Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary

When something becomes so important to you that it drives your behavior and commands your emotions, you are worshipping it.

My identity and my security are not in my spiritual progress. My identity and my security are in God’s acceptance of me given as a gift in Christ.

Without love even the most radical devotion to God is of no value to Him. Let me make sure that sinks in… You can gain all the spiritual gifts in the world. You can take the most radical steps of obedience. You can share every meal with the homeless in your city. You can memorize the book of Leviticus. You can pray each morning for four hours like Martin Luther. But if what you do does not flow out of a heart of love - a heart that does those things because it genuinely desires to do them - it is ultimately worthless to God.

Gospel change is the Spirit of God using the story of God to make the beauty of God come alive in our hearts

It is one thing to understand the gospel but is quite another to experience the gospel in such a way that it fundamentally changes us and becomes the source of our identity and security.

The gospel has done its work in us when we crave God more than we crave everything else in life and when seeing His kingdom advance in the lives of others gives us more joy than anything we could own. When we see Jesus as greater than anything the world can offer, we’ll gladly let everything else go to possess Him.

Being able to articulate the gospel with accuracy is one thing; having its truth captivate your soul is quite another.

What would your prayers look like if you believed that the cross really was the measure of God's compassion for someone?

A Christianity that does not have as its primary focus the deepening of passions for God is a false Christianity, no matter how zealously it seeks conversions or how forcefully it advocates righteous behavior.

Awe combined with intimacy is the essence of Christian worship.

As we see the beauty of God and feel His weightiness in our hearts, our hearts begin to desire Him more than we desire sin. Before the Bible says, "Stop sinning," it says, "Behold your God.

Unless we are actively preaching the gospel to ourselves daily, we fall back into “works-righteousness.

We are changed not by being told what we need to do for God, but by hearing the news about what God has done for us.

It’s not that I didn’t understand or believe the gospel before. I did. But the truth of the gospel hadn’t moved from my mind to my heart. There was a huge gap between my intellect and my emotions. The Puritan Jonathan Edwards likened his reawakening to the gospel to a man who had known, in his head, that honey was sweet, but for the first time had that sweetness burst alive in his mouth.

The Gospel Prayer “In Christ, there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, and nothing I have done that makes You love me less.” “Your presence and approval are all I need for everlasting joy.” “As You have been to me, so I will be to others.” “As I pray, I’ll measure Your compassion by the cross and Your power by the resurrection.

In a post-Christian, skeptical age, love on display is the most convincing apologetic.

Satan’s primary temptation strategy is to try and make us forget what God has said about us and to evaluate our standing before God by some other criteria.

Yes. But ceasing sin is the by-product of seeing God. As we see the beauty of God and feel His weightiness in our hearts, our hearts begin to desire Him more than we desire sin. Before the Bible says, “Stop sinning,” it says, “Behold your God!” Think of it like a balloon. There are two ways to keep a balloon afloat. If you fill a balloon with your breath, then the only way to keep it in the air is to continually smack it upward. That’s how religion keeps you motivated: it repeatedly “hits” you. “Stop doing this!” “Get busy with that!” This is my life as a pastor. People come on a Sunday so I can “smack” them about something. “Be more generous!” And they do that for a week. “Go do missions!” And they sign up for a trip. Every week I smack them back into spiritual orbit. No wonder people don’t like being around me. But there’s another way to keep a balloon afloat. Fill it with helium. Then it floats on its own, no smacking required. Seeing the size and beauty of God is like the helium that keeps us soaring spiritually.

Make the gospel the center of your life. Turn to it when you are in pain. Let it be the foundation of your identity. Ground your confidence in it. Run to it when your soul feels restless. Take solace there in times of confusion and comfort there in times of regret. Dwell on it until righteous passions for God spring up with in you. Let it inspire you to God-centered, death-defying dreams for His glory.

If I’d had a good week—a real “Christian” week”—I felt close to God. When Sunday came around, I would feel like lifting my head and hands in worship, almost as if to say, “God, here I am . . . I know You’re excited about seeing me this week.” If I’d had a stellar week, I loved being in God’s presence and was sure God was pretty stoked about having me there too. But the opposite was also true. If I hadn’t done a good job at being a real Christian, I felt pretty distant from God. If I’d fallen to some temptations, been a jerk to my wife, dodged some easy opportunities to share Christ, was stingy with my money, forgotten to recycle, kicked the dog, etc. . . . well, on those weeks I felt like God wanted nothing to do with me. When I came to church, I had no desire to lift my soul up to God. I was pretty sure He didn’t want to see me either. I could feel His displeasure—His lack of approval. That’s because I didn’t really understand the gospel. Or, at least I had forgotten it.

The Hebrew word for “glory” (kabod) literally means “weight.” To give something glory in your life (or, to worship it) is to give it so much weight that you couldn’t imagine doing life without it.

That’s why growth in Christ is never going beyond the gospel, but going deeper into the gospel. The purest waters from the spring of life are found by digging deeper, not wider, into the gospel well.

the word abide is much more straightforward than that. The Greek word meno means literally “to make your home in.” When we “make our home in” His love—feeling it, saturating ourselves with it, reflecting on it, standing in awe of it—spiritual fruit begins to spring up naturally from us like roses on a rosebush.

Abiding in Jesus means understanding that His acceptance of us is the same regardless of the amount of spiritual fruit we have produced.

His love is the soil in which all the fruits of the Spirit grow. When our roots abide there, then joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control grow naturally in our hearts.

Being converted to Jesus is learning to so adore God that we would gladly renounce everything we have to follow Him.

The goal of the gospel is to produce a type of people consumed with passion for God and love for others.

True worship is obedience to God for no other reason than that you delight in God.

True religion is when you serve God to get nothing else but more of God. Many people use religion as a way of getting something else from God they want-blessings, rewards, even escape from judgement. This is wearisome to us, and to God. But when God is His own reward, Christianity becomes thrilling. Sacrifice becomes joy.