Pulpit Magazine

(By Nathan Williams)

Have you been amazed by the gospel today? I began reading through Romans this week and found myself pausing with amazement at verse 16 of the first chapter. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” What exactly does Paul mean when he says that the gospel is the power of God for salvation?

Paul means that the gospel does not come to us in word only (1 Cor. 2:4-5) but it comes to us with ability to save. When someone hears the proclamation of the gospel and believes in what is being proclaimed, the gospel does not simply make salvation possible, it makes salvation a reality. When the gospel message is mixed with belief in the hearer salvation becomes a certainty by the very working of God.

Far too often I forget the astounding power that God displays in the gospel. Through the gospel message He literally imparts life to the spiritually dead (Eph. 2:1). What is this message? Countless books have been written expounding the significance of the good news, but Paul explains it to us simply in 1 Cor. 15:3-4.

It is often good for us to step out of the steady flow of life and ponder the power of God demonstrated in the gospel. I would like to aid your pondering today by offering some words from various authors concerning the message which when proclaimed demonstrates the power of God.

John MacArthur: The gospel — in the sense Paul and the apostles employed the word — includes all the truth about Christ. It does not stop at the point of conversion and justification by faith but embraces every other aspect of salvation, from sanctification to ultimate glorification.

John Piper: When we proclaim that the death and resurrection of Jesus is the ground for propitiating God’s wrath and forgiving sin and imputing righteousness, we are not just assuaging guilt and relieving fears — we are displaying the glory of God. We are making known not merely divine acts and divine gifts — we are making known the truth and beauty and worth of Christ himself who is the image of God. By God’s sovereign creative power, we are opening the eyes of the blind to see in the gospel “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

C.H. Spurgeon: The heart of the gospel is redemption, and the essence of redemption is the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ.

J.C. Ryle: The man who does not glory in the gospel can surely know little of the plague of sin that is within him.

John Murray: If we are to appreciate that which is central in the gospel, if the jubilee trumpet is to find its echo again in our hearts, our thinking must be revolutionized by the realism of the wrath of God, of the reality and gravity of our guilt, and of the divine condemnation. It is then and only then that our thinking and feeling will be rehabilitated to an understanding of God’s grace in the justification of the ungodly.

J. Gresham Machen: It is said in the same passage in 1 Cor. with which we have already been dealing not merely that ‘Christ died’ but that ‘Christ died for our sins.’ That is not a bare fact, but a fact with the meaning of the fact: the gospel tells us not merely that Christ died, but why he died and what he accomplished for us when he died. And what is here put in bare summary becomes in the New Testament as a whole abundantly plain. We deserved eternal death because of sin. But the Son of God, because he loved us and because the Father loved us too, died in our stead upon the cross; and when he had died, he completed his redeeming work by his glorious resurrection. That is the center and core of the gospel that the apostles proclaimed.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration: The heart of the gospel is that our holy, loving Creator, confronted wth human hostility and rebellion, has chosen in his own freedom and faithfulness to become our holy, loving Redeemer and Restorer.

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