If broken trust in God is the root of sin, then for the problem of sin to be fixed, trust will have to be put back in its rightful place. That is why faith is so important in God’s plan for our restoration to His fellowship through Jesus Christ.
If we turn away from the gospel because of the costliness of the love involved in discipleship, there is nothing left but lesser loves — counterfeits that offer little more than disappointment, having cost us little more than what was convenient.
In a “feel-good” age, it is hard for us to see that our first response to the gospel must be grief. Yet if the gospel is about sin, we are not ready for what the gospel offers until we see our sins for what they are and grieve them in a godly way.
We often reject ideas as being “untrue” for no reason except that we don’t want them to be true. But the more painful a truth may be to accept (at least in the short term), the more we must be adventurers — going wherever the truth leads us.
Hope is a powerful thing. And one reason the gospel of Christ is the greatest of all messages is that it offers the greatest of all hopes. Here is the prospect of a perfect, eternal relationship with God when our present lives have run their course.
In the New Testament, there are two phases or stages in obeying the gospel: first, we accept God’s forgiveness on His terms, and second, we live the rest of our lives under the lordship of Christ. To do the first but not the second is to deny Christ.
The fact that our salvation is by grace does not mean the gospel requires no response. It is a message that must be responded to, and in the absence of the response required by God, the benefits of the message should not be expected (Acts 2:37,38).
The gospel is the good news of God’s salvation. But never forget: the message is about Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus that God is offering salvation. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul affirms that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (v.19).
It is from sin that God desires to save us. The gospel is not about the amelioration of social ills or earthly maladies. It’s about (a) the forgiveness of our sins, and (b) learning to live in reverence and gratitude before the Creator who loves us.
Adam and Eve were free, but they used their freedom to reject God rather than honor Him as their Maker. We must not underestimate the seriousness of their decision to do what God had said they must not do. Their choice amounted to open rebellion.
