The Gospel
I attend Kaleo Church of San Diego and I love how they don’t hide behind walls, but instead they come right out and say it. The way they describe the gospel is the same. Read below and you will see what I mean.
The Gospel’s core meaning.
The Gospel is not that we demonstrate our own righteousness before God and then He owes us something, but that He demonstrates His righteousness through Jesus Christ and then freely imputes His righteousness to us (2 Cor. 5:21). The Gospel is not that “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’ve been good,” but that “it doesn’t matter if you’ve been good, as long as you believe in Christ as your Savior.” The Gospel is not that we go from being irreligious to being religious; it’s that we realize that our motives for both religiosity and irreligiousness were essentially the same and essentially wrong—that we were seeking to be our own saviors and thereby keep control of our own lives.
To the degree that we rely on something other than Jesus to save us (such as moral performance, career, romance, family), we experience anger, fear, guilt, and despair.
To the degree that we rely on something other than Jesus to save us (such as moral performance, career, romance, family), we experience anger, fear, guilt, and despair. But when we trust in Christ as our Savior, we no longer trust in our own self-determination or self-denial for salvation; neither do we trust in moralism or hedonism for our security and comfort.
Kaleo assumes that most people have not heard of or thought through the implications of the Gospel. We exist to bring things “in line with the gospel” (Gal. 2:14), which renews us spiritually, psychologically, corporately, socially. The Gospel avoids the errors of legalism and liberalism, moralism and relativism, yet it does not produce something in between, but rather something different from them all. The Gospel critiques both religion and irreligion (Matt. 21:31). It shows us a God far more holy than the legalist can bear (Jesus had to die because we could not satisfy God’s holy demands) and yet far more merciful than the liberal can conceive (Jesus had to die because God loves us). The Gospel affects everything we do at Kaleo.
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