The Gospel - Every Day!
I grew up in Green Bay Wisconsin. Yes, that IS what that
means. I am a die-hard Green Bay Packer fan. So, I think on
this Superbowl Sunday it’s only appropriate that I begin
this morning with an illustration from the greatest football
team of all times who isn’t in the Superbowl today, the
Green Bay Packers.
The date was July 1961 and the 38 members of the Green
Bay Packers football team were gathered together for the
first day of training camp. The previous season had ended
with a heartbreaking defeat when the Packers squandered
a lead late in the 4th quarter and lost the NFL
Championship to the Philadelphia Eagles.
The players had been thinking about this brutal loss for the
entire off-season and now, finally, training camp had
arrived and it was time to get to work. The players were
eager to get their game to the next level and start working
on the details that would help them win a championship.
Their coach, Vince Lombardi, had a different idea. He
began with the most elemental statement of all.
“Gentlemen,” he said, holding a football in his right hand,
“this is a football.” Think of it. Lombardi was coaching a
group of three dozen professional athletes who, just
months prior, had come within minutes of winning the
biggest prize their sport could offer. And yet, he started
from the very beginning. He didn’t stop there. Lombardi
continued his focus on the fundamentals throughout
training camp. They opened up the playbook and started
from page one. At some point, Max McGee, the Packers’ Pro
Bowl wide receiver, joked, “Uh, Coach, could you slow
down a little? You're going too fast for us.” Lombardi
reportedly cracked a smile, but continued his obsession
with the basics all the same. His team would become the
best in the league at the tasks everyone else took for
granted. Six months later, the Green Bay Packers beat the
New York Giants 37-0 to win the NFL Championship.
It seems absurd that a coach would take experts and get
them back to the fundamentals, but Lombardi knew
something important. He knew that if he didn’t repeat
those fundamentals to his guys, they would be prone to
forget them, and their execution would be lacking.
God is the ultimate coach, and he wants to make sure his
“team” never forgets the fundamentals. In Deuteronomy
6:4-9, he instructs the Israelites with these words. “Hear, O
Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD
your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with
all your strength. These commandments that I give you
today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your
children. Talk about them when you sit home and when you
walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get
up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on
your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your
houses and on your gates.”
Why did God want them to do all of this? In verse 10 and
following, we get the answer. God wanted to make sure
that they constantly knew that he alone was the source of
every good thing they would experience, and without
those constant reminders, He knew they would forget Him.
And He was right. Over and over, we see in scripture how
God’s people would forget the fundamentals, become
apathetic in their relationship with God, and would fall
away from Him. God’s unconditional love would always
restore His people, but not without consequences. He
disciplined his people, because He wanted them to know
that it was far better for them to follow Him in the first
place.
God has given us fundamentals as well, and it is called the
gospel, the good news of the life and ministry of Jesus and
how salvation is a gift from Him alone. And like the
Israelites, we too need to repeat our fundamentals,
because we forget, and are prone to wander and leave the
God we love.
Too often, however, we tend to think the gospel is for
rookies only, just the handbook for coming to Christ as
Savior and Lord and then we move on to more important
things, the more complicated “plays”. Instead, those of us
who claim the name of Jesus need to repeat the gospel
regularly, even every day, because just like the Israelites,
we can forget how good the Good news is.
Furthermore, we tend to confine the gospel to a narrative
found in the first four books of the New Testament;
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These four books, actually
called the Gospels, do give the good news of the story of
Jesus’ life, his birth, his ministry, his death and
resurrection and we need to read them. But God’s plan of
redeeming people for himself, the good news, was not
simply a last-minute decision 2000 years ago, or some
abrupt change in God’s direction. Jesus, was in fact God’s
redemptive plan, His good news, from the very beginning.
So the Bible, the entire Bible, is the complete story about
the Good news of God redeeming man from his sin. From
Genesis to Revelation, from beginning to end, Jesus is the
Gospel, and we need to be reminded of it every day.
This morning, we are going thru our playbook, the Bible, so
that we might see again this plan of salvation thru Jesus
woven thru the entirety of Scripture! Don’t worry, it won’t
take that long. We’re going to give an overview of God’s
plan to redeem His people, and to see the powerful reality
that we are included in that plan from the very beginning.
My prayer for us is that we might be reminded again, in a
fresh way, the power of the Word of God. That it is
powerful and affective. That it is in fact, in its entirety, the
Gospel, the Good news of Jesus.
