This website calls the church to return to the gospel, above all, because the gospel is not only the doctrine of what a person needs to be saved, with progress in the Christian life to be followed by the teaching and application of more advanced biblical principles. Instead, the gospel is like a pair of glasses we put on through which we look at everything in the world; the gospel calls us to allow our worldview and lifestyle to be shaped by its redemptive content and its transformative implications.
So, on this website, our goal is to call the church to return to the gospel by regularly presenting expository Christ-focused and gospel-centered teaching that explains what the gospel is, and how it relates to every area of our daily lives.
This website calls the church to return to the gospel because this is what Christ Himself modeled with single-minded devotion to His followers. In Luke 4:42-44, in response to a group of people who tried to keep Him from leaving their town on account of His healing miracles, Christ emphatically said, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.” Having said that, Christ went off and He kept on preaching the good news of the gospel of the kingdom in the synagogues of Judea.
The second important reason the church must preach the gospel is that this is what Christ preeminently commanded His disciples to do. In Matthew 24:14, Christ said to His disciples, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” In Mark 16:15, after His resurrection, and before His ascension, He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”
In their simple obedience to the call of Christ to preach the gospel, the Apostles changed the world. The Apostles’ simple obedience to the call of Christ to preach the gospel explains why, throughout the NT, only the preaching of the content and implications of the gospel is seen in the NT church.
In 1 Cor. 9:16, Paul declared, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” In Rom. 1:16, Paul boldly asserted that “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.” In Gal. 1:8, Paul strongly declared a curse on anyone, including angels, who preached anything other than the gospel.
In James 3:1, the Apostle James warned that those who teach in the churches will be judged more strictly by God. He was implying that teaching anything other than the gospel would be held accountable by God for doing so resurrection, and before His ascension, He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”
This means that, in the church, a pulpit is a sacred place reserved for the preaching of the gospel. Any other use of the pulpit, it can be argued, is, therefore, an ab-use of the pulpit. This is because men and women without Christ are perishing, and it is only the preaching of the
content and implications of the gospel that can save them.
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
Matthew 24:14
