Chapter 2: The Heart of the Gospel
Understanding the true source of our salvation
No man can make himself a Christian; God alone makes Christians.
D. Martin Lloyd-Jones[i]
How does God reach the lost, and where is the source of our salvation’s power?
How are men and women brought to true saving faith in Jesus Christ, and how does the gospel message arrest and save souls?
The Apostle Paul did not speak subtly about this topic or hold back on what God exclusively uses to open men’s hearts.
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. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Romans 1:16-17
Paul made it clear, both here, and again in 1 Corinthians 1:18 and 24, that God saves men through the preaching and teaching of the gospel of his only Son, Jesus. It is this message that points them to solely trust in his sinless life, death, burial, and resurrection for the atonement of their sins and eternal salvation of their souls.
The Apostle Peter emphasized this same point when he was called before Jewish leaders in Acts 4:12:
“And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
Peter’s words astonished his hearers, because they were delivered with uncommon boldness from a common fisherman (Acts 4:13), and they are astonishing to us since they compel us to think about God’s method and means of salvation.
One Message
It bears repeating that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the Lord’s sole method for growing his church. Though we as believers may seek to add to our fellowship by pointing them to Jesus, we dare not attempt to paint an inaccurate version of God’s character or filter the story of redemption by diminishing the depth of our depravity and our need for his mercy and grace.
Yes, God is love (1 John 4:8), but he is also holy (Isaiah 6:3, Psalm 99) and any effort to stress one of these attributes while omitting or diminishing the other warps the truth and fails to point them to the God of the Bible.
A Jesus who unconditionally ignores or permits men’s sin is not truly loving, and a stern and wrathful Jesus who requires endless work for atonement is not truly just.
In the words of the Apostle Paul, we must never “shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) when sharing the good news with others. Any message that offers less than this simply isn’t the gospel and abandons the only truth capable of opening one’s heart.
The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
Psalm 145:18
One Source
Do we fully understand and believe that the act of salvation is a genuine miracle, solely wrought by the will and work of God through the power and work of the Holy Spirit?
Jesus made it clear when he explained to Nicodemus in John 3, that no one can see God’s kingdom unless they are “born again” (v.3), and that the act of spiritual re-birth was only accomplished by the Holy Spirit (v.6). Later, he would tell Jewish authorities, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:44)
God is the initiator in his relationship with men; not the other way around.
In addition, the idea that a man’s soul must be re-born dashes any notion that the gospel message is therapeutic or philosophical in nature. The transformation is far more radical than that, as the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesian church:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2:1-9
The work Jesus accomplished on the cross was never intended to merely make us become better men since any attempts to do so would, in effect, amount to dressing up a corpse.
No, our condition required nothing short of a miracle; a miracle that draws its power from the same source that brought Jesus’ body back to life after three days in a now-empty tomb.
Coming Tomorrow: Surveying 1 Corinthians 2:1-16
[i] Lloyd-JonesD. Martyn. God. Baker Publishing Group (MI), 1979.