The first verse, of the first chapter of the Bible starts out:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over
the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering
over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there
was light. God saw that the light was good, and he
separated the light from the darkness. God called the light
“day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was
evening, and there was morning – the first day.” God
continued to create. He created the water, the sky, the
land, trees, fruit, the sun, the stars, fish, birds, wild animals,
livestock, all creatures that move along the ground. For
five days He created all the things we can see and can’t see,
and each thing He created pleased Him, and He called them
all GOOD. We are told in the Gospel of John chapter one
that Jesus Himself was present during creation and even
participated in creation. “In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was
with God in the beginning. Through him all things were
made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
On the sixth day of creation, God said, “Let us make man in
our image, in our likeness (in the image and likeness of the
Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit), and let them
rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the
livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that
move along the ground. So God created man in his own
image, in the image of God he created him; male and female
he created them.” It was upon creating man that He was no
longer simply pleased saying that it was good. He was now
VERY pleased and said that it was VERY good. God loved
man, and gave him dominion over all He had created. He
gave him every fruit and plant to eat from. He blessed man
and would walk with man in uninterrupted relationship
and fellowship. Imagine that. God and man, walking
together in perfection without fear.
But by the third chapter of the Bible, only a few short
pages in, man decided that all the perfection, all the
blessing given by God was not enough. Man wanted to be
LIKE God and so he disobeyed God by eating from the one
tree which He specifically forbade. Because of this one act
of disobedience, this one act of sin, God disciplined man.
Man was cursed by being sent away from the garden. The
earth would no longer be perfect, but would become
difficult to deal with, causing hard, often unfruitful work.
There would be pain in childbirth, difficulty in personal
relationships, and a recognized distance from God because
of this sin. But instead of leaving man, God shows his love
to him by clothing him, caring for him, and making him
fruitful by multiplying him. God’s gospel plan is already
unfolding. Do you see it? Man sins and God redeems.
Man pays back God’s love and kindness by continuing to
sin. Murder is introduced by the fourth chapter, and by the
sixth chapter of the Bible, sin is so horrible and the Lord
saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become,
and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was
only evil all the time. So He decides to “start over” by
wiping man off the face of the earth. But even then, in His
mercy, He saves a remnant in Noah and his family and a
portion of all the animals He had created. It’s the gospel.
Man sins and God redeems.
God tells a man named Abram that he is going to make him
the father of a great nation. They will be God’s people, His
chosen nation, and He will bless them with their very own
land that He will give to them. God miraculously rescues
His people from captivity in Egypt thru a man named
Moses and performs all sorts of miracles to prove His
presence with them. His very presence is actually with
them visibly in a cloud by day and fire by night. Imagine,
living with the very manifest presence of God every day.
Man repays this amazing gift from God by grumbling at His
provisions, longing for their days of slavery in Egypt, and
ultimately serving other gods. God punishes man for his
disobedience, but gives him a way to atone for sin by a
sacrificial system using animals without defect as sin
offerings. This sets the stage even further for gospel, the
coming redemption thru Jesus. Man sins and God redeems.
God gives His people the promised land, destroying foreign
armies in ways that only He can take the credit. There is
no other way than God to explain how a small nation could
overpower armies much greater than them. Man repays
God by marrying foreign women, taking on their gods and
forgetting Yahweh. God judges man for his disobedience by
making these other nations a problem to them. Man
confesses his sin and God sends judges to restore the
worship and relationship His people had with him. Man
sins and God redeems.
Man decides that God’s sovereign rule is not enough. Man
wants a king like every other nation. God gives them a
king, but because these kings are not God and imperfect,
man continues to fall back into sin and idolatry of all kinds.
So God sends prophets to convict man of sin. These
prophets call the people to repentance and point toward a
Messiah that will bring ultimate peace and salvation. The
gospel continues to unfold. God never leaves His people.
But for now, God decides that His people must become
captives to other nations because of their idolatry and
other transgressions. And yet, God still saves a remnant of
His people. Because again, the good news throughout the
Bible is that man sins and God redeems.
After generations of no new revelation from God, God
decides to send another redeemer to redeem His people
again. This time it will not be a patriarch like Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob. It won’t be a deliverer like Moses. It won’t
be a judge like Samson. It won’t be a king like David. It
won’t be a prophet like Isaiah. This time the Redeemer will
be God Himself. The second member of the Trinity, who
was with God in the creation of the world, who was with
God when God said let Us create man in OUR image. The
perfect Son of God would be the Savior of the World. “The
Word became flesh.” This Savior would be like none other.
He would be the perfect Adam. The perfect Abraham. The
perfect Moses. The perfect David. God would become a
man to redeem man. Man sins and God redeems.
But there’s a catch. Because God is holy, He demands a
sacrifice for sin. We’ve seen this pattern from the
beginning of Scripture. Sin must be atoned for. Someone
HAS to die. Either we die for our sin, or a substitute must
die. But now the substitute will no longer be an
unblemished animal which must be offered repeatedly for
the repeated sin of man. God says His perfect,
unblemished, sinless Son, Jesus will be a once and for all
atoning and substitutionary sacrifice. Jesus agrees to leave
the perfection of heaven that He had experienced for all
eternity, to become flesh, with all its weakness and
limitations, so he could die for rebellious and sinful people
whom He loves. Romans 5:6-8 says, “You see, at just the
right time, when we were still sinners, Christ died for the
ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man,
though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die.
