The Role of the Gospel

We have had much discussion over the past few months on the necessity of changing our lives to become more missional minded individually and as a church body. I am convinced that this is necessary. I am also convinced that one of the main barriers we have in doing this is our relatively small view of the gospel and its continuing role in our lives. We cannot live a missional life without preaching the gospel to ourselves every day, in every situation we encounter. The gospel should be our first thought of the day, the last one as we fall asleep, and should govern all of the thoughts in between. If we are honest, I believe most of us (myself included) cannot say that this is true of our lives.

Therefore, over the next few weeks I am going to present some arguments for preaching the gospel to ourselves on a daily basis. I will discuss benefits to our own life, benefits to our interactions with fellow believers, and benefits in living missionally.

A few weeks ago in youth group, we asked the kids to write out the gospel. I was stunned at the number of them who managed to leave out sin entirely! And this from kids who, for the most part, have been raised in Christian homes and have attended church, sunday school, and youth group their whole lives! Therefore our discussion will start out with sin. We will look at what sin is and how God views sin. We will then move onto the solution to sin - the gospel. Lord willing we will together be convinced of God's absolute hatred of sin, of the fact that we are by our very nature sinners, of the extreme mercy and grace shown to us through Jesus' work on the cross, and the absolute necessity of the gospel dictating every aspect of our lives.