The Gospel

For my second sermon, I decided to tackle a big topic: the Gospel. In retrospect, this was a bad idea. The passion I had to talk about it was reflective of the passion my church family had to talk as well. Such an important topic deserves extra attention, and I remember walking away knowing I made more than a few rookie mistakes. As tempting as it is to serve up only the “greatest hits,” I think it’s better to be real in this line of work. So in that spirit, here is the manuscript for my sermon on 1 Corinthians 15, delivered at First Baptist Church of Mt. Pleasant, MI, July 27, 2014.

Text and Introduction

Good morning. Thank you so much for having me back! I’m thrilled to spend another Sunday morning with you as we look into the very words of God together.

If you have your Bibles with you, our passage is found in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15. This morning I’d like to start by reading the whole passage before we dive in. I’ll begin in verse 1.

¹Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, ²and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. ³For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. ⁹For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. ¹¹Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11 (ESV)

This is the word of the Lord.

If you’ve been exposed to church for any length of time, one of the things you’ll notice is that we Christians love to talk about the Gospel. We have gospel organizations, like Union Gospel Mission, the Gospel Coalition, Gospel Light. There’s a popular conference called Together for the Gospel. We have a rich tradition of gospel music. And we have lots of books on the gospel: just to name a few there’s The Explicit Gospel, The Ragamuffin Gospel, The Naked Gospel, The Gospel Primer, The Gospel According to Jesus, The Gospel at Work, The Gospel for Real Life, The Gospel’s Power and Message, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, Gospel-Powered Parenting, and of course a book just called Gospel. Last year Pope Francis issued an encyclical called “The Joy of the Gospel,” and before that John Paul II wrote “The Gospel of Life.” We even have four books of the Bible called gospels. And if that’s not enough we have fake gospels like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas.

We Christians love to talk about the Gospel. And we should—it lies at the heart of who we are as a body of believers. Of course, since it’s so precious to us, it makes a great target for the Enemy. That’s why there have been false gospels almost as long as the true Gospel.

But even within the church we sometimes get confused over what this word “gospel” means. When everyone is talking about something there’s a tendency to assume we all know what we’re talking about. But that’s not always true. In fact, even the leaders and authors we trust are sometimes inconsistent in the way they talk about the Gospel.

But thankfully God didn’t leave us on our own here. Whatever confusion the church has faced over centuries past and especially today, the Holy Spirit has already told us, through Paul, the very essence of the Gospel. And it’s found here in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

Heavenly Father, please open our eyes and ears this morning so that Your words would speak in all their power and goodness to us. Give us hearts that beat for Your Gospel, that we might know it, live by it, and share it with others. I pray this most of all for myself, that my wandering heart would not love any story or doctrine or idea more than this one—the Gospel of Your Son, Christ Jesus. We ask it in His name, amen.

Part 1: The Centrality of the Gospel

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul has just finished a long list of corrections and clarifications about how believers should live and worship together as the local church. He talks about apostleship, unity, church discipline, marriage, freedom of conscience, the Lord’s Supper, and spiritual gifts. It’s such a fantastic book because it speaks to so many practical issues we face trying to follow Christ together.

But here in chapter 15, Paul pulls back to the big picture and speaks to the issue underlying all the others, the doctrine that unites us no matter who we are or where we come from, the very foundation of the church, that doctrine that tells her who she is. This the climax of the whole letter. This is where everything is pointing, and where it’s all held together. As we move along, I think you’ll see why.

Paul sets up the discussion in verses 1 and 2 by reminding the Corinthian church of the centrality of the Gospel. He writes,

¹Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, ²and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.

1 Cor. 15:1-2 (ESV)

You see this message is already a part of their lives: Paul preached it to them and they received it. We won’t go there today, but you can look in Acts 18 and see the story of how Paul founded this church at Corinth. It was on his second missionary journey, and at first he had been trying to persuade his fellow Jews, but they wouldn’t listen. After a while he got fed up and literally went next door from the synagogue to the Gentiles and many believed and were baptized. He ended up staying with them a year and a half to teach and care for them.

