Why Is The Gospel So Important To The Church?

Why Is The Gospel So Important To The Church?

Well brethren, it’s a great joy for me to be invited to be with you on this occasion. I would have loved to be with you in person, but these are difficult days in which we are living. Our nations and the governments have had to find ways to curb the spread of COVID-19 and consequently, one of the things that has really suffered, is that of conferences, and therefore I’m unable to travel to be with you. And continue to pray that in due season, when COVID-19 goes down, the doors might be opened and, the Lord willing, we might have some time together.

One of the things that I’ve been quite encouraged about has been the reception that this book (God’s Design For The Church: A Guide For African Pastors and Ministry Leaders), that I wrote last year, has received around the world, and much more, of course, here in Africa. And I have been encouraged also to know that you will be receiving a copy of this book. I have said on a number of occasions to people, that I wrote this book, not because I love writing, which I do, but I wrote it out of a genuine concern for the church in Africa. And so, although it might be read elsewhere, it’s really meant for this continent, for the churches that God has been pleased to bring to birth on this, the soil of Africa. It is to my fellow pastors and church leaders that this book is primarily dedicated, so that as it is read, we might end up with churches that are a lot more healthy than we currently have. And so, if you look at the table of contents you will see that there are quite a number of very pertinent subjects that I deal with, all of them largely in the form of questions.

What I want to do as we meet on this occasion, is to look primarily at the fourth chapter of this book. And it says there, “Why is the Gospel so important to the church? Why is the Gospel so important to the church?” There approximately 20 questions that are answered in 20 chapters, but now I’m primarily taking this fourth chapter, because I honestly sense that often it has been the loss of the Gospel, that has led us to begin making the kind of innovations in church life, that seem to look like they are giving us fruit, but they are not. If we can get the Gospel right, and keep the Gospel right in our midst, and keep preaching the Gospel, we may find that a lot of other areas will be dealt with as well. And that’s really the way I begin this chapter.

Churches That Look Healthy But Aren’t

Please turn with me to Matthew 28, which will be the first passage that we will look at, but it will be after quite a lengthy introduction. So, Matthew 28 and what is referred to often as the Great Commission. I trust you know it by heart by now. It says there in verse 16,

“Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. (Therefore) Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20)

As I hope to show you in a few minutes, when Jesus speaks about, “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he has in mind the Gospel there. In dealing with the subject of why the Gospel is so important to the church, I begin by really bemoaning the fact that, when you look at a lot of churches, on the outside they might look healthy primarily because they are drawing crowds. But often, when you really get close, you soon discover that they are far from the church as it ought to be, in the New Testament. And often, it is because they lost the Gospel altogether.

So, I give the example of one of my favourite pastime activities when I was a child, and it was that of making wire cars. And basically, what we did was to ransack wire fences in order to get the raw material, and then would go to the backyard of our homes and there we turn the place into an assembly plant, as we would be tying those wires together and finally coming up with cars that looked like the real ones that we drive in on a daily basis. So, we even gave them names: Ford, Toyota, Mercedes Benz and so on. And we would be driving them around. And to us, it was exciting stuff, as we came back from school, quickly dumped our school bags, and picked up our wire cars and went off into the neighbourhood. As we were driving, them sometimes we’d compete with one another and obviously those guys that had good, strong legs would always beat the rest of us.

And sometimes we would give lifts to other friends in the neighbourhood, and it was fairly easy; all you needed was (for) your friends to queue up behind you, one person holding on to the shirt of the person in front of him, and there you were making your way, all the way in the township where we lived. They were very easy to maintain. There was no oil. There was no gasoline, no coolant, no nothing. All it needed were good, young, strong legs in order for you to enjoy your time there.

But the reality of it was that they were not real cars. The moment you stopped pushing, those cars stopped moving. And as much as (you may have) we may have felt very nice about it, ultimately, they were a very poor imitation of the real thing. And really that’s the concern that I had here. That you have churches where individuals are in their best attire, as they are making their way there to church. They sing the songs that everybody sings. They listen to inspirational messages by the pastors and so on. They give their “Amen! Preach it, Brother!” and all the rest of it, and yet, at the end of the day, it is nothing more than a social club.

The Gospel Brings Spiritual Life

And I really want to insist that the major problem here is the loss of the Gospel and without that, we cannot have spiritual life, in the context of the people of God. Which is the very first point that I deal with in this book, in this chapter: the fact that it is important to have the Gospel because it ensures real growth for the church. Men and women coming to repentance and faith, having understood the message of the Gospel.

