How do you define the gospel?
Back in 2009 I wrote an article about definitions of the gospel. At the time I had recently completed teaching a course during which we examined various understandings of the gospel. In that original article I referenced a number of various definitions of the gospel that Trevin Wax had compiled on his blog. Trevin has since authored another post that highlights and emphasizes a broad picture of gospel definitions. You should check it out.
Here’s the definition I’ve used:
The gospel is the good news that God, who is more holy than we can imagine, looked upon with compassion, people, who are more sinful than we would possibly admit, and sent Jesus into history to establish His Kingdom and reconcile people and the world to himself. Jesus, whose love is more extravagant than we can measure, came to sacrificially die for us so that, by His death and resurrection, we might gain through His grace what the Bible defines as new and eternal life.
This past week I revisited that conversation during a week long graduate class that I taught in partnership with The Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. During the class I asked the students to attempt to provide a definition of the gospel (after some rather lengthy discussion of gospel, mission, kingdom, etc.). They reviewed the definitions that I listed in the previous article, and then attempted to articulate the gospel themselves. Here are a few of their definitions (with their names if they wanted to include them):
The gospel is the good news that the one and Holy God has promised to restore all things, including you, through the sending of himself through his one and only son Jesus Christ into history to reconcile you to himself by bearing our judgment as cursed …
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