Excerpted from this article at 9 Marks, concerning man’s response to to the message of the gospel:

THE GOSPEL

Response

All this of course requires a response from people. Jesus said it this way: “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)

Repent and believe. Turn away and trust. Renounce sin and rely on Christ.

Relying on Christ means embracing the fact that salvation has nothing to do with works performed or not performed, words said or not said. It means renouncing every other possibility for appealing to God’s mercy. It means jumping empty-handed off a cliff and crying, “Jesus, if you don’t save me, then I am lost,” and then trusting by faith that he will save. Relying on Christ means putting away the instinct to stand before God and point to all your good words and works for why he should save you. When he asks why he should declare you righteous, you only point to Jesus and say, “God, justify me because of what he did on the cross. I have no other plea.”

Renouncing sin—repentance—is not merely turning over a new leaf. It is not an über-New Year’s resolution. It is a comprehensive, wholesale change in a person’s life. And it is possible only by regeneration, the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit in a believer’s life.

Repentance is a change of orientation: from death to life, from darkness to light. And it has repercussions in every area of a believer’s life. It means, first of all, turning away from sin and toward God. Not that a believer will never stumble into sin again—at least not until heaven (1 John 1:8). But a believer will count himself dead to sin and alive to God. He will refuse sin the right to reign. He will not offer his body to sin, but to God as an instrument of righteousness (Rom. 6:11-13). He will orient himself to live in harmony with God’s law.

Indeed, the repenting believer does even more. He determines to live in such a way that restores relationships, keeps peace, and gives people around him the sense and smell of Jesus Christ in his life. He determines to join God’s work in redeeming the world, caring for the poor and oppressed, and rolling back the effects of the Fall. Repentance is both vertical and horizontal, God-ward and people-ward.

Again, both these directions—vertical and horizontal—are important, and to neglect either one of them leads to a distortion of the gospel. For example, the revivalism that characterizes large segments of evangelicalism tends to neglect the horizontal aspect of repentance, focusing almost solely on the believer’s individual relationship with God. Far too often, revivalistic sermons call people to believe in Christ, repent of sin, and be baptized—but that’s about it. And the result is that thousands of people are “won and baptized” in America’s biggest churches every year, and then never seen again. There is no change of life, no union with Christ’s church, no repentance toward other people, nothing at all of what the Bible describes as newness of life. They are won one minute, and lost the next.

On the other hand, there is also a danger of over-emphasizing the horizontal, of pressing Christians in the work of restoring earthly relationships so hard that the most important relationship of all is neglected. Many new books—perhaps especially Brian McLaren’s—major on alleviating this world’s oppression and overturning this world’s injustices. They press believers, often compellingly, to join God’s work in “redeeming” the world. But their gospel becomes so socially oriented, so focused on the present, that “redemption” comes to take on a different meaning entirely. The great biblical themes of salvation from sin and its consequences for God’s people get lost. Yet those ideas lie at the very heart of the gospel’s meaning. To be sure, the horizontal aspects of responding to the gospel are crucial. God will one day create a new heaven and a new earth, and God expects us to work, even here, even now, toward that goal. But that cannot be all. We cannot de-emphasize the doctrines of salvation and eternity, or pretend that they are somehow not important to the Christian life. For as Paul once wrote, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Cor. 15:19)

Some people will argue that subjecting the doctrines of the gospel to interpretation, making them flexible and even expendable, would result in a freer, more open, more mysterious, and thus more compelling Christianity. I just don’t believe that is true. In fact, I believe it would result in a tragic distortion and even fatal falsehood in our understanding of both ourselves and God.

John Calvin once wrote that a person cannot truly know himself until he has come to a knowledge of God. And you see, people can only know God and themselves truly—who they apart from Christ, who they are in Christ, and who they are becoming through his work in their lives—through the doctrines of the gospel revealed in Scripture. The gospel is the divinely-revealed key to our own story, and therefore every part of it is crucial if we are to see ourselves or God clearly. Take out any part of it, subject any line of it to your own re-imagining, and you blur your own vision. That’s not freedom. It’s more bondage.

Real freedom is seeing clearly. It is knowing beyond doubt who you are and what God has done for you in Christ. It is being able to live your life with full assurance that God will do what he has promised and that one day you will see his face. That kind of freedom doesn’t come from having the ability to remake the gospel in your own image. It comes simply from trusting what God says about you, about himself, and about his Son. In short, it comes from believing the gospel.

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September 2006
Greg Gilbert

©9Marks

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