Amen. Our first scripture reading this morning may sound a little familiar. Yes, it is a repeat. It comes from Acts chapter 9, beginning in the first verse.
But Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.
Now as he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
And he said, “Who are you, Lord?”
And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But rise and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”
The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul rose from the ground, and although his eyes were opened, he saw nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.
And for three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank.
Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias!” And he said, “Here I am, Lord.”
And the Lord said to him, “Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, and he is seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him, so that he might regain his sight.”
But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem, and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name.”
But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for my sake.”
So Ananias departed and entered the house, and laying his hands on him, he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized, and taking food he was strengthened.
For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus, and immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”
From the book of Acts, we turn to Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 1, again at the first verse:
“Paul, an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead—and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray:
Lord Jesus, we thank you for the gospel, for all that it is and all that it means to us and for us. We thank you that most especially it is not our gospel, that you, the one, the author and creator of all things, are also the one who gives us the good news by which everything that we have broken is able to be restored. Open our ears now, and let us hear your word. Let it be received into our hearts and encourage us through this time and for all of the days that surround us. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
The most important thing for every Christian to know is also the most difficult question for most of us to answer satisfactorily, whether we are answering it to and for ourselves or to other people who are outside of the faith. Just what is the gospel?
At first, we would think that it is rather intuitive for us, that we could each quickly answer, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” But once we stop and think to start and try and give an answer, we begin to stumble, and our tongues falter.
The most important thing about our faith, besides the one whom our faith is in, is something that the average American Christian cannot define or describe in 15 words or less; much less 15 sentences.
I think that for those of us who are considered to be professional Christians, we are oftentimes even worse at answering that question in a clear, concise, and reasonable manner because we are so used to saying, “This is the gospel.” And because we say it in so many ways week in and week out about so many different elements from sacred scripture, each of which is part of the gospel whole, we find it difficult defining it simply.
All of us seem to want to overcomplicate it; to subconsciously try and make it more impressive or extravagant.
It slices, it dices, it can even cut through a tin can as well as a tomato! You all remember the Ginsu knives commercials from the 80s? Yet the gospel is so much more impressive, so much more effective than we could ever hope because it is so very simple.
Paul writes elsewhere in scripture concerning this gospel that he preached, saying, “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
The gospel does seem so simple, foolish and weak, but that’s only according to the standards of the world, for it is an expression of the very power of God and of Jesus Christ.
So again I will ask, what is the gospel?
The gospel that Paul preached across the known world of his day, that brought down and transformed the greatest worldly and most powerful empire that history had ever yet seen—the gospel that continues to drive and change the hearts and lives of men and women today, 2,000 years later—the gospel that has caused people to surrender and give up their lives on its account, unwilling to deny its truth and what it means for ordinary people like you and me.
The Lord Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
The gospel in 34 words! See, Paul also had a hard time getting it into 15 words or less. It’s so simple and yet so powerful; so clear and yet so easily misunderstood.
This is clearly God’s gospel to us, for there is nothing from us; there’s nothing good from us or any other man in it. The Lord Jesus Christ, Kyrios, Adonai, Yahweh. Jesus is the Lord God Almighty. Christos, Meshiach, Messiah. Jesus is God’s anointed Son, fully God and fully man, who gave himself for our sins.
Now here we come to the first part of the equation of why the gospel is so very powerful and why faith is the only way in which it may be applied to us to transform our lives from lives of sin and misery into sanctified lives of righteousness and godliness.
Jesus gave himself for our sins. Martin Luther wrote concerning this verse, “If our sins can be taken away by our own works and merits, why did the Son of God need to be given for them? But since he was given for them, it follows that we cannot put them away by our own works.”
See, if we could pay the penalty and retrieve righteousness by anything that we might do—anything at all—then Jesus’s sacrifice would have been excessive beyond measure. He would have overpaid our bill, then in dying for us. If there is any possibility that we could actually atone for our sin through doing good works, by pious living, or with animal sacrifice, then we have no need for Jesus.
God would not have sent his only begotten Son if we could do it ourselves. Then we would do it, wouldn’t we? But we can’t. It’s an impossible task for mortal men because our sins are, as Luther calls them, invincible against us.
But with God, all things are possible. Thus, that is why, according to the will of our God and Father, Jesus is our Savior and Redeemer, the only one who triumphs over our invincible sin because he is the sinless one. Jesus has done the hardest work for us.
Unfortunately, though, this is where we run into our modern problem with the gospel: sin. However, the problem is, other than our sin and sinfulness, it is actually the issue of the existence of sin and people’s beliefs concerning sin that is our modern problem.
The French author Charles Baudelaire once wrote, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” But I don’t think that’s a true statement. The devil himself is ultimately irrelevant—a defeated foe, a fanless serpent, a blunted sword. Coca-Cola without the caffeine: Splenda, utterly worthless. Even if he is able to still cause some harm to us in this life.
