Phil Gons

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What Is the Gospel? How Genesis 12:3 and Galatians 3:8 Open Our Eyes to the Whole-Bible, Whole-World Good News

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It seems like an elementary question with a simple answer. Almost every Sunday school child at gospel-preaching churches knows that the gospel is the good news about Jesus dying on the cross to save sinners through faith so they can be forgiven and have eternal life.

While there’s a beautiful simplicity to the gospel that even a child can understand and savingly believe (Matt 18:3, 6; 19:14), there’s also a depth and multifaceted richness to the gospel that drops the jaws of the inhabitants of the spiritual realm (1 Cor 2:6–10; Eph 3:10–11; cf. 1 Pet 1:12), baffles theologians (1 Pet 1:10–12; cf. Dan 12:8–9; Zech 4:4–6), can’t be exhausted in all the world’s books (cf. John 21:25), and will be an endless source of delight for all eternity (cf. Rev 4:9–10; 5:13; 7:12).

In this post, I’d like to consider some common conceptions of the gospel and then invite you to broaden your horizons beyond these essential elementary truths into depths and glories of the gospel that you might not often enough consider.

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“Faith Reviving” | Augustus Toplady

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I recently enjoyed reflecting on this encouraging hymn text with solid theology penned by Augustus Toplady (ERF | ODCC):

Augustus TopladyFrom whence this fear and unbelief?
Hath not the Father put to grief
His spotless Son for me?
And will the righteous Judge of men
Condemn me for that debt of sin
Which, Lord, was charged on thee?

Complete atonement thou hast made,
And to the utmost farthing paid
Whate’er thy people owed;
How then can wrath on me take place
If sheltered in thy righteousness,
And sprinkled with thy blood?

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Fighting for a Clean Conscience

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I just posted an excerpt from John Ensor’s The Great Work of the Gospel: How We Experience God’s Grace. It’s an encouraging read that I needed. I commend it to you. Here is a portion of that excerpt:

INSTRUCTING OUR CONSCIENCE ABOUT THE CROSS

Not that this sense of liberty is always there and never flags. It surely does. One problem is that our conscience is not sufficiently informed about the gospel. It needs training in righteousness. In terms of human experience, we must often “reassure our heart before him; for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart” (1 John 3:19-20). I take this to mean that we need to bring the work of God in Christ to bear on our stubborn conscience. We must grasp the truth of the cross and wrestle our conscience into alignment and conformity. We must instruct our conscience about the cross until our conviction of guilt gives way to joy and confidence. Hebrews 10:22 calls this having “our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil [burdened] conscience.”

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