So, we have read Matthew 28. It has a number of parallel passages. One is Mark 16 and I’ll quickly take you there, where the Lord Jesus Christ says in verse 15 to verse 16,

“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16)

Or, as it is put in Luke and chapter 24 verse 46 and verse 47, Luke 24 verse 46 and verse 47. The Bible says there that Jesus said to them,

“Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:46-47)

So, the point is fairly straightforward there. It is in the proclamation of the Gospel that men and women come to repentance and faith and are then added to the church. This is the good news that we give to the world, and it is about God sending his Son into the world to live and to die for our sins. He’s the only one who was born sinless and, therefore, could die on behalf of sinners. He’s the only one who lived a perfectly righteous life and consequently death had no claim on him. But what he did was to take on himself our sins, our liability before God, and therefore, God could now punish him in our place. He stood as our substitute, and that is the way in which we are redeemed from sin. His death is the payment in our place. What took place on the cross was a propitiation – a payment that was made in order to take away wrath. In this case, to take away God’s wrath. And the evidence that finally God accepted this, was in the way in which, three days later, Jesus rose again from the dead. It was showing in a way that nobody could argue that God was now satisfied, that death was completely vanquished through Jesus Christ.

I love the way in which 2 Corinthians and chapter 5 verse 21 puts it. It says there,

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

That’s the fruit of it, finally, that we might be justified, that we might be declared righteous by the supreme court of Heaven itself, God making that pronouncement.

The Promised Work Of The Holy Spirit

That’s one side of this good news. The other is that, when he now finally went to Heaven, he received from the Father, the promised Holy Spirit, whom he brought here on earth, that the Spirit of God might be the one to convict us of sin, might be the one to regenerate us, turn us around from the inside out, so that we might become individuals who are truly converted, truly changed, truly transformed from the inside out. That we might be individuals who now hate sin and love righteousness, whereas previously, we loved sin and we hated righteousness. It is this work of the Holy Spirit that is again a fruit of Christ’s redemptive work, that brings new men and women to fill the pews of the church, to even become church leaders in due season, to grow in genuine godliness, because they have been transformed from the inside out, and therefore, we become real citizens of God’s kingdom. We become real citizens, not only of this earthly nation that we might be in, but of God’s eternal kingdom, changed by the Gospel, changed by the power of God.

When we lose the Gospel, that’s precisely what we lose. We lose that which is the instrument in the hands of God to give life to the dead. The instrument in the hands of God that the apostle Paul referred to as, “The power of God” in the book of Romans when he said,

“I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe.” (Romans 1:16)

It is the “dunamis” of God. It is the dynamite of God that changes lives. Once we lose the Gospel, our pews end up being filled by dead men and women – nothing more than self-righteous pharisees still on their way to hell and in the nostrils of God, emitting a terrible smell, because they are still dead. They are corpses. Oh, that we might realize this! To lose the Gospel is to lose the means by which dead men and women will be given life and with that life, live in the life of the church.

The Gospel Brings Spiritual Growth

But that’s only the first reason. The Gospel is also important to the life of the church because it’s the central message that helps Christians to grow in their Christian lives. We begin our spiritual lives with the Gospel, but we never graduate from it. Never graduate from it. It is through the Gospel that we gain a strong assurance of faith, as we continue to meditate upon the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and what happened there. It is also through the Gospel that we grow in our spiritual lives, as we continue hearing this message, hearing this message, we get more and more committed to the God who sent his Son, to the Christ who hung upon the cross. One thing we definitely will not do, is to want to hang on to our individual efforts to produce any real significant spiritual lives in us. We will not do that. We’ll keep going back to the finished work of Christ that we might grow thereby. We find this pretty well taught in Colossians and chapter two. Colossians chapter 2 and verse 6 to verse 8. The Bible says that in Colossians 2:6-8 that, (Sorry, I’m in Philippians) Colossians 2:6-8,

“Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.” (Colossians 2:6-8)

Notice the way the apostle Paul is putting it there to the Colossians? He’s basically saying you don’t just begin with the Gospel. Having received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him, rooted and built up in him. The picture there is of a building like this: you put the substructure first as a foundation and then, in due season, you begin to erect the superstructure. And you’re always wanting to make sure that each one of those walls is going up on the foundation that is in the ground. Rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught.

Why is the apostle Paul emphasizing this to the Colossian believers? Well, in chapter 2 towards the end, we noticed the reason why. It is because there was a form of legalism and a form of asceticism that had crept into the church. Brothers and sisters were beginning to seek to grow their lives through “dos” and “don’ts” and so he says there beginning with verse 20,

“If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings?” (Colossians 2:20-22)

In other words, it’s all basic human wisdom, human legalism. It says then verse 23,

“These have indeed an appearance of wisdom (they look wise) in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.” (Colossians 2:23)

They cannot arrest sin in the heart. There’s only one way to arrest sin in the heart, and it is when God’s people build their lives on the foundation of Calvary, on the foundation of the cross and they do not move away from that.

