The News That Changes Everything
Introduction
A few weeks ago I posted a message titled “What is the Gospel” which was intended to help clarify for both believers and skeptics what the good news about Jesus Christ is all about. For me, the gospel is the best news I’ve encountered in my life and, as this post title indicates, I believe this news has the power to change everything.
This post includes an thoughtful essay by Todd Brewer in which he explores the reason he believes this is the case. In his introduction he writes:
From the very beginning of Christianity, people have found themselves captivated by the message of the gospel, their hearts “strangely warmed” with a newfound sense of freedom and an easing of the burdens they carried. This experience of release, of joy unknown, and a peace that passes understanding is what has repeatedly happened when the “good news” of Christianity has been preached.
May the good news in this post warm your heart and may you know that all the treasures it contains are available to you this day through faith in Christ. Jesus revealed this to Nicodemus saying, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). This step of faith is the beginning of a life long adventure with Christ, who promises to be with you always, to the very end of the age. This is the good news that changes everything!
How Does the Gospel Work?
By Todd Brewer - 1/30/25 (from mbird.com)
“About a quarter before nine, while Luther’s commentary was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Vincent Van Gogh - The Sower
I can’t remember the precise day and time, but I was twenty years old when it happened. Sitting in my dorm room reading through Paul’s letter to the Romans, I reached the first verse of the eighth chapter: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” The “now” of that sentence was written two thousand years prior, but it suddenly felt contemporary, an announcement addressed directly to me. I was not condemned, and this message made all the strange complexities of God and the world click into place.
From the very beginning of Christianity, people have found themselves captivated by the message of the gospel, their hearts “strangely warmed” with a newfound sense of freedom and an easing of the burdens they carried. This experience of release, of joy unknown, and a peace that passes understanding is what has repeatedly happened when the “good news” of Christianity has been preached. Perhaps it has been true for you, too.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
But there is something odd about this whole business that I think is worth interrogating. Somehow, through the gospel, an encounter with God in the vertical sense translates into the horizontal plane of life and one’s actions. God says, “You are not condemned,” and that encounter somehow alters how we feel and live in the world. Having been forgiven, we are given a previously unknown ability to forgive others. Far from being external to gospel proclamation, the variety of worldly, human maladies provides the kindling for the flame of the gospel in human hearts.
Finding a gracious God, the daily anxieties that encumber us feel less weighty and somewhat manageable. But how?
At first blush, the anxiety I might feel in my work or relationships really has nothing to do with God. God may be loving and forgiving, but God doesn’t seem to have much to do with deadlines, strained relationships, or any of the everyday stresses, yet these are the very worldly realities that are transformed by an encounter with the gospel. It’s not that my daily demands or interpersonal dynamics change — I am transformed somehow to relate to my neighbor and the world quite differently than before.
Some may suggest that it is the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit that enable such transformation. Gifted with divine power through this person of the Trinity, we are renewed to become new creations in a barren world. But appealing to the Holy Spirit as the basis of the power of the gospel, however true, does little to account for the nature of the message itself. At worst, it can imply a kind of mysterious, divine magic that operates inscrutably independent of the gospel’s actual content.
There are, I think, a few key characteristics to the good news which together provide a coherent account of its affective power. There isn’t necessarily a magical formula to gospel proclamation, but its intrinsic transfer from the vertical to the horizontal plane is nonetheless emotionally plausible and intellectually coherent.
The gospel has nothing (and everything) to do with you. Nothing? This may sound like an inauspicious place to start, but it can’t be emphasized enough. The gospel is the announcement of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the subsequent life-giving benefits entailed by that. As an event in history, whose cosmic scope reaches into the very being of God, it always stands wholly outside of us. The gospel is entirely independent of our status, success, failures, morality, genetics, history, and all the things we believe comprise our identity. The varying milieux of our lives can neither add nor subtract from what God has done in Jesus for the world. And yet, precisely because of this independence, the grace of God is unconditional and freely given. We are mere recipients of grace and nothing more.
The gospel is not “of this world.” The event of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the hinge upon which all of human history turns, but it is an alien intrusion that operates outside of worldly values and contingencies. The world as we know it is ruled by Death, and nothing we see now is untouched by its infectious diffusion. As such, the gospel must not be confused with any aspect of the world in which we live and the systems we inhabit, whether that be our relationships, social movements, governments, economies, or even the church.
The gospel gives life to the dead. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the one event in human history by which all people might live — both now and on the last day. The horizon of salvation in the New Testament is ultimately the future resurrection of the dead, but the certainty of this hope, arising from Jesus’ own resurrection, caused the early Christians to also speak of life in the here and now. For the Gospel of John in particular, belief in Christ and the life he will give infuses life now with an altogether different meaning. “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). Though we are still bound by this mortal body and world, we are simultaneously alive.
Only Christ gives life. This is perhaps the hardest point to digest. Most of us are just trying to get by, desperately searching for glimmers of life wherever we can find them. But if life is to be found at Calvary, then all other possible paths to life are necessarily empty, if not deadly. Setting the gospel alongside the world’s various promises of life creates a necessary, existential conflict for the hearer. This is the logic employed by Paul when it came to the Law: “If righteousness were through the Law, then Christ died for nothing” (Gal 2:21). Paul’s argument can and should be extended to the various seculosities of our day. A little yeast leavens the whole lump.
Putting these all together creates a plausible portrait that accounts for the power of the gospel to radically change how we relate to the world. The good news promises in Christ to resurrect us undeserving corpses. The only thing that matters is the life-giving pronouncement of Christ: the forgiving love of our Savior, the cessation of judgment in His arms, and the assurance that all will be excellent in the end. The response of faith to such a promise undividedly binds one to Christ, thereby dislodging us from the world and its false promises of life. The message of the gospel is the intrusion from above into our lives in this world to radically alter our relationship to the world. It is the best news that changes everything.
Our work may be unbearably demanding, but God demands nothing. Our friends may abandon us when we fall off the rails, but God’s promise remains. While the world judges us all the time, in Christ, there is no condemnation. The hearer of the gospel receives it as Good News inasmuch as they have suffered (however great or small) from the deadly lies the world has preached, and it is precisely the contrast between the gospel and the world that gives life now. The yoke of the gospel feels easy because it displaces the oppressive yokes thrust upon us by the world, or, as that old hymn says:
“My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the weakest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand…”