Don’t ever think of the gospel as, “That’s the way you get saved, and … That’s the gospel. It is not conviction of sin just to feel miserable about yourself, your failures, and your inadequacy to meet life’s demands. With these universal commands, as we indicated above, go universal promises of salvation to all who obey them. Repentance and faith are rendered matters of duty by God’s direct command, and hence impenitence and unbelief are singled out in the New Testament as most grievous sins. As theology it is expanded, and related to the death by crucifixion of Jesus. Evangelistic preachers and personal workers have sometimes been known to make this mistake. But it is not biblical thus to isolate the work from the Worker. It tells us how we have fallen short of God’s standard, how we have become guilty, filthy, and helpless in sin, and now stand under the wrath of God. In a word, the evangelistic message is the gospel of Christ and Him crucified, the message of man’s sin and God’s grace, of human guilt and divine forgiveness, of new birth and new life through the gift of the Holy Spirit. He could take this knowledge for granted, for his hearers had the Old Testament faith behind them. In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything; or else our evangelizing becomes a sort of confidence trick. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the message of the good news of salvation offered to mankind by grace through faith in the finished works of Christ on the cross (Ephesians 2:8-9). The Alcoholics Anonymous gospel of salvation is that our sins can be taken away “root and branch” without the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The gospel is not, “Believe that Christ died for everybody’s sins, and therefore for yours,” any more than it is, “Believe that Christ died only for certain people’s sins, and so perhaps not for yours”...We have no business to ask them to put faith in any view of the extent of the atonement. With these universal commands, as we indicated above, go universal promises of salvation to all who obey them. Let us see how Paul describes the gospel. And where there is no clear knowledge, and hence no realistic recognition of the real claims that Christ makes, there can be no repentance, and therefore no salvation. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,” said Paul (Act 16:31). For the very idea of sin in the Bible is of an offence against God that disrupts a man’s relationship with God. Everybody’s life includes things that cause dissatisfaction and shame. 1. And this also is a necessary step. Nor can you tell on what terms to approach Him now until you know about the resurrection, ascension, and heavenly session—that Jesus has been raised, and enthroned, and made King, and lives to save to the uttermost all who acknowledge His Lordship. —Nor can you make sense of His life until you know about the atonement—that He lived as man so that He might die as man for men, and that His passion, His judicial murder was really His saving action of bearing away the world’s sins. To preach Christ means to set Him forth as the One Who through His cross sets men right with God again…. And this also is a necessary step. However, God’s plan of salvation began shortly after Adam and Eve rebelled against Him, if … It tells us that we owe our very existence to Him; that for good or ill, we are always in His hands and under His eye; and that He made us to worship and serve Him, to show forth His praise and to live for His glory. ( Log Out /  “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,” said Paul (Act 16:31). But this is just the question that has to be raised when we speak about sin. The Message of Jesus: The Gospel According to Paul: A Bible Study. In their concern to focus attention on the atoning death of Christ as the sole sufficient ground on which sinners may be accepted with God, they have expounded the summons to saving faith in these terms: “Believe that Christ died for your sins.” The effect of this exposition is to represent the saving work of Christ in the past, dissociated from His Person in the present, as the whole object of our trust. And the beginning from which Paul started in such cases was the doctrine of God’s Creatorship and man’s creaturehood. When asked by His hearers what they should do in order to “work the works of God,” our Lord replied, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent” (Joh 6:29). The ‘Sexual Rights’ Movement Is Gaining Power Globally. It tells us who He is, what His character is, what His standards are, and what He requires of us, His creatures. “God…commandeth all men every where to repent,” Paul told the Athenians (Act 17:30). It is a saving message, the only thing that can truly reform the human heart. This being so, one thing becomes clear straight away: namely, that the question about the extent of the atonement, which is being much agitated in some quarters, has no bearing on the content of the evangelistic message at this particular point. He could begin at once to declare Christ to them as the fulfillment of Old Testament hopes. Are you satisfied? We never know what sin really is until we have learned to think of it in terms of God and to measure it, not by human standards, but by the yardstick of His total demand on our lives. It does not, therefore, follow that a man is convicted of sin when he is distressed about his weaknesses and the wrong things he has done. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also (i.e., put them all decisively second in his esteem), he cannot be my disciple...whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple” (Luk 14:26, 33). Excerpt From Evangelism & the Sovereignty of God  by J. I. Packer. More than once, Christ deliberately called attention to the radical break with the past that repentance involves. Historians affirm that the earliest Christian message is the Gospel as Paul wrote to the church in the Greek city of Corinth. We are all sinners. Nor would it be saving faith if a man in that condition called on the Lord Jesus Christ just to soothe him, and cheer him up, and make him feel confident again. 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