i concluded my last post with the thought that when i finally began to understand the Gospel i was changed. the gospel does that, it changes you.
this Gospel is what some of the church has lost. but it is the key to true freedom.
having come to the place of spiritual meltdown, a friend pursued me and allowed me to vent, and confess, and cry. honestly, i was acting very unbalanced at the time and i look back at that time with embarrassment, yet my friend continued to reach out with concern and LOVE. after an hour of dumping my inner life on him i half expected him to reject me as i had come to believe God had done but he didn’t and that is when the door opened to me in understanding the reality of the Gospel. understanding the expansive LOVE of God is the key to understanding the gospel.
God in LOVE chose us before the foundation of the world.
God in LOVE created a means to restore a broken fellowship with Him in spite of the ugliness of our sin and our rejection of Him as our God.
God in LOVE took the form of a human being and chose, in JESUS, to suffer the everyday sufferings of all that is human.
God in JESUS healed the sick, fed the multitudes, freed the demon oppressed, and brought people back from the dead.
God in JESUS suffered humiliation, rejection from friends, betrayal, shame, incredible physical pain, and the crushing weight of the gross, horrific, repulsive sin that we commit every day. God took all the sin we would ever commit and in JESUS, made restitution with HIS BLOOD, now freeing us from the penalty of sin forever.
And to prove that this last sacrifice was sufficient for all time God in JESUS rose from the dead.
When we come to understand and accept this we are now in JESUS.
JESUS did all that we can never do. God loves us unconditionally because of JESUS.
God in JESUS has made us fully justified, completely righteous, forever holy. We are free from our sin, free from any wrath from God, free to become what God is calling us to be. we are also free to fail and get back up. we are even free to sin but the deeper our understanding of God’s LOVE in JESUS the less we seek sin and the more we seek Him.
The reality is we don’t do anything to earn our salvation, nor do we do anything to keep it. Blessings come because of JESUS not because i am good. everything in our relationship with God is because of JESUS.
JESUS is the key. JESUS is the reality of God’s LOVE.
once i saw that, i was free from the bondage of self-serving religiosity. do i still screw up? every day, but my salvation is not about how good i am getting, it has always been about how perfect JESUS is.
JESUS is the GOSPEL, the GOOD NEWS of God’s great LOVE.
Musings of a "not so good" Christian 
Hi Mark, really enjoying your take on the Gospel. Of course your reformed theology is showing! But I’ll forgive you for that! I’ve begun to understand the Gospel less and less in propositional truth statements, and more in relational terms. The theology is important ( I guess), but understanding those truths never ignited a love on my part, I’m grateful for it and I admire God for all the effort, but what really captures my heart is the relational aspect of the Gospel. The Gospel declares that God is now free to be friends with sinners (me). I can ask His advice, we can laugh (and cry) together, we have arguments, He wants to know my opinion on things, He ticks me off, I’m sure he’s “ticked off” at me sometimes, I ignore His advice, He stands up for me and defends me, He disciplines me, I run away from Him, he runs after me! He assures me that I never have to relate to Him from my “false self” (the pretender trying to impress others)! The Gospel is about freedom from “religious theater”, and freedom to simply be human. The insane, irrational, nonsensical, flawed, broken, egotistical, childish, spiritual brat that I am!! Why? Because Jesus is a “friend of sinners” and that for me is the Gospel “in a nutshell”.
Theology and doctrinal purity never leads to an intimate relationship with our Creator Daddy. Too many of us Christians get stuck at the theology and forget the relationship. If we conducted our human relationships like some Christians conduct their relationship with God we would have no friends….
lou I’m afraid that mark is right on this one. and Mark I believe that lou is right on some grounds as well. We “Christians,” at the birth of our spiritual relationship, relay purely on the emotional needs that all religion can provide. it gives us that warm fuzzy feeling, that we are important and needed in this world, and gives a reason to live. For the nature of mankind is to “feel” needed as a productive member of society. With that being said even the ways of confuscis and daoism can fulfil that need, and they get it done without the need of any one specific diety. So lou, I believe that you need to take your head out of the clouds and dig into your Bible alittle more to find that God of creation. What Mark is trying to say is that once we as “Christians” begin to mature in our faith, that fuzzy feeling that lurks deep within us begins to fade and we need to find some other way to fill the void. The reason for this is becuase most “Christians” don’t look at the Bible as Direct communication with God. they begin to dig in deep and find the problems of society and why things are the way they are. we get caught up in the rheortic and theology of the bible and begin to claim our theological belief structure. One man claims to be a calvinist while another claims to follow martian luther,when infact they should be studing the Biblefor a directline communication with God so that he can reveal his nature to us on a personal level. And Mark this is where you could learn a lesson from lou if we learn to seperate our selves from the message we truely miss the reason of why we were created. Its not that we should worship in everything we do, it is that we should let everything we do be worship. and mark you should really start refrencing your blogs I believ that the average person would love to see the research that you put into your blogs