No, the devil’s greatest trick is not convincing the world that he does not exist, but in convincing the fallen children of Adam that sin does not exist and that sin is not our core problem with cosmic and eternal consequences.
Each of the ancient pagan religions had some understanding or concept of sin. Sin was assumed to be a relatively universal problem in our past history. Sin was an offense against the divine and/or against people. Sin was everything considered to be evil.
Sin was not morally neutral, ambiguous, or irrelevant to life. Sin is a problem that needed to be atoned for. Job’s friends assumed that his misfortune was because he had kept secret some hidden, unrepentant sin. They were merely expressing by their advice the commonly held worldview and the common sense of divine retributive justice that demanded that every sinful cause resulted in some effect of punishment.
And the converse idea that everything bad that happens to anybody was the divine response to their sin. The Greek hero Odysseus, his journey was extended, delayed 10 years with misfortune following disaster leading to catastrophe—all on account of his sins against the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, and his cyclopean shepherd’s son.
First for blinding the son, and then denying the power of Poseidon to heal him following their death.
And after the various burial rituals of the ancient Egyptians, they believed that when their soul reached the underworld, then their heart would be weighed. If their actions and sins in this life caused it to weigh greater than a feather, then their heart and soul would be consumed or destroyed. But if they had lived good and virtuous lives, then they would be allowed to pass into their fanciful paradise.
So when Paul spoke to the Gentiles, folks from all sorts of different pagan religions, backgrounds and traditions concerning the human problem of sin, they recognized their need for salvation. They knew their need and they had a common frame of reference for Paul’s gospel because, oftentimes, that is why they were already trying out these different religions and cults.
They knew that sin was bad, and that they had way more sin than they could handle. They just could not agree on how to deal with the problem of sin.
But it’s not so clear with our modern 21st-century enlightened and progressive culture. That frame of reference is gone. People are assumed to be basically good by nature, and now sin is no longer considered to be a problem because people do not understand that they are sinners.
Nobody is considered a sinner unless they’re being judged and condemned for the perceived sins against the latest popular, socially constructed cultural fantasy. Fortunately, that is still not a problem for the gospel’s success and impact, even if it may feel like a problem to us as Christian evangelists, because that is what every believer is called to be.
Remember, this cultural concern forces us to increase our dependence upon the Holy Spirit instead of our own human efforts of persuasion. We must trust and believe that the Spirit will work and move within those people who hear the gospel, that He will bring to their minds the knowledge and understanding of their own sinfulness and their dire need for repentance, their need for Jesus to save them just as He has worked within us.
No mere human argument can ever convince anyone concerning the truth of Jesus Christ, certainly not to the point of saving faith, even if they might give their mental assent. Only God can and will, as always.
Conversion, regeneration, and a person’s burgeoning faith is still the sole operative work of the Holy Spirit. Our duty is, as always, to proclaim God’s gospel and to believe it ourselves. Our job is to still plant the seeds, and then we get to watch the Holy Spirit make them grow.
“To deliver us from the present evil age.” This here is the second part of the equation, and it is something which ironically enough everyone today will agree with: we live in an evil age. Although I expect some people would disagree on the particular definition of evil, we live in a day when things that are good get called evil while evil is called good.
Even worse, it is a day of relativism where the very concept of good and evil is denounced and denied. We live in a world which has adopted the viewpoint of Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov, believing that without God everything is permitted—a world where morality and immorality, good and evil, sin and righteousness cannot exist because they are based upon a standard, a divine standard, an absolute.
All standards and absolutes are being denied in a world that believes that since everything is relative, then there cannot be any one single true standard. Because any standard that may be used must therefore be of human origin. So how could any possible standard then be declared and judged better or worse than any other?
A world where people may deny and ignore the rational arguments of others by simply declaring, “That’s not my truth.” A world where the use and explanation of discernible, verifiable, and measurable facts in opposition to a fanciful world view is now considered to be violence and abuse.
Without having an absolute standard to compare against, everything devolves into chaos and totally and truly becomes illogical. Thus, our true need for some absolute standard becomes a compelling argument in favor of the existence of a God to be the absolute arbitrary arbiter of right and wrong.
If morality is not established by provocative prerogative fiat or holy commandment, then it cannot be anything but relative, arbitrary, and thusly immoral and false.
The most pervasively accepted definition of evil across all of history until our modern time is chaos in opposition to order. Order is a concept that is universally accepted, even when the label itself is denied.
Order is the foundation of all logic. Why something cannot both be and not be at the same moment in time and in the same relationship: it’s called the law of non-contradiction. Order is the root of the scientific method, that a true test will produce repeatable and discernible results.
Order is why your dinner plate will not float up off of your table and why a 13-pound bowling ball will always fall at the same rate as a 13-pound bag of feathers, because gravity on earth remains constant. Order is why the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Order is what the Lord God created in the beginning, when the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep—formless and void, tohu vavohu—in other words, chaos as opposed to the order of having form.