They believed his message in the beginning, but it’s as much a part of their present as their past. This is the message in which they now stand. This is the message by which they are being saved even as they read this letter—in fact, it’s true of us here and now as we read it in Mt. Pleasant in 2014. Of course, Paul says, we’re saved if—and that’s a pretty scary place to find an “if”—if you hold fast to the word I preached to you. Our faith is in vain—it’s fruitless, it’s futile, it’s for nothing—if we believe anything less than this one message.

This is big. Are you ready?

Part 2: The Gospel is the Story of Jesus

Verse 3:

³For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

1 Cor. 15:3-8 (ESV)

The Gospel is the story of Jesus. It’s the testimony of the Apostles about Jesus. It’s the person and work of Jesus, it answers the question “Who is Jesus and what did He do?” The Gospel is the story of Jesus.

Now we have to be careful, because this can get out of hand quickly. Who is Jesus? That’s a big question. He’s fully God and fully man without mixture, confusion, separation, or division—He’s infinite, beyond our understanding.

What did Jesus do? Well, that list is pretty long. You see, Paul didn’t begin by sitting people down and starting the story in eternity past—although he could have. He didn’t begin with predestination or the Trinity or a Bible study on the Pentateuch—although each of these teachings is rich and important. The Gospel doesn’t answer these questions exhaustively. It’s the foundation. It’s the beginning of our journey, not the end. But everything else stands or falls with it.

In fact, Paul says as much at the beginning of the letter. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 are all about how Paul laid a foundation and others built on it. Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth, remember that? What was that foundation? 1 Corinthians 3:11, “For no one can lay a foundation other than that which was laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

This is why I say chapter 15 is the heart of this letter: because everything comes back to the testimony about Christ. In chapter 1, Paul thanks God that the Corinthians accepted the testimony about Christ. In chapter 2, Paul explains that he didn’t impress them with philosophical arguments for the existence of God or what decisions the Trinity made prior to creation, because as great as that stuff is, it’s not the foundation. The foundation is simple. This is why Paul says in chapter 2 verse 2 “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” It’s not that we never need to know more; it’s that nothing else belongs in the foundation.

The Gospel is the story of Jesus, and it is the only foundation of His church. It’s the message by which we are being saved, if we cling to it in faith. It’s a simple message.

Now there’s flexibility in the Bible about which parts of Jesus’ story should be included. Paul emphasizes the Crucifixion and Resurrection here, Christ died for our sins and rose again, and those are practically universal in Scripture. But there are other parts of the story that sometimes get thrown in. We see references to Christ’s ascension and intercession, His role as mediator. We see the importance of His birth as a human descendent of King David. And we see His return.

If you want to boil down the Gospel into the shortest form possible, it’s “Christ died for our sins and rose again.” But we can pull in these other teachings to flesh things out into what I want to call the Whole Gospel. God became one of us, walked among us, died for our sins, rose to life, intercedes for us, and is coming back to make all things new.

God became one of us and walked among us—think the miracle of Christmas, Emmanuel. Died for our sins and rose to life—the miracle we celebrate at Easter. Intercedes for us today as our mediator; and is coming back to make all things new. The Whole Gospel flows out of the shorter version: Christ’s death implies His birth, and His resurrection entails His return.

Part 3: The Nature of the Gospel

So Paul reminds us that the Gospel is the story of Jesus, whether you keep it simple or flesh it out a bit. But if we look back at what Paul has written here about the content, we can make a few observations about the nature of the Gospel.

First of all, the Gospel is doctrinal. The Gospel is doctrinal. What do I mean by that? The Gospel is a matter of accepting and affirming by faith what God has revealed to us. If you get the story wrong, if you deny or undermine parts of that story, your faith is in vain. A Jesus that isn’t born a human can’t die for us. A Jesus that didn’t rise again can’t give us life.

This might seem obvious to many of you, but in recent decades postmodernism took a swipe at the Gospel. You may have heard Christians saying things like, “Christ unites, doctrine divides,” therefore let’s chuck all this divisive doctrine and just look to Christ in our own way. One author even said giving up the Virgin Birth is like losing a single spring on a trampoline; it’s expendable, everything still works fine. What they failed to recognize is this personal relationship with Christ isn’t negotiable. It’s rooted in the testimony of the Apostles, an affirmation of specific truths.

