There are many images that come to mind for many people when I say “Gospel.” Some people think of a hellfire and brimstone preacher screaming condemnation with a veneer of “Gospel” spread over the top. Others picture the little Sunday School flannel-graph picture of three crosses on a hill where Jesus was crucified; another simple picture of all his friends that were sad; and then the smiles on their face when they see the stone over the tomb rolled away. For others, it’s just a confusing Christian saying that defies a definition.
For me, when I say “Gospel”, I mean the Good News that Jesus came to bring to us. But this Gospel has only become good news to me over time. Yes, I believed the message as much as I could when I knelt as a little six-year-old kid and asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life. But much like lovers that grow old together, my relationship with the Gospel has grown to be better news to me as I have matured.
There are two underlying components to the Gospel that I had to grasp.
- The Gospel says that “we are more loved…than we ever dared hope”.
- The Gospel says that “we are more sinful… than we ever dared believe”.1
I had to believe in both premises for the Gospel to be good news to me. “More loved than I ever dared hope”2 is only fully understood in contrast to the weight of sin that I bore. But my sinfulness alone produced deep despair and it was then that I had to experience the depth of unconditional love of the One that calls me Beloved.3
While both premises are equally true, there is a ranking of primacy, which I began to discover through my process of letting go.4 For most of my Christian existence, I had focused on the sinfulness of myself and others and had striven to “do better”, including doing those actions that would position me more in alignment with the Word of God. However, this focus led me to viewing God’s love through the lens of my sinfulness instead of viewing my sinfulness through the lens of His Love.
Part of the Gospel becoming good news for me was formed as I began to grasp how God sees me. God does not see me through my sinfulness, but instead he sees me through Christ’s perfection. Theologically, I professed verbal agreement to that reality, but, practically, I didn’t live that way. I lived like I had to achieve perfection. Like I had to put myself together. True, I said that I was “growing in holiness” through Christ’s power, but there was a lot of human effort involved.
The Gospel starts from a place of unconditional and unimaginable love. It’s God’s love that compels him to find a way to reconcile mankind back to himself.5 If you like love stories, this one is almost unimaginable. We find the consistent teaching throughout the Bible that God has unfailing “steadfast love” for humanity and that he desires a relationship with us.6
To tell you the truth though, for a long time, I couldn’t imagine God or other people wanting to be friends with me. Sure, I knew that people could want to be friends with who they thought I was and who I tried to be, but what if they knew the secrets that I buried deep inside? Surely, they wouldn’t be my friends then. It was this prison of fear and shame that the Gospel message cracked the lock off of and threw the door open for me.
For this Gospel message to become “good news” for me, I had to let go. I had to let go of the hatred for myself that characterized my existence, because I couldn’t fully believe that God would love me if I couldn’t love me.
I couldn’t fully believe that God would love me if I couldn’t love me.
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It look a long time to believe, but through God’s grace, I realized that I was truly loved, unconditionally loved. Not loved if. Not loved but. Just loved. And slowly, as I began to see myself through that lens, I began to love myself.
Thomas Merton says it well:
[We] must repudiate nothing that is our own, nothing that we have, nothing that we are. We must see and admit that it is all ours and that it is all good: good in its positive entity since it comes from God: good in our deficiency, since our helplessness, even our moral misery, our spiritual, attracts to us the mercy of God.
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1956), p. 35
Now the other side of the coin is that the Gospel says that I am more sinful that I ever dared believe.7 This is a painful subject for me, because this premise has often been wielded like a giant sword to gouge those who didn’t line up with another’s standards of perfection. It’s been used as a barrier for me to realize my value and self-worth. That’s a shame. It denies the whole point of the Gospel.
You see, the Gospel message is essentially one that declares that I am of infinite worth. The Gospel says that I could never rescue myself, and that God longed to have relationship with me, so he paid the highest price so that I could be restored to proper relationship with Him.
At this point, I must stop to define what I mean by sin. By sin, I mean willful turning away from God. I am thankful to be raised in the holiness Christian tradition, which emphasized the severity of sin and the need to follow Jesus in our everyday lives. However, every movement or denomination has weaknesses, and ours was that cultural norms, traditions, and political stances were often conflated and equated with “sin”.
Therefore, for a long time, I carried false guilt for aspects of my experience that were proclaimed to be sinful. I wasn’t receiving the grace that I needed because I was trying so hard to be the best Christian I could be. I was not the outwardly rebellious teenager—I was the self-righteous one. Want me to prove it? Read on…
- “Never wearing short sleeve shirts makes me more holy?” I’m in.
- “Television is bad for me?” No problem, I won’t even watch sports at the restaurant. (Confession: I’m not a sports fan anyway so that wasn’t such a sacrifice!!)
- “Not wearing the color pink will make me more Christ-like?” Check. I got this.
- “Only listening to Southern Gospel music will make me more pure?” No problem, I won’t even listen to Jingle Bell Rock at Christmastime.
Now, before you laugh and think that I was crazy or that I am making light of the faith that I was raised in, I am not. I was blessed to be raised by parents that held the standards that they did because they loved Jesus and honestly wanted to please him above all else. I applaud that and seek to emulate that heart attitude in my own life. But the reality is that I professed faith in Christ alone through grace alone, but lived as if my works made me worthy of his love.
I professed faith in Christ alone through grace alone, but lived as if my works made me worthy of his love.
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Therefore, when I fell short of the impossibly high standard I had set for myself or accepted from others, I felt deep condemnation. I would emotionally “beat myself up” in an act of penance and then would come back and try harder. I had no trouble believing that I was broken, however, my actions demonstrated that I didn’t believe that I was utterly broken. That all I could do was try to cover up my weakness and brokenness with the cheap makeover of self-righteousness that ultimately started to fade. It was when I was able to pull off the sham of perfectionism that I was able to accept the gift of imperfection. Yes, I am broken, but much like a mosaic, my brokenness is not something that detracts from my value, but rather that accentuates it.
I had to let go of trying to fix myself—of trying to fit into the mold of who I thought I had to be, and instead relax into the arms of Jesus who is continually transforming me through his power into who He wants me to be. It was this truth, this reality that provided me with the power to accept all of my experiences that once brought me shame.
And that, my friend, is why the Gospel is good news to me.
- Timothy Keller, The Meaning Of Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2013)
- Ibid.
- This terminology comes from Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (New York: Convergent, 1992).
- God’s kindness leads us to repentance (Rom. 2:4).
- John 3:16
- Exodus 15:13; Exodus 34:6-7; Psalm 33:5
- Timothy Keller, The Meaning Of Marriage (New York: Penguin, 2013)