What Is the Gospel? | John MacArthur

Pastor John, many people understand foundationally that they are saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but they don't even know how to articulate that, and many people don't understand what the gospel actually is. Can you define that for us and tell us what is the gospel? Well, first of all, gospel is simply a word that means good news, good news. If I said to you, you're gonna get a job and you're gonna make $75,000 a year as a start, you'd say, wow, that's good news. At least for the immediate future. If I said to you, you're gonna find a beautiful girl and you're gonna get married, you're gonna have kids, I can predict that, wow, that's good news. And if I said to you, by the way, when you die, you're gonna go to eternal hell and conscious punishment forever in eternal hell unless you put your faith in Jesus Christ. But here's the good news. If you trust Christ, repent of your sin, he will take you to heaven forever. He'll forgive all your sins. Now, how does that compare with the good news about a job and a wife? I mean, you're talking eternity. So you can't pull the gospel back into any kind of temporal thing. The gospel is not finding a need and fixing it. The gospel is not solving a social problem. The gospel is not social justice. That's not the gospel. The gospel is we're all headed to eternal punishment in hell, conscious punishment out of the presence of God forever, but God has provided a rescue through the death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. You're not talking about the gospel unless you talk about sin, repentance, Jesus Christ dying, rising again, and faith in him. That's the gospel. It's very easy to pile stuff on top of the gospel and then even eliminate the real gospel, but it has to do with the best news that anyone will ever hear, and that is you can escape eternal punishment, spend eternity in heaven. So if someone comes up to you and says, I want to believe in the gospel, but I don't even know what that means, you say, well, it's Jesus' death. Well, you'd start with sin and who God is first, or where would you start? Yeah, I mean, you start by touching the unbeliever where the unbeliever can basically feel the pain. You're a sinner. Almost everybody knows that, and that's the one touchpoint you have with a nonbeliever, because they feel guilt, they feel anxiety, they feel fear, they feel dread, they're worried about death. So when you talk to the sinner about sin and the reality of sin, you're touching the one thing that that sinner can know. You then say you need to repent of your sin, and here is what God offers you in Christ, the forgiveness of all that sin and the promise of eternal life in heaven, eternal bliss. So you start with sin, which is what the sinner can identify with, and then you go to the gospel, explain Christ's death and resurrection for the sinner, he died in our place, and then say it's a matter of faith, repent, put your faith in him. So how does that activate it? Is it activated by me praying a prayer? Look, the way to move from understanding it to receiving it is pretty simple. You ask God, save me, save me. You don't say, okay, I prayed this prayer, I'm in. That's not yours to decide. God is the one who saves. God is the one who forgives, and the sinner should be pleading with God. The apostle Paul says we plead with sinners. We beg them to repent and believe, and then they in turn beg God to forgive them. But Jesus said this, him that comes to me, I'll never turn away. That's so helpful and so clarifying. You know, I was watching something the other day. It says that the gospel is to see a need and need it and to find a hurt and heal it. They're saying, no, the gospel is you're a sinner, God saves, and he does that through his death and resurrection, and what we need to do is to ask, plead with God to be reconciled to him. And once you've done that, that's the ultimate good news, and everything that may be not quite exactly the way you want it in life doesn't matter much because your life is a vapor that appears for a little time and vanishes away. This is short, that's forever. Love it, thank you so much, Pastor John.