As we said in our previous post, we’re taking some time this week to follow up in various ways with the text from this past Sunday, as we looked together at four responses from Jude 17-23. If you’d like to follow along with us this week but didn’t have the chance to hear the sermon, you can watch it right here.
Yesterday we focused on the first response, "Remember the Teaching You Received," by taking a look at New Testament scholar D.A. Carson's 2007 address entitled "What is the Gospel." Today we focus on the second response, "Build Yourself Up in That Teaching," by directing one another back to that same gospel again.
In other words, the primary driver of spiritual growth (or the way to build yourself up in the faith) in the New Testament is going back, again and again, to the gospel of grace. Our mission statement at Gospel Life Church is the same as our definition of discipleship: “Rooting all of life in the good news of Jesus for his glory and the city’s good.” We believe that the gospel is the power of God for salvation and the power of God for sanctification (becoming more like Jesus) