What the Gospel is(n’t)

The Gospel does not free you from physical ailments, poverty, difficulties, struggles, or afflictions. The Gospel is very simply that our righteous God established laws in accordance with His righteousness — those laws required that a sacrifice be made when they were broken. As sinners, we have all been guilty of breaking those laws. But Jesus Christ, a perfect man (and perfect God), became that sacrifice for us, that all who call on His name in repentant faith would receive forgiveness for our sins and be granted eternal life with Him.

That is all that the Gospel promises. And it should be enough — more than enough! If, in God’s abundant grace, He chooses to call us to repentance of our sin, we must follow Him at all costs. Scripture does not promise that it will be easy — the disciples were poverty-stricken, tortured, imprisoned, and martyred. To divert ourselves around the difficulties of life is to divert ourselves away from the Gospel entirely, substituting a false Christ for the true Christ.

If we have faith in Him, we must also have faith that He is sovereign over all things, that His will is perfect, and that He can and will be glorified even through (and especially through) our afflictions!

 

References:

Job 23:10: “He knows the way that I take; when He has tried me, I shall come out as gold.”

James 1:2-3: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”

Romans 5:3-5: “…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us.”

2 Corinthians 12:8-10: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Romans 1:16-17: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.'”

1 Corinthians 15:3-4: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”

1 Peter 3:18: “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”