We can describe what Evangelicals mean by “the Gospel” by breaking it down into three parts. “Our Ruin” refers to sin, and our need to be rescued from ourselves. “God’s Remedy” refers to the work of Christ. God the Son became Jesus, then died and rose again so that we can be forgiven as members of God’s Kingdom.
“Our Responsibility to Respond” refers to the need to be converted – that is to personally trust God, to depend on Him to forgive you, and to let God change you as He sees fit.
The following quotes spell out this message in a little more detail.
Our Ruin
"[Sin] means self-centeredness... Individually, that means 'I live for myself, for my own glory and happiness, and I'll work for your happiness if it helps me.'
Tim Keller Has the 'Notion of Sin' been Lost? (Interview in “USA
“[rationalist theologians] essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument. If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”
GK Chesterton Orthodoxy
“In my world view, sin is defined as "missing the mark," imperfection, or perhaps better, weakness. I cannot believe that we are pure moral beings capable of establishing and abiding by a rational morality. We are weak, and, in our weakness, we sin against each other by our pride, our selfishness, our lovelessness. I approach my life and the world not from the point of view that we need better education or better government or better communication. We need deliverance, not improvement. The basic concept of sin is that we are deeply flawed and we need divine intervention to help us and to heal us; we cannot help ourselves.”
Heather Williams Overhaul at Stanford
“Sin is folly: no matter what images they choose, the writers of the Bible say this again and again. Sin is missing the target; sin is choosing the wrong target. Sin is wandering from the path, or rebellion against someone too strong for us, or neglecting a good inheritance. Above all, at its core, sin is offence against God.
Why is it not only wrong but also foolish to offend God? God is our final good, our maker and savior, the one in whom alone our restless hearts come to rest. To rebel against God is to saw off the branch that supports us.”
Cornelius Plantinga The Sinner and The Fool
"The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. …Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to commit. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students; now that's sin."
J. Budziszewski Escape from Nihilism
“Let us not trifle with God or trivialize his love. We will never stand in awe of being loved by God until we reckon with the seriousness of our sin and the justice of his wrath against us.”
John Piper 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die
God’s Remedy
“At the center of the Christian faith is a Cross that is not alien to tragedy, and a savior not complacent in the face of suffering. Christ is not blind to the pains of the world nor passive aggressive in the face of despair. On the contrary, the Cross is a portrayal of passion, not passivity. Christ willingly carried defeat, thirst, and emptiness through the end of the darkness to the ends of himself and the ends of the world…Christ does not refuse our sense of tragedy or awareness of pain. He bears it in love, affirming our condition, carrying our sorrows to the end, all the way to the heart of God.”
Jill Carattini Still Deeper Darkness
“If we are saved from the consequences of our bad deeds, it will not be because they weighed less than our good deeds…There is no salvation by balancing the records. There is only salvation by canceling records. The record of our bad deeds (including our defective good deeds), along with the just penalties that each deserves, must be blotted out—not balanced. This is what Christ suffered and died to accomplish.”
John Piper 50 Reasons Jesus Came to Die
“Could God not have forgiven people without going through the pain and the violence of the Cross?" As nice as that sounds, reality forces me to ask: When is forgiveness not painful? True forgiveness cannot occur unless the hurt is acknowledged and called for what it is. When you look a wrong full in the face but choose to accept the hurt instead of returning it on the one who did it, that is always painful…just as wrongs cannot be erased by punishment or repayment, they cannot really be erased by simple forgiveness either. When the master forgives the servant's debt, the debt does not simply disappear. The master takes the loss! He accepts the full brunt of the debt himself. Similarly, when a person forgives, he or she accepts the full brunt of the hurt or injustice rather than returning it on the one who caused it. Although it is painful, this is the way that healing and restoration begin. This is why there is no way to avoid the bloody Cross. And this is why God's love is terrible. Think of what it includes: us, with our best and our worst, with our failed attempts and outright cruelty, with our wrong motives for right actions and our right motives for wrong actions... us, with the mess we have made of the world, with our brokenness and despair, with our rebellions and inadequacies.”
Rachel Tulloch A Painful Forgiveness
OUR RESPONSIBILITY....
On one hand, you may feel that you “need” him. Even though you may recognize that you have needs only God can meet, you must not try to use him to achieve your own ends. It is not possible to bargain with God. (I’ll do this if you will do that.”) That is not Christianity at all, but a form of magic or paganism in which you “appease” the cranky deity in exchange for a favor. Are you getting into Christianity to serve God, or to get God to serve you? Those are two opposite motives and they result in two different religions. You must come to God because 1) you owe it to him to give him your life (because he is your creator) and 2) you are deeply grateful to him for sacrificing his son (because he is your redeemer.)
On the other hand, you may feel no need or interest to know God at all. This does not mean you should stay uncommitted. If you were created by God, then you owe him your life, whether you feel like it or not. You are obligated to seek him and ask him to soften your heart, open your eyes, and enlighten you. If you say, “I have no faith,” that is no excuse either. You need only doubt your doubts. No one can doubt everything at once— you must believe in something to doubt something else. For example, do you believe you are competent to run your own life? Where is the evidence of that? Why doubt everything but your doubts about God and your faith in yourself? Is that fair? You owe it to God to seek him. Do so.
...TO RESPOND BY REPENTING
Relativists are usually irreligious, or else prefer what is called "liberal" religion. On the surface, they are more happy and tolerant than moralist/religious people. They may talk a great deal about God's love, but since they do not think of themselves as sinners, God's love for us costs him nothing. If God accepts us, it is because he is so welcoming, or because we are not so bad. The concept of God's love in the gospel is far more rich and deep and electrifying.
Christians are those who have adopted a whole new system of approach to God. They may have had both religious phases and irreligious phases in their lives. But they have come to see that their entire reason for both their irreligion and their religion was essentially the same and essentially wrong! Christians come to see that both their sins and their best deeds have all really been ways of avoiding Jesus as savior. They come to see that Christianity is not fundamentally an invitation to get more religious. A Christian comes to say: "though I have often failed to obey the moral law, the deeper problem was why I was trying to obey it! Even my efforts to obey it has been just a way of seeking to be my own savior. In that mindset, even if I obey or ask for forgiveness, I am really resisting the gospel and setting myself up as Savior." To "get the gospel" is turn from self-justification and rely on Jesus' record for a relationship with God.
Tim Keller "The Gospel at the Centre"
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