I admit that I am not a details person, and that weakness has cost me a lot of wasted time and resources. A few weeks ago, for instance, I had an appointment with a lawyer who's helping me buy a pre-owned house. A few hours before our meeting, I got a message that we were rescheduling to 4PM instead of the 3PM we first agreed on. Not a problem for me. When I got to the law firm, I got to a locked office. I checked my phone again to realise that I had missed out the bottom of the text message where He said 4PM tomorrow, not today.
We think that the message of the gospel is all about sincerity and passion, but when you really think about it, it's not. You can be sincere and passionate about the gospel you proclaim, but when it's going the completely wrong direction, you're still sincerely and passionately wrong. And, often times, our erroneous delivery of the gospel comes because it's not complete. An incomplete message will always be a wrong message.
So many Christians today are delivering the wrong gospel message because, just like me and my incomplete understanding of my attorney's text message, we miss out on something that could change the message completely. Some think we can preach the gospel without having to communicate the pessimistic negativity of sin and death.
When Paul declared the gospel to the Romans, He said, "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord" (ESV, Romans 6:23). Not only that, but the apostle also says that we've all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23), meaning we all deserve death because of our sin.
If a newspaper headline said that two children were eating pizza, I don't think that would catch your attention. But if the headline told you that they enjoyed that pizza after they were saved from a burning building, your whole perspective would change. The good news only becomes good news because we include even the most horrific and terrible details.
We can never truly understand the magnitude of God's love and grace without knowing the magnitude of the price Jesus had to pay for our to save us from eternal death. Good news without bad news just isn't as good as it should sound. The gospel is no different. When we leave out sin and death from the story, we just become two kids eating pizza, not realising the cost that had to be paid so that we could enjoy that pizza.
