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The Power Behind Religious Words

06/08/2008 - The Gospel, Selected Scripture

"How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!" That's what the apostle Paul says in Romans 10:15. Well today I want to bring good news to all of us. Today I want my feet to be beautiful feet. And the good news I bring is called the gospel. That's what the word gospel means, "good news." How beautiful are the feet of those who bring the gospel!

There are a lot of us in this community that can use some good news right now because we're going through some really tough times. And we need to talk about them and we need to pray for one another and encourage each other. Life can be tough.

Some of us are struggling financially and have been deeply impacted by the instability of our economy. If gas stays at $4.00 a gallon and food prices continue to escalate and our energy bill jumps 20%this month we wonder what we're going to do. Some of us are out of work right now and have been for months and we're feeling pretty hopeless. Some of our marriages are in crisis mode and may not make it. Some of us are watching loved ones slowly pass away and it's tearing our hearts out. Some of us are in the midst of our own medical challenges recovering from surgery or facing surgery and we're afraid of what the future holds. Some of us are battling depression, addictions, or other chronic conditions that just don't go away. We feel like the woman in the story that Greg and Katie talked about a few weeks ago who spent all she had on doctors, but instead of getting better she grew worse. Some of us are grieving over our kids and the struggles that they're going through. Some of us just feel lost right now in our jobs or in our relationships or in our life. Over time life has a way of leveling the playing field for all of us.

And God knows all about that. But in the midst of it all God wants us to hear and embrace the gospel, because it's good news. We all need good news. But what is the good news?

Well today we begin a new series that will help us to answer that question. I've called it The Power Behind Religious Words. Over the next four weeks we're going to look at some religious words that many of us may have heard before, but perhaps don't completely understand. Words like the gospel, salvation, repent, believe, and evangelism.

Growing up in church I heard these words all my life, but I'm not sure I fully understood what they meant or experienced the power that's behind them. These words and the concepts they communicate have life changing power. And to fully understand them we have to first see what Jesus meant when he said them. And what those who followed Jesus understood him to be saying. Then we can understand more clearly what they mean for us today. Part of my growing edge these days has been a growing passion to understand the Scriptures first and foremost in the historical context in which they were written. I've been too quick to look at the Bible through the eyes of my culture, when I first need to understand the Bible in the culture in which it was written. And because of that I think my gospel has been way too small.

So today we start with the word "gospel." Matthew 4:23 says, Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.

In Mark 1:14-15 we read, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ¹⁵"The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!"

The gospel of the kingdom. The kingdom of God has come near. That was the central message of Jesus. That was the good news he came to proclaim. The kingdom of God was near because the King was on the scene. The arrival of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven as Matthew sometimes calls it was the main message of Jesus. He talked about it constantly. He preached about it. He spun stories about it. He told parables on it. He did miracles to confirm it was true.

After four hundred years of silence between the end of the book of Malachi to the birth of Jesus when it seemed like God was deaf, if not dead, God finally arrives on the scene in the person of Jesus and that's good news.

But it didn't end with Jesus. That was just the beginning. The kingdom is still among us here and now - for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. And let that be an encouragement to all of us today. The king is present in the middle or our mess, in the midst of the chaos of every day life. He's here to help us and to bring hope and healing and insight and wisdom and freedom and joy and peace and sanity and encouragement and relief. We are not alone in our struggles.

But we need to understand that when Jesus said that the kingdom of God is near his people, the nation of Israel, were under the oppressive rule of Rome. The only kingdom they could see was Rome's kingdom. And the Caesar's in Rome were getting bolder all the time in their claims to be God, to be saviors of this world. They had a gospel too. Their good news was that they would bring freedom and peace and security to all those who worshipped them. And if you didn't they would hang you on a cross.

And so from the start, the gospel of the kingdom that Jesus was preaching had real political overtones. It was a threat to the power structures of the day and of course, Jesus himself would eventually end up one of those crosses. Which is why the Christmas story starts out with a political statement in Luke 2:1, In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.

Against the backdrop of Caesar Augustus who was hailed as the Savior of the world, the one who healed the chaos of Rome and brought it into a new golden age, the one whose birthday was called the beginning of good news, enter the baby Jesus who's introduced like this to the shepherds in Luke 2:10-11, But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. ¹¹Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.

Do you see what's going on here? Jesus' gospel that he is Savior and Lord is coming right up against Caesar's gospel that he is Savior and Lord. King Herod understood that. That's why he had every baby boy two and under slaughtered when he heard these words. He knew that there's only room for one person to fit on a throne.

The gospel of the kingdom is a threat to every other authority and power structure that would demand our total and complete allegiance. That's why there's so much persecution of Christians in totalitarian countries. But even in America where we celebrate the freedom to worship as we please we must remember that as followers of Jesus Christ our first allegiance is to him and to his kingdom, even before this country or any other authority including ourselves. We make it our goal to please him because there's only room for one person to fit on a throne our lives and that person is King Jesus.

Jesus' grew up working with his father, Joseph, as a carpenter in Nazareth. And then at the age of thirty he was baptized by John in the Jordan River, tempted by the devil in the wilderness for forty days, and then came back to his hometown to launch his ministry and almost got himself killed the very first day of his campaign.