Another obvious example of this is found in Romans and chapter 12, Romans 12, where the apostle Paul is ending the part of this great epistle that deals with indicatives of this great Gospel – the things that are done. The things that are facts that we simply believe in. And then in chapter 12 onwards, it deals with the imperatives of the Gospel – that which we ought to do in order for us to please God. But what I want you to notice is that in chapter 12 verse 1, he begins this building of the imperatives on the Gospel itself, what God has already done in Christ. Romans 12 and verse one,

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” (Romans 12:1)

The New Living Translation of the Bible captures this thought very well by saying,

“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God of all he has done for you.” (Romans 12:1a)

Which is what Paul is saying here. Because of all that he has done for you, and what is that? Well, exactly what he has been handling all the way from the first chapter to the 11th chapter: a grand panoramic view of what the apostle Paul, in the book of Ephesians, calls “the unsearchable riches of Christ” and at the centre of it all, is that great work of redemption. The great work of redemption. That substitutionary work that we are but beneficiaries of. There are a number of high points in that great, this great, epistle and one of them is when he says,

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1)

Or, as he puts it later in the same chapter, in the book of Romans,

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39)

It is something of these glories in the soul, that makes a child of God say, “I am going to spend and be spent for him who has loved me this way. There’s no reason why I would even think about holding anything back. I’m going to give myself and give my body and give my time and give my talents as a living sacrifice to this God, out of love for him. I would like to love him back.”

One hymn writer captures it so well when he says,

O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy grace, Lord, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee (The theme of grace is what ought to do this)
Prone to wander Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above. (Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing)

Grace, grace, grace motivates a true child of God to live for the glory of God.

The Gospel Gives Birth To True Worship

Well, very quickly, time is not on our side here. Here is another reason why proclaiming the Gospel is so important to the life of the church. And it is the fact that it is the Gospel that gives birth to true worship, deep worship, God glorifying worship. And in a sense, we can still remain here, in Romans 12, in order for us to see this, because the words that we are reading here in Romans 12 are actually built upon the finishing words of Romans chapter 11. And the ending words of Romans 11 actually are a doxology. Listen to this. I begin reading from verse 33 of Romans and chapter 11. The Bible says there,

“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

 “For who has known the mind of the Lord,
or who has been his counsellor?”
 “Or who has given a gift to him
that he might be repaid?”

(And there it is) For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:33-36)

It has been this display, this, this meditation upon the height and depth and length and breadth of the love of God in Christ Jesus, that makes the apostle Paul worship as he does here. “Oh, the depths,” he says, “of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!”

May I say that without a continuing feast upon this great theme of the Gospel, inevitably worship is lost. And that’s become fairly common in a lot of churches. And that’s the reason why we have, in the end, replaced true worship with entertainment. it’s the only way you can keep people coming whose lives are not built upon the Gospel.

And so, individuals come to church, and a church which is characterized by motivational speaking instead of opening up these grand biblical truths, doctrines of the gospel, and therefore they just want to repeat over and over and over again some simple chorus that says, maybe, “God has blessed me.” And, you know, “You don’t know how God has blessed me. You don’t know how…” And what matters is the music and the dancing. That’s all that matters. And even when there is an opportunity to say something about what the blessings are, you discover it’s all physical stuff. It’s my health. He’s given me education. He’s given me marriage. He’s given me children. He’s given me a home. He’s given me a job. He’s given me a car, an expensive car for that matter. He’s given me physical things that even unbelievers have.

There’s a failure to slot in that which is glorious, infinitely glorious. That he’s given me redemption. He’s given me justification. He’s given me adoption. He’s given me regeneration. He’s given me sanctification. He’s giving me glorification – its just a matter of time. All those glorious fruits of the Gospel are conspicuous by their absence. Brethren, it ought not to be. basically, the things that are being rejoiced about are nothing more than wire cars, that’s all they are, wire cars. In the end, it’s our own human effort that does it.

Preach The True Gospel

Sadly, very few church pastors are still preaching the good old Gospel, to both non-believers and believers. And all you need to do is pick up an average church member in a lot of these churches and say to that person, “Supposing I was not a Christian, share with me what you understand to be the Gospel, in five minutes,” and listen to the pool of ignorance that they are in.

I’ve never forgotten just asking somebody, just a week or two ago, that same question, who’s grown up in church, his own parents are church leaders, and claims to have been a Christian for at least 9 years. I said to him, “If I was not a believer, and I came to you and I said I want to become a Christian today. What should I do? His answer was, “I’ll tell you to read your Bible.” I said, “Uh-huh.” And he was stuck, stuck!

That’s a tragedy! That we should have individuals in our churches who are actually claiming to be Christians and they don’t know the good news that the world desperately needs to hear: the good news by which they should be growing in grace. The good news that ought to be causing worship. true worship to well up to God in praise. It’s a complete tragedy and oh how I pray that those of you who are listening to me today will not be guilty of that. To end up with your hands red in blood on the judgment day, that many individuals that passed through your hands, went to Hell thinking they were going to Heaven. Oh, that God may save each one of us from that. Indeed, may it be that, as Spurgeon puts it, that those who are going to Hell, may only end up there by climbing over us, because through us would be a very clear, ongoing, clarion call of the blessed Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is that alone that truly builds up churches. Yes, it may not have immediate fruit, tomorrow’s fruit, because some of the people getting converted might end up joining other churches. But in due season, the fruit will be obvious. The fruit will be obvious. Oh, I plead with you: hang on to the blessed Gospel. Proclaim it. Live it out. It is essential for the health of the church. Amen