Which brings me to my second point: the Gospel is historical. The Gospel is historical. It actually happened. The Apostles are real people who saw real things that a real person did. And this is the part that drives unbelievers bonkers. You see, they like so much of what Jesus had to say, but they can’t accept that He’s God. So they try to drive a wedge between Jesus and the disciples and put the Jesus they want, the Jesus in their own image on one side, and they put the disciples and all their kooky religion on the other. And if that doesn’t work they spiritualize everything and say, well Jesus was divine in the sense that He was the most God-like, and so metaphorically He did this and that and—

No. Stop. Paul won’t let you get away with that.

Notice here he doesn’t just say Christ died and rose again—although that’s the Gospel message. He also says, “according to the Scriptures.” This is what God intended long ago and revealed through His prophets. It would take us all day to go through all the explicit prophecies Jesus fulfilled, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so I’m not going to go there. The bottom line is God said this was going to happen, and it did.

But that’s not all. Paul says, “I personally saw the risen Christ! Jesus is alive! Don’t take my word for it, check my references!” Peter, James, the rest of the twelve disciples (minus Judas, of course), they all saw Him. There was a group of over 500 people who saw Him all at once! And if this list impresses you—and it should—it’s not even exhaustive! Paul doesn’t even mention the women at the tomb, the very first people to have seen Jesus in the flesh after His death! And when Paul was writing this letter, most of these people were still alive! They could have been put on the witness stand and cross-examined, so to speak. What more could you want! Even if you don’t believe in Jesus, you have to admit that the Gospel is making a historical claim.

So the Gospel is doctrinal and historical. But there’s one more observation we can make in the next few verses. In this little aside, Paul stops talking about the Gospel and the witnesses and starts talking about himself. Look with me in verse 9. He says:

⁹For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.

1 Cor. 15:9, 10 (ESV)

What is that all about? Paul is saying, “Yes, absolutely, I saw the risen Christ,” but then he stops dead in his tracks to talk about how unworthy he is. I can’t tell if it’s from grief over his past sins or if he’s fighting the temptation to be proud, or maybe both, but he wants to be clear that he’s an extra in this story. Paul wasn’t one of the Twelve. He never followed Jesus, he didn’t believe the testimony of the Apostles at first—he had them killed! He wasn’t just an unbeliever, he violently opposed Jesus and His followers. So how is it that he of all people saw Christ?

Grace.

You see, the Gospel is gracious. The Gospel is gracious, start to finish. God became one of us? Grace. Walked among us? Grace. Died for our sins? Grace. Rose to life? Intercedes for us? That’s grace, too. Even now we don’t deserve His return, we don’t deserve the resurrection of our bodies. But when He does come as He promised, that will be pure grace, too.

Sometimes we forget that Jesus didn’t have to come to begin with. Or maybe we think that by some good we’ve done we’ve earned the right to be saved, that there was something God saw in us that compelled Him to come to the rescue. Paul knew better. He didn’t seek Jesus and he knew it. Jesus sought him—He exploded into Paul’s world in blinding light. After studying so hard, persecuting so relentlessly, Paul knew everything about this Gospel was a gift. He wasn’t worthy. And neither are we.

Part 4: Living in Light of the Gospel

The Gospel is the story of Jesus, and it’s doctrinal, it’s historical, and it’s overflowing with grace. It’s the foundation of our faith, central to our lives today. So how should we respond to Paul’s reminder?

First of all, we ought to take a moment and reflect on our foundation, make sure what we believe is in line with the testimony about Christ. There is no other foundation. Take a walk around you heart and inspect: I believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man, that God became one of us and walked among us. I believe that He died on the cross for my sins. I believe that He rose again on the third day and appeared to His disciples. I believe that He ascended into heaven and intercedes for us—for you and for me. And I believe that He’s coming back again, that we might live with Him forever.

