The gospel: putting it plainly
“And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.”
Hebrews 11:6
Our hearts
My observation: a lion kills for food and snakes are a threat only when they are hungry or sense danger; but humans kill for the fun of it.
You’ve lived in this world for some time. Can’t you see there’s something wrong here? It scares me even more when I see this…sickness in myself.
Sin is when you exalt something or someone as if they were God. At its root, it is living life wanting and believing that “Me, Myself and I are in control”. All other wrongdoing springs from this point.
Sin took control of the human heart when Adam and Eve, the first humans, believed a lie that the devil told them and decided they could become like God. That day, we died.
The good news
Sin separates us from God. Just like air, a life lived outside of God is not life at all.
The natural consequence for sin is death. That’s why till today, people make sacrifices and other offerings to attempt to atone for their sins.
If you think that you could try to ‘behave good’, you will end up falling back into sin because you assume there is something you can do by your own efforts to save yourself – a classic example of “Me, Myself and I are in control. We can do this!”.
The good news is that God loves us. He couldn’t just leave us in the vicious cycle of sin, so he sent his son, Jesus.
Gospel is an old word that means good news.
Jesus, the Christ
Jesus, who is himself God, became flesh and blood in order to save humans. He is referred to as Christ, meaning messiah or anointed.
He went through our pains and sufferings, our struggles and temptations with the sole mission of breaking the curse of sin and bringing us back to God so that we might live.
He accomplished this mission by his death on the cross.
Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.
Hebrews 2:14-15
The cross
The cross was a shameful and grotesque Roman execution style that Jesus was sentenced to, but it was his plan all along to die.
Something magnificent happened when Jesus died on the cross. He brought a final end to our separation from God.
Jesus is the one perfect sacrifice that paid for our sin of the past, present and future. He is perfect because he is sinless and spotless, the Creator himself.
And this is the fulness of his perfection: Death cannot hold him down.
The resurrection
Three days after Jesus was mutilated and killed, he came to life again. All other sacrifices and ‘good’ men are held down by the penalty for sin, but not Jesus.
This means that if anyone sins, they can point to Jesus as their sacrifice but there would be no point killing Jesus again (if it was possible) because he would simply get up again. You could do that again and again and he will keep on defeating death.
So, he stands forever as our saviour who has brought us life for all eternity.
Eternity
Because of what God’s love has done for us on the cross, though our physical bodies may fade away with each passing day, we have eternal life within us that lives on.
About forty days after his resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven, leaving us here on earth to live the life he has called us to live: to be a light in this dark world.
As we shine our light, we wait for the day when he shall come again in glory to judge the earth and make all things new, even these ragged bodies.
The pancakes
Anyone can have this life as long as they believe in Jesus. Yes, he died for everyone’s sin but we have to make that step to take his hand.
Imagine that one morning, I wake up hungry. My flatmate has gone off to work but she made fresh pancakes before leaving and there’s some for me. I can smell the pancakes from my bed, I can even see them in my head, but I will stay hungry unless I get out of bed, get to the kitchen and devour those pancakes. So it is with faith in Jesus.
What he did will mean nothing for you unless you eat him.
The Mark 8 Christian 