Where News Becomes "The Good News"

Picking up where we left off from last week: 

We concluded with two facts, based on what we have seen in Scripture:

1. God is Creator and has the authority and right to make rules and set boundaries for His creation.
2. Mankind, as one of the created, must live within said rules and boundaries but cannot; therefore we have separated ourselves from God via our rebellion (sin).

Unable to get ourselves back in alignment with our Creator, In His grace and mercy, provides a bridge back to Himself for us. That Bridge was Jesus Christ, His death on a cross and His resurrection three days later.

“Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out ‘Abba Father!’ Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.” Galatians 4:3-7

From this passage we can conclude five things about Jesus and His mission on earth-

1. There was a specific time God chose to send Jesus Christ; it was not random.
2. Jesus Christ is God’s Son; making Him divine.
3. Jesus Christ was born of a woman under the law; making Him one of us yet without the lineage of sin left by a human father (Romans 5:12)
4. His purpose was to fulfill the law (which He outright claims in Matthew 5:17)
5. His fulfillment of the law would be permanent; we see this by the claim we will be adopted as sons and once in the family we are not removed.

Now we have the Who, we need the How and for that we will look to Hebrews 10:1-18:

“1 The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves. The sacrifices under that system were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide perfect cleansing for those who came to worship.2 If they could have provided perfect cleansing, the sacrifices would have stopped, for the worshipers would have been purified once for all time, and their feelings of guilt would have disappeared.
3 But instead, those sacrifices actually reminded them of their sins year after year. 4 For it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.5 That is why, when Christ came into the world, he said to God,
"You did not want animal sacrifices or sin offerings.
But you have given me a body to offer.
6 You were not pleased with burnt offerings
or other offerings for sin.
7 Then I said, ‘Look, I have come to do your will, O God—
as is written about me in the Scriptures.’”
8 First, Christ said, “You did not want animal sacrifices or sin offerings or burnt offerings or other offerings for sin, nor were you pleased with them” (though they are required by the law of Moses). 9 Then he said, “Look, I have come to do your will.” He cancels the first covenant in order to put the second into effect. 10 For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.
11 Under the old covenant, the priest stands and ministers before the altar day after day, offering the same sacrifices again and again, which can never take away sins. 12 But our High Priest offered himself to God as a single sacrifice for sins, good for all time. Then he sat down in the place of honor at God’s right hand. 13 There he waits until his enemies are humbled and made a footstool under his feet. 14 For by that one offering he forever made perfect those who are being made holy.
15 And the Holy Spirit also testifies that this is so. For he says,
16 “This is the new covenant I will make
with my people on that day, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their hearts,
and I will write them on their minds.”
17 Then he says,
“I will never again remember
their sins and lawless deeds.”
18 And when sins have been forgiven, there is no need to offer any more sacrifices.” (NLT)

Seeing that there is now no need to offer sacrifices for the remission of sin, the law having been fulfilled by Jesus Christ’s death on the Cross, does that mean we are all good again and can continue to live as we were? No! His death on the cross did pay the penalty of death that was due for sin; opening the door that allows rebellious Mankind to reconcile with God our Creator, but we must come to Jesus in order to be able to walk through that door and reach reconciliation. We cannot walk through that door with alone or with any other. There must be an individual and personal response to the open door Jesus created.

In John 14:6, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’”. We cannot walk through the doorway to God any other way. So, this raises the next logical question, how does one “come to Him” and what is our responsibility when we get there?

When Christians use the words, “come to Jesus” we don’t mean it as physical walking down an aisle but more like “come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ”; an understanding and accepting of the knowledge that Jesus Christ made, and became, the bridge (or doorway to continue the previous metaphor) between sinful man and a Holy God.

Paul, in Romans 10: 9a-13 writes, “that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised HIm from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.’’.

Now, to see this practically applied we will use Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost, as an example. As Peter concludes the first Christian sermon the crowd asks him what to do next. He replies, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins…” (Acts 2:38). Peter reconfirms this later when talking to some of the Jewish men in Jerusalem, “Repent therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord…” (Acts 3:19). Further in Acts, we see Peter tell Cornelius and his household, “whoever believes in Him will receive the remission of sins” (Acts 10:43b).

Using these accounts, we can conclude that coming to Jesus involves repentance and belief in Jesus Christ, or as Paul put it, confession with your mouth and belief in your heart . To repent, in today’s American culture, has an assumed definition of being sorry for doing something. Unfortunately that definition is inaccurate and not how the Bible uses the word “repent”. It does not mean to apologize for something but means to turn from what we had been doing; it is a change of heart and direction. We can be sorry for what we have done all day long, then that night go right back to that particular sin. That would not be repentance, but remorse. The author of Proverbs considers a person with this behavior to be a fool. “As a dog returns to his own vomit, So a fool repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11). The way to break the habit of returning to what we know is wrong is to first recognize what we are doing is wrong/painful/unbiblical and that we cannot break the behavioral pattern on our own. So when we realize our actions are running counter to the Creator’s rule and law we must realize we cannot change our hearts on our own and God is faithful to fulfill His promise he gave to Ezekiel, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will keep My judgments and do them (Ezekiel 36:26-27). This heart exchange happens when repentance meets belief that Jesus Christ is capable of changing His creation and that He has every right to do so as the Creator (Colossians 1:16).

Now for what it means to believe. Believing in Jesus consists of two parts- first we believe Jesus is Who He says He is and second, we believe Jesus did what He said He did. In John 8:58, Jesus says, “Most assuredly I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM” and in John 10:30, He says, “I and My Father are one”. Both account Jesus as claiming oneness with God the Father. In Colossians 1:15 Paul writes, Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” He continues to say of Jesus, “For it pleased the Father that in [Jesus] all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself (Colossians 1:19-20a). Furthering Jesus’ claim to be one with God the Creator.

In his letter to the Romans Paul writes, “For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly...But God demonstrates His own love towards us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him (Romans 5:6-9). Not only did Jesus die for us, justify us, “He as also made us alive with Him and forgiven us of all tresspasses, blotting out the handwriting of requirements that was against us” (Colossians 2:13b-14a). So when we come to Jesus in an understanding that He is God and He has paid the penalty due for our rebellion (sin) against the Creator’s authority and rule and confess this is true and we are in need of His saving grace; we are cleared of the debt of our rebellion (sin) and given a new heart and the Holy Spirit, allowing us to now work towards living in accordance to God’s law. This new lifestyle typically does not happen overnight but God’s grace we are renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16).

C.S Lewis wrote of my favorite quotes on Jesus:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” Mere Christianity

Once we come to recognize Who Jesus is and what He did for us, we then are to act on this understanding (personal response). We are to, “confess with our mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead” if we do that, Paul says we will be saved (Romans 10:9). After our belief and repentance, our lives must, and if that confession was genuine will, look different. There will be evidence of a changed heart, mind and life because, “those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again (2 Corinthians 5:15).

At the fundamental center of all we have just discussed are the 4 pieces of our Christian foundation and have been boiled down to God, Man, Jesus Christ, and Personal Response. The Gospel, or the news we are to share is found in the fact that Jesus Christ came and died for us, creating a way to right the wrong of our sin and the context of that news makes it The Good News.

Don't take my word for it, be like the church at Berea, “[They] were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” Acts 17:11