Darkness as being opposed to being everything that is absent of light. Through the establishment of God’s eternal holy law as the guidelines of order, we have had a binary standard established ever since the very beginning: form versus formless, male versus female, light versus darkness, something as opposed to no thing, good versus evil, order versus chaos.
Looking around us, it is hard to not see chaos and conflict everywhere around us. The left versus the right, the powerful acting against the powerless in the name of helping the weak and downtrodden. Riots being called peaceful protests while protests that get out of hand are called insurrection merely because of what they are against.
Abortion being called health care and prosperous successful workers being taxed to support those who choose not to work. Gender confusion—men wanting to be women and women being men—people trading the things that are natural and right for that which is perverse and unseemly.
As the prophet Isaiah declared, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” There’s a whole lotta “woe” going on out there in the world.
And this is why, in part, we Presbyterians are known for doing everything decently and in good order—all for God’s glory. Because the Lord is not a God of confusion but of peace.
Thus we Christians demonstrate through our worship and our lives of faith our separation, our difference from, and our having been delivered from this present evil age.
We Christians have been delivered from this evil age, even though we still live in it. During and following the time of the Acts of the Apostles, as the Christian faith spread across the Roman Empire, the world and culture around us was being transformed, becoming better than it was.
But the world was and is still locked into that same age of evil. We live in a time where Jesus presently, right now, reigns as king in heaven over both the heavens and the earth, but also when his eternal kingdom has not yet been consummated and has not yet been visibly established on earth.
We live in a time of “almost but not yet.” This evil age began when Adam and Eve first took a bite from that forbidden fruit, and it shall continue unto the day when Christ returns in glory.
We Christians cannot fundamentally change the world’s nature, and we cannot hurry Jesus’s second coming. But what we can do is live and work in such a way by faith to make the world better; to make the present world more like the world and the kingdom which is coming.
Not only do the children of God whom He has redeemed need to be rescued from this evil age, but we also need to be regularly reminded and to have our eyes opened by the Holy Spirit to see just how evil the age truly is.
According to the will of God, our Father, God our Father wills that his chosen and called people be saved. Jesus Christ, God the Son, our brother, whom the Father raised from the dead, first gave himself to save us.
Why?
Why did God will to save us?
Love. The Lord God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—loves us, so therefore He willed to and has saved us.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
The salvation which we receive only by the gracious gift of faith in him—God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
The good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s gospel, truly is that God loves us so much that He wills to save us, paying a price beyond our comprehension, choosing to rescue us from the sinful mess of our own making.
This is not a gospel of men. This is not what we would expect or imagine the means of salvation to look like. The cross of Christ would not have been our plan; it would not have been our choice.
But every other way that the minds of men and women have imagined or tried has been insufficient, faulty, and unsatisfactory. Our ways are not good enough because they still come from a corrupted and flawed source.
But fortunately, God’s ways are not our ways. Praise be to Him always! Just as the Apostle Peter would go on to write concerning this same gospel, “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
Paul vehemently denies any human origin for the good news that he preached, saying, “For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel.”
“For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.”
We may have confidence in the divine origin of this evangelistic message because like Peter and the others who walked the streets of Jerusalem with Jesus, Paul is an apostle of Christ despite his human sinfulness, despite his standing in approval of the murder and martyrdom of Stephen, despite all his prior persecutions, threats, and imprisonments of those faithful to the Way of Christ.
Despite him being the foremost of sinners, Paul was redeemed and then sent out to preach God’s gospel to the Gentiles and Jews of the world.
Paul was changed by the gospel, transformed, and the work of the Holy Spirit upon his heart. He was not too far away from God to be saved. His case was not too far closed to be pled by Jesus Christ. His sins, as terrible as they were, were not too great to cause the Lord to turn away from one whom He loves.
No one is beyond the salvation of God when He calls you His child, His own, His treasured possession.
The message which Paul proclaimed across the known world was not some cleverly devised myth, like the Homerian epics or an Egyptian fantasy, but was the express message from God. Thus says the Lord: The gospel which Paul preached was not Paul’s gospel but God’s gospel as received by a revelation of Jesus Christ.
It was not taught to Paul by the 11 disciples; it was not learned by Paul in the synagogues. He learned it from the mouth of and at the feet of Jesus Himself.
Although none of us can ever expect to receive such a special revelation of Christ and a manner similar to Paul until Jesus’s glorious appearing, we do now have God’s word that we may read and which we may hear proclaimed.
God’s gospel is right here. Whenever you need to be comforted and encouraged, you may open it and hear the word of a God who loves you, telling you all about all that He has done for you.
God loves you. God loves us so much that He has saved us from our deserved damnation. Therefore, glorify Him; praise Him, because He alone is good.
So what is the good news of God’s gospel?
It is: If you believe in and trust Jesus Christ alone, then your sins have been forgiven. You have been and will be rescued from the evil of this age, and you may now look forward to life eternal with our resurrected brother, the King, Jesus. Amen.