Excerpt from J.D. Greear post:
Are you enticed to read this book?
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Now, you might look through that prayer and say, “But I already know all this stuff.” Of course you do. But if you are not growing in your passions for God and for His Kingdom, you may not really know them. You may know that the honey is sweet, but that sweetness has not burst alive in your mouth yet.
The Gospel has done its work in you only when you crave God more than you crave everything else in life—more than money, romance, family, health, fame, anything—and when your service to Him is done because there is nothing else you’d rather do that delight Him and see His Kingdom grow in the lives of others.
Christian growth is not usually learning something “new,” but going deeper in what you already know. The purest waters from the spring of life are not accessed by enlarging the circumference of our well, but by digging deeper into it.
The Gospel is amazing because it is simple enough for a child to understand but overwhelming enough that it bewilders the angels. My children have been able to explain the basics of the Gospel from the time they were 4 years old. Jesus, in fact, said that in order to enter the kingdom of God you had to become like a small child. That same simple Gospel, however, still blows the minds of angels. 1 Peter says that the angels “long to look into” the things of the Gospel. The angels have to be some of the smartest theologians in the universe, and they still can’t get enough of it!
You grow in Christ not by cramming your head full of more complex Christian stuff, but by going deeper in the simplicity of the Gospel.
Whatever spiritual dysfunction you have in your life, the cure is the Gospel. Every answer to every question you have about God and yourself is the Gospel. Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, said that Christian growth came from “…embracing the love and kindness of God… and daily exercising our faith therein; entertaining no doubt of God’s love and kindness.”[1] Embracing the love of God for you. Abiding in it. Seeing more and more of your life through it.
Let me lay a very heavy burden before you. I think evangelicalism, as a whole, desperately needs a recovery of the Gospel. Even in conservative denominations like my own (the Southern Baptist Convention), who have built their identity on standing for the importance of the Gospel, the Gospel has been displaced as the primary means of Christian growth.
I don’t mean we are not preaching the Gospel or that we have corrupted it, doctrinally speaking. Being Gospel-centered does not mean that each week we tack it onto the end of our sermons or that we can articulate with precision the pages of a systematic theology manual. Making the Gospel central in our lives means that our primary goal is to adore and show off the beauties of God displayed in the Gospel, knowing that as people see God for who He is, their hearts will fall in love with Him and overflow with love for others.
Love for God and others is the heart of all the commandments. Jesus said that if we did that, we would naturally keep all the other commandments? But how can we learn to love? You can’t be commanded to love; true love only grows when you delight in and cherish something. Where does the heart learn to delight in and cherish God? Only in knowing God’s prior love given to it as a gift (Matthew 22:37-40; 1 John 4:19)For many evangelicals, the Gospel has functioned as the entry rite into Christianity; a prayer we prayed to begin our relationship to God; the diving board off of which we jumped into the pool of Christianity.
What I want to show you is that the Gospel is not just the diving board off of which we jump into the pool of Christianity, it is the pool itself. It is not only the way we begin in Christ, it’s also the way we grow in Christ. As Tim Keller says, the Gospel is not just the ABC’s of Christianity, it is the A-Z; it is not the first step in a stairway of truths, it is more like the hub of a wheel of truth.[2]
In seminary one of my professors used to say that “Evangelism was one beggar showing another beggar where he found bread.” The implication was that we ate the Gospel bread once, were satisfied, and then spent the rest of our lives telling people how satisfying it was. I think it would be better to say that evangelism is one beggar taking another beggar to the place he eats bread daily and showing him how to find ever-present satisfaction for his starving soul.
Let me say this again as clearly as I can: Centering yourself on the Gospel does not mean being passionate about the spread of the Gospel, giving a lot of money to missionary work, or inviting people to be saved at the end of every sermon. Centering yourself on the Gospel means that everything you do flows spontaneously out of an overwhelmed sense of awe and delight in who God is and gratitude for what He has done for you in the cross and resurrection of Jesus.
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This is what has happened for me and the church I lead, the Summit Church, in Raleigh-Durham, NC. When I came to the Summit Church in 2002 I preached the Bible. People came to faith in Christ. But it was almost 4 years later when I discovered what it meant to center my life on the Gospel. I listen to those sermons from the 1st 4 years and realize they are filled more with moralisms about how to live than they are adoration of Jesus Christ. In a lot of the illustrations I point people more to an example to emulate (often me) than I do a Savior to hope in.
Here’s something scary: I think most Muslims could have preached my sermons from those 1st 4 years and simply substituted “Mohammad says” for “Paul says” or “Jesus says.” How I tried to motivate people to obey is not fundamentally different than how works-based religions motivate people to obey. Yes, I took people through a “salvation rite,” but at the end of the day I told you to obey so that your life would be blessed and you could avoid God’s discipline. Obeying God was a means to an end. I didn’t urge obedience as a grateful response to God’s grace, or urge people to seek God because He was beautiful in Himself (I’ve told our congregation I’d like to preach a series at our church called “Encore” in which I go and re-preach all those passages, topics and book in a Gospel-centered way.)
In the last 4 years we have “re-discovered” the Gospel as a congregation. The change has been profound. We are more fruitful than ever. We have grown, numerically, at a greater rate than we did before. More importantly, I see people in our congregation who have for the 1st time in years become worshippers of God.
The Father seeks those who worship Him in Spirit and truth, i.e. those who seek Him because they delight in Him. I am seeing Him find some of those in our congregation, and it has only come through the consistent preaching of the glory and beauty of Christ in the simplicity of the Gospel.
I want you, and your family, and your church, to have that kind of revolution, too. The humbling thing for me is that I can’t really teach any of this to you. These things are spiritually revealed and spiritually discerned. They require the gift of heavenly eyes. I couldn’t even teach it to myself when it was right in front of my face, so what would make me think I could illuminate your heart?
And what makes you think you can develop a passion for God by reading a book? Why not stop right now and plead with God to open the eyes of your heart? You might use the words of Paul in his prayer for the Ephesians,
“I pray… that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened… and I pray that you… may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 1:17–18; 3:18–20)
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