Fact of Jesus is our starting point and is our gospel.
It is the gospel of Jesus before it is the gospel of God or the gospel of the kingdom. The gospel lies in his person—he didn’t come to bring the good news—he was the good news. This gospel is not spelled out, therefore verbal; it is lived out, therefore vital. Jesus didn’t come to bring the forgiveness of God—he was the forgiveness of God. There is no other way to God, for Jesus is the Way from God. He is God coming to us. Therefore there can be no other way.
Mastery
(Week 1, Thursday)
God a Half-God Ruling over a Half-Realm
Matthew 13:37-41
Jesus started out “preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God” (Mark 1:14 KJV), the only thing he ever called his gospel. And he sent out his disciples to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God. Then he seemed to change his emphasis and began to preach himself. “I am the way. . . . No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6 CEB). Which was his message—the Order or the Person? Or did they coalesce and become one? They became one; he used interchangeably “for my sake” and “for the kingdom’s sake.” He was the kingdom personalized; the Order came to embodiment in him. The Absolute Order and the Absolute Person came together and were one. That meant religion was personal in that it had personal relations with a Person; it was also social in that it had relations with an Order embodied in that Person. It was not now personal and now social; it was both by its very nature. So I do not want a personal gospel or a social gospel; I want one gospel that redeems the total life, individual and social. That is as it should be, for God is not a half-god ruling over a half-realm. God is the God of all life. God’s kingdom is a total kingdom.
Mastery
(Week 29, Monday)
Expectation of Perfection, an Illusion
James 3:1-2
The blood of Jesus Christ is the life of Jesus Christ, laid down sacrificially for us; that life cleanses us from all sin. And so at the heart of our gospel is a continuous cleansing element. This makes possible a fellowship, for within the fellowship is this redemptive principle and power at work, cleansing away the impediments to fellowship as they arise.
Christian Maturity
(Week 11, Saturday)
Taste of Love in Fruits of Spirit
Ephesians 5:1-2
In the gospel, love is not something put in and then canceled out by other emphases. It is the whole motif.
Christian Maturity
(Week 17, Saturday)
Depleting and Defeating
Galatians 2:16
John the Baptist represented the gospel of a demand: “You can’t do this; you must do that.” And Jesus said: “He who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than [John the Baptist]” (Matt 11:11). Why? Because the kingdom of God did not present the gospel of a demand, but the gospel of an offer. We are to “receive” the kingdom, not whip up ourselves into it. Those who are in the kingdom of an offer, though they be the very least, are greater than those who are in the kingdom of a demand. For those who are under a demand end in depletion; those who are under an offer end in repletion and fullness. They are replete with all it takes to live, for they are attached to infinite resources. They live by the grace and power of Another.
Christian Maturity
(Week 32, Wednesday)
I Got Her In
We pause to look at our passage again: “For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Cor 4:15). Note the phrase: “through the gospel.” If we preach a philosophy (ideas about life), or a moralism (principles and practices upon which life can be lived), or religious practices (techniques of religious life), we do not become a “father in Christ Jesus”; we do not beget spiritual children. It is only “through the gospel” that we become creative. . . .
The gospel is the redemptively creative activity of God. And Jesus himself is that gospel.
In Christ
(Week 22, Friday)
Introduction
This verse, “And the Word became flesh” (John 1:14), sets the gospel off in a class by itself. And yet while it is in a class by itself, a sui generis, nevertheless it relates it to everything: God, life, the material everything. For it is planted in life: spiritual, material, and social. But planted in life, it is different, apart, and unique.
The Word Became Flesh
(pp. 11–12)
Matthew 13:12-17
We come now to a key passage, which reveals the whole Christian gospel as the Word become flesh. Not only in the initial incarnation in human flesh, but as a continuing incarnation, as a method and attitude in everything connected with that gospel; it was all an application of the principle of the Word become flesh, the principle become practice. As Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue at Nazareth, he announced his program and purpose: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor [the economically disinherited]. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives [the socially and politically disinherited] and recovering of sight to the blind [the physically disinherited], to set at liberty those who are oppressed [the morally and spiritually disinherited], to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord [a fresh world beginning—the corporately disinherited]” (Luke 4:18-19). He closed the book and began to say to them: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21); today this word of Scripture becomes flesh, in me. And it did!
In his own person, Jesus embodied this fivefold redemptive impact upon life and started movements, which then and now are leading to the emancipation of the poor from economic bondage, the downtrodden masses from social and political captivity, the physically disabled from their disabilities, the morally and spiritually bruised from their guilts, the world from total bondages in the total life. The program became the Person and the Person became the program; they were one. The text became clothed in flesh and blood. No wonder “they were surprised that words of such grace should fall from his lips” (Luke 4:22 NEB). It was the grace of embodied fact, the grace of being and doing.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 19, Monday)