I trust that most of us can say “amen” to each of these statements. But maybe there are some listening now who would say I’ve placed my faith in other things, that I’m missing this foundation. If so, God is inviting you today to trust Christ for salvation, to believe Jesus is who He claimed to be and did what the Bible says He did. In another letter, Paul says that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. I’d love to talk more about that with you after the service if you’re interested.

Another way we can respond as believers is to share the story of Jesus with those around us. 1 Peter 3:15 says “always be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within you.” You may have been taught that verse means be ready to prove your faith, be prepared to win an argument, but I think that’s wrong. What it says is when people see the hope you have—and they should be able to see it—be ready to explain where that hope comes from. The reason is the Gospel.

You know, when I was a kid I used to be bold about sharing my faith. But as I grew up and learned more and more about the Bible it became harder and harder. The Gospel became horribly complicated for me. Where do I begin? What if I get it wrong? Fear consumed me. I started thinking I needed to begin by explaining predestination or proving absolute truth exists. But friends, hear me: that’s not the foundation. The foundation is simple. Any one of you can share it. God became one of us, dwelt among us, died for our sins, rose to life, intercedes for us now, and is coming back to make all things new. And if you can’t remember all that, just remember Christ died for your sins and rose again. That was good enough for Paul. He loved to preach the resurrection even though he knew how foolish it sounded. Start there.

Finally, we can respond to the Gospel by renewing our hope. The Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and rose again means that we will rise again, that death is not the end of our story. It means that death, our great enemy, will itself die once and for all.

And make no mistake, death is our enemy. Death is not good! We desire to be with God, and so we console ourselves with the truth that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, but in our haste to see Him we must not forget that death is the fruit and wages of sin, death is the enemy of our God, the one who created and sustains all things. In Him is life! This is why we sing “O Death, where is your sting?” Our hope is not in death. Our hope is in the resurrection.

So when we gather around the body of a loved one who has gone to be with the Lord, one thought should fill our hearts, one cry should consume us: this body will rise again!* Humpty Dumpty was a lost cause for the king’s men, but even the ashes of an urn scattered to the four winds is no problem for Almighty God. This body will rise again! The Gospel means that because Christ Jesus is alive from the dead, all those who believe will live again. Not just spiritually or metaphorically. Physically. Completely. Eternally.

This is where Paul goes with the rest of chapter 15, and I encourage you to sit down and read it this afternoon, it’s not long. Our hope is the resurrection, and it has direct bearing on our lives today. We can take comfort knowing that even though our labor is hard, it is not in vain. Whether it’s sharing your testimony, living at peace with other believers, grieving over a loved one, raising children, working long hours—you name it. We live between resurrections, between Christ’s and ours, and it’s hard. We have the Holy Spirit, but we still wrestle with sin. We have eternal life, but our bodies still fail us. Our salvation is incomplete. It’s incomplete because the Gospel story isn’t over yet, Jesus isn’t finished with you or this world. But you can have peace knowing that He who began this good work in you will be faithful to complete it.

I was recently in a group discussion about heaven, and a couple of believers hinted at the idea that that this life doesn’t matter, only the next one does. They had their hearts in the right place, but they forgot in the moment that eternity doesn’t render this life meaningless. It’s just the opposite! Your resurrection doesn’t empty the meaning from this life, it amplifies it! This life, your life right now, matters to God. Your labor is not in vain.

After all, God loved us so much that He became one of us and walked among us. He died for our sins and rose to life. He ascended into heaven where He intercedes for us. And He’s coming back to make all things new.

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, what kind of love is this? That Your Son would not just visit us but become one of us. That He would willingly give Himself on the cross to pay for our sins. That You would offer us something so precious as eternal life with You. And You gave us Your Spirit! And Your Word! Thank You, Father. Thank You! We ask that Jesus would come soon to complete our salvation, to make all things new, and to raise again our brothers and sisters who have already passed on. Renew our hope even now as we wait for that glorious day and embolden us to share that hope with those around us. We ask it in Christ’s name, amen.

*Note: while I am indebted to my professors at Dallas Seminary for many of the insights here, I feel compelled to credit Dr. Kuruvilla in particular for the phrase “This body will rise again!” He delivered those words powerfully in class, and I share them whenever I can.