The Bible doesn’t view the gospel as the ABC’s. The Bible views the gospel as the A to Z of Christian living. Not simply the way of entry, but actually the path of progress. And we think absolutely wrongly if we think in terms of the fact that we are justified by the gospel and then we are sanctified by our obedience. No, we’re not. It is by the gospel that we come to faith, and it is by the gospel that we live by faith, and it is by the gospel that we grow in faith. And for this reason Christians need the gospel preached to them routinely.

Now when I say gospel, I’m not talking about the kind of thing that happened to me a couple of weeks ago in a place that I wont mention, but I was asked to give an address at a certain place, which I did. But just as I was about to begin, somebody said to me, “…and are you gonna make a gospel appeal?” And I said, “Well, no, I hadn’t planned to do that. And they said, “Mr. So-and-so will.” And so I spoke from the old testament. A fairly instructed message. I hope it was encouraging and so on. And then I sat down. And then someone stood up, and “preached the gospel.” But they didn’t actually preach the gospel. What they said was, “some of you here may not believe in Jesus, and it’s high time that you did believe in Jesus.” And then they gave a talk on how you could believe in Jesus. That’s the way most people think about the gospel. That the gospel is something that you stick on the front or you add on the end no matter what you’re talking about. Or that you make an “appeal”, or you ask people to do certain things. But the gospel is the comprehensive story of God’s redeeming love provided for us in Jesus.

And I say to you again, and you can read of this for example on Collosians 1, where Paul talks about how the gospel “is bearing fruit and growing and has been doing so among you”, He says, “after you have understood the gospel in all it’s truth”. So that you can spend your whole life under, if you like, the sound of the gospel. And indeed to the extent that we don’t we are impoverished.

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- Alistair Begg, The Gospel of Thy Grace, 100808 – Truth for Life Broadcast