The word, “gospel” means, “good news.” In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul summarizes the Gospel of Jesus Christ in this way.
“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…”
- 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
The first thing to note is that whatever this good news is, it is the door by which we start a relationship with God (Paul says, “you received”), this good news is the room in which you must live your Christian life (Paul says, “in which you stand”) and this good news is the oxygen of your ongoing spiritual life (Paul says, “by which you are being saved”). In other words, the gospel has past, present and future implications. It matters for all of life!
At Grace Fellowship Church, we like to keep "the gospel on our hand", by assigning a word to each finger "Christ died for our sins...", then raising our hand upward as a sign of the resurrection, "...and was raised!"
The gospel is about the second member of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. This long-promised Messiah was born of the virgin Mary and lived a sinless life.
The last three years of that life were spent doing good and teaching people about God (You can read all about that in a place like the Gospel of Mark).
Jesus, both fully human and fully divine, was put to death on a Roman cross.
He really died.
To the point that when His body was taken down from the cross it was buried in a Jewish tomb. This death of Jesus was not an accident, however.
Sometimes the most important words in our Bible are the smallest ones. The word, “for” means “in the place of.”
The death Jesus died was a substitution. He was taking the place of, or dying in the place of someone else. Who this was gets explained further with the next two words.
When Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he was writing to Christians. That is why he tells them that Jesus died for “our” sins — they were all Christians.
The death that Jesus died was for all those who repent (turn away from sin) and believe (have faith in Jesus alone to save them).
All of us were born with an inclination to sin. All of us have sinned in real-time.
God told the first man, Adam, that if he sinned, he would surely die. The penalty for all sin is death.
The message of the Gospel is that Jesus came to die in our place. He took our sins on Himself and suffered the punishment of God in our place.
God’s giant stamp of approval on what Jesus did for us was raising Him from the dead. Jesus was resurrected on the third day and appeared to many of His disciples to prove it.
By being raised from the dead, God made clear that the full price for sins had been paid by His Son.
Now, the only thing left is for people like you and me to respond to this good news. For, the message of the Gospel is not mere information, but a call to obedience. We are supposed to obey the good news.
We are supposed to do something when we hear the gospel: we are to repent (agree with God that we are sinners, renounce our sins and turn our back on that old way of life) and to believe (put all our confidence in the person of Jesus as our substitute, whose death was enough to rescue us from the hell we deserved).
In this sense, the Gospel is something to know, to be accepted as true, and to act upon. You can talk about repenting and believing as obeying the gospel.
And that leaves us with a good question to ask ourselves:
Have I come all the way to Christ?