What is the Gospel?

This is a paper I turned in for an Evangelism class I am taking. I enjoyed writing it and was pretty impressed with the result...

The question of, “What is the Gospel?” is a challenging questions with no simple answer. Attempts to answer the question oversimplify and reduce the gospel, limiting the gospel’s vast mystery and possibly attempting to control the gospel to fit our cultural needs. The gospel effects people, it works in people and through people. This makes the gospel personal, giving the gospel its complexity and vastness. For each person the gospel may mean something different. For those who are oppressed the gospel is freedom, for the hurt and broken the gospel is healing and wholeness, for the lonely the gospel is comfort, for some the gospel is life, for others is it the belief that there is something bigger than themselves at work in the world. My simple definition is the gospel is God’s loving work, beginning at creation, carried through the people of Israel, shown fully in the life, teachings, death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus, God’s son, now expressed by the church, Christ’s followers empowered by the Holy Spirit. This work is for the restoration of creation, the bringing in of the Kingdom of God, bringing all of creation into right relations with each other, and God our creator from the bringing of time through the ends of the ages.

My working definition of what is the gospel comes from my encounters with the gospel. Like many people of the Old Testament their encounters with God are described by God’s actions. It is easier to describe God by God’s actions. We are able to see the results of God’s actions, and can easily describe these actions. For me the gospel is much the same. For the gospel is the good news of God’s redeeming love through Jesus. It is God who created the world and all that is in it. Yet humans having been created in God’s image wanted to be like God and ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge separating us from God. God removed humanity from the Garden of Eden. However God never gave up on creation, God called Abraham and Sarah to be the beginnings of a great nation who is called to be a blessing to all peoples of the earth. God continued to work in and through these people, giving them land, an identity reminding them of their purpose, being a blessing to the world. Yet every time the people forgot, God would raise up a leader to call them back to God.

God’s love for God’s creation is fully expressed through the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus. God, still loving what God created, comes in the likeness of a human being, Jesus. Jesus comes to fulfill what God has spoken through the prophets and begin to bring God’s creation back to a right relationship with their creator. Through Jesus’ life and teachings we are invited to be apart of God’s kingdom on earth; a kingdom where love abounds, where justice flows like a mighty river, where our identity comes not from what we have or what we do but from who created us. This kingdom of God is in conflict with the culture that surrounds it. Jesus’ calling for a new and better way of life lead him to be tried, convicted and executed for challenging the culture, for pushing the cultural norms. Jesus teachings went against what the world was calling for. Jesus was calling for people to love their enemies, to walk an extra mile with those who were ruling over them, challenging the status quo, and celebrating the small and lowly, calling the first to be last and last to be first. Jesus was calling for a world flipped on its head. This radical living brings healing to broken, food for the hungry, love to the unloved, communion for the outsiders, hope for the hopeless, and comfort for the afflicted. It brings peace not with the sword but with acts of love. It is not just for the downcast, afflicted, marginalized or left out but it is for all people. It is this upside down world where God has invited creation to join God and to be in communion with the Creator.

It is through the God’s ultimate expression of love, the resurrection of Jesus from death to life, that we are able to truly see and experience God. Jesus bore all that afflicted humanity, setting us free from those things that hold us down, and bringing us back to being who God created us to be. We have been set free from the bondage our self-centeredness has placed us in and our culture has reinforced in us. We are free to bring the good news to all people, to help restore creation. Following Jesus’ resurrection, his followers were called and empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue Jesus mission. This mission goes all the way back to Abraham and Sarah’s call to be a blessing to all people, and is expressed in the sharing of the good news of what God is doing in the world in and through God’s people. It is through this work of restoration and love in which believers, empowered by the Holy Spirit, become the hands and feet of Jesus, continually working to bring in God’s kingdom. It is through our fumbling and bumbling encounters with those around us, we can begin to piece together what God is doing in the world.

Part of gospel is engrafting ourselves into this story of God in the world, and continuing it, and adding our own flavor to it. The gospel is the good news that God is at work in this world. It is through God’s love of God’s creation that we are able to be freed through the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus. This is good news that we are free to love and care for those around us because we have first been loved by our Creator.