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we
were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Man sins and God
redeems.
It was at the cross that the perfect died for the imperfect. It
was the death of the holy for the unholy. The death of God
for man!
I have been asked, and even thought myself, “How could
the Jews have missed this?” With so much history of God
redeeming His people, how could they have missed it,
choosing instead to crucify Christ? In three years of
ministry, Jesus performed at least 37 different miracles. He
turned water into wine. He provided bread and fish to
feed thousands. He healed sick people. He cast out demons.
He even raised people from the dead. Even upon his arrest,
His captors watched him reattach an ear of a soldier that
one of His disciples had cut off. How could they have
missed it?
Some Bible scholars suggest that there are more than 300
prophetic Scriptures completed in the life of Jesus. That
means that hundreds of years before Christ was born,
prophets talked about Jesus coming. In other words, Jesus
was the plan from the beginning. He would be born of a
virgin. He would be born in Bethlehem. He would spend a
season in Egypt. He would be a Nazarene. He would be
betrayed. He would be spat upon. He would be crucified
with criminals. And the list goes on and on. How could
they have missed it?
John 12:37-40 says, “Even after Jesus had done all these
miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not
believe in him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the
prophet: “Lord, who has believed our message and to whom
has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For this reason they
could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere: “He has
blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can
neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts,
nor turn – and I would heal them.” They missed it because
God had a plan, and that plan includes you and I.
But we know that the cross is not the end of the plan, nor
the end of the story. After three days, in the biggest miracle
of all, Jesus rises from the dead. The stone is rolled away
from the tomb. Death and sin has been conquered. Just as
Adam’s one sin brought condemnation for all of us, Christ’s
one act of love brings life forever for all who believe.
After showing himself to hundreds of people, the risen
Jesus was ascended to heaven, where He was and is
glorified. The Lamb that was slain is now the Lion of Judah
reigning as King of kings and Lord of lords!
And that brings us to the end of the Bible. We are told that
one day, the Bible says maybe even today, King Jesus will
return to establish His Kingdom forever and ever, and he
will create a new heaven and new earth, without sin and
death. Without sickness and pain and poverty. Once and
for all, He defeats Satan and all His demons. Man sins and
God redeems.
So today, we have in this book, the Bible, God’s full plan of
redemption in all its fullness. A third of the world claims
some belief that Jesus is who He said He is. Most of you
here this morning believe that Jesus is who He said he is.
But if it’s true, if Jesus really is who He is, why will we not
turn our lives over to Him? Why will some of us, even this
morning, continue to reject the gift of redemption – the
Gospel? It’s because we still want to live our own lives. We
still don’t think God is enough. We still think there must be
a better way. Maybe we feel we’re good enough. Maybe we
feel we’re NOT good enough. Maybe there is still some
evidence that we need to see to believe. Maybe we just
don’t think it makes a whole lot of difference.
Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.” The apostle
Paul says in Romans 8:1-2, “Therefore, there is now no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because
through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free
from the law of sin and death.” The evidence is clear. The
difference is clear.
God has had a plan to redeem His people from the very
beginning, and all along His plan has been Jesus. He loves
us. He loves you. So what will you do with His plan? Will
you continue to live in rebellion? Will you continue to
reject the truth of Christ? Will you continue to investigate
other roads that you think will lead to redemption?
Hebrews chapter 3 says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do
not harden your hearts….See to it that none of you has a
sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living
God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called
Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s
deceitfulness.” Today is the only day you have. Today is the
day for you to accept the Gospel.
Many of us here this morning have accepted the truth of
the Gospel. My question for us is this: Is it still life giving?
Is it still the best news ever? Is the truth of the gospel
changing the way you live each day, or are you prone to
wander, forgetting its power? Maybe most importantly, if
you say yes to all that, yes it's the best news ever, yes it
changes the way I live every day, then are you sharing it
with those who don’t know the gospel? Do you even have
people in your life that aren’t followers of Jesus with whom
you can even share the gospel?
Maybe the most convicting passage to me in all of scripture
is from Romans 10:13ff. “Everyone who calls on the name of
the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one
they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the
one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear
without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone
preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful
are the feet of those who bring good news!”
ARDA (Association of Religious Data Archives) website. In
Lake County, just under 41% have some sort of religious
connection. About 17% claim to be evangelical protestant.
59% of the county has no religious affiliation at all. If you
take that percentage to Mount Dora as an example, that
means that it is probably safe to say that there are over
7,000 people that have no religious connection at all.
-Brothers and sisters, we need to preach the gospel to
ourselves EVERY Day! We need to preach it to ourselves to
remind ourselves from what we have been saved from.
And we need to preach it to ourselves so that we might
share it with those that are in our sphere of influence right
now who need to know this gospel, this great news of life
through Jesus.