Turn to Luke 4:16-21 (p.703), He, that is Jesus, went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ¹⁸"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." ²⁰Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. ²¹He began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

This was the day that Jesus launched his gospel campaign. If Jesus was running for President, this would be his platform and his campaign slogan would be "Jubilee!" because what he read that day was a reference to the year of Jubilee that the nation of Israel was to observe every 50 years. It was God's way of giving his people a fresh start, bringing economic justice and balance back into the system. It was God's way of narrowing the gap between rich and poor one time in every generation. It was brilliant.

But Israel never practiced it. And a few minutes later when Jesus hinted that his kingdom would include Gentiles as well as Jews the synagogue exploded in anger and they grabbed Jesus and took him to the top of a cliff to throw him off. They wanted to kill him for even suggesting that God's kingdom would include those outside of Israel. But Jesus survived their attempted assassination and we read in verse 30, But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way. It wasn't his time to die yet.

So what is the gospel, the good news that Jesus preached? The gospel is the good news that the king has arrived and his kingdom has begun. It's not finished yet. It hasn't come in all its fullness. We certainly know that. But it's started. And God wants all of us to get on board with it. It's a kingdom that brings good news to the poor and to the oppressed and to the sick and to all those, including us, who are in bondage. That's why the gospels are filled with stories of lepers and beggars and bleeding women and sick children. That's the good news that we take to the whole world. Jesus is the king and his kingdom has begun and is present right here, right now through us his followers.

In Matthew 24:14 Jesus said, And this gospel of the kingdom will preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.

That's the content of the gospel that Jesus preached. He, not Caesar, is Lord. He alone is worthy of our worship. He's the long awaited King of kings and Lord of Lords and his kingdom, not Caesar's, will last forever. And he invites all of us to believe his claims to be king and to rethink our lives in light of the values of his kingdom. Repent and believe the good news! And when we do he promises to be with us to the very end of the age.

But when we move from the four gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and into the book of Acts and then into the rest of the New Testament, other aspects of the gospel become clear. Again and again we read statements like this in Acts 5:42, Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.

Acts 8:35, Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

Acts 11:10, Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus.

Acts 17:18, They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.

In a word, the gospel became the good news about Jesus. Jesus is the good news. And God uses the apostle Paul, more than any one else, to give us a high def picture of who Jesus is and what he accomplished for each of us through his death on the cross and his resurrection from the grave.

Turn to 1 Corinthians 15:1-8 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ²By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. ³For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

Paul wants us to know that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, and that his death and resurrection have powerful implications for each one of us. Jesus, he writes, died for our sins, in our place, according to what was foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures. His burial confirmed his death. But three days later he rose from the dead and that too was predicted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Isaiah 53 speaks of both the death and resurrection of Jesus. And the proof of his resurrection is the eyewitness accounts of Cephas, also known as Peter, and then the rest of the Twelve.

But there were others who saw him alive as well. Paul goes on to say in verse 6, After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Tons of people, believers and unbelievers alike, witnessed the resurrection of Jesus. Most were still living at the time Paul wrote this. Paul himself saw Jesus after he had already ascended to heaven, which is why Paul says he appeared to me as to one abnormally born. The death of Jesus for our sins and his resurrection is a huge part of the good news of the kingdom because when we believe in Jesus as the king who died for us and rose again we receive forgiveness of sin and are rescued from the kingdom of darkness and brought into the kingdom of light.

Turn to one more passage and look at what Paul says in Romans 1:16-17 , I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentiles. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed - a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, "The righteous will live by faith."

So putting all this together, what is the gospel? The gospel is the good news that the king has arrived and his kingdom has begun and is wide open to any and everyone who believes that the king died on the cross for our sins and rose again. And once we're in the kingdom our number one allegiance is to Jesus and to making his kingdom known in this world by our words and our deeds.

In his book This Beautiful Mess Pastor Rick McKinley has a wonderful explanation of the gospel and the kingdom. He writes, "Sometimes it seems as though we find two gospels in the New Testament - the gospel of Jesus and the gospel about Jesus. The gospel of Jesus is his announcement of the kingdom and the life he embodied in his loving actions toward the world. The gospel about Jesus is about his atoning work on the cross and his resurrection through which we receive forgiveness of sin through repentance and faith.

"I believe that the two are actually one gospel and that when we lose the tension that comes from holding both together, we experience an unhealthy and unbiblical pendulum swing in our faith. If we're only concerned about personal salvation without a concern for the needs of our world we have an incomplete gospel (That was me and that's why my gospel was too small for too long). On the other hand, if we're only concerned about the needs of our world without a concern that others embrace Christ we also have an incomplete gospel. It's not one or the other. The New Testament shows us a God who is restoring humanity as part of his restoring the world. We need both."

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: The gospel is powerful. There is power behind that religious word. The gospel has the power to heal a broken world and the power to save us, to rescue all who believe. And next week we'll talk more about that religious word "salvation."

FOR MORE INFORMATION about Valley View Community Church, feel free to contact us at info@valleyviewseek.org or call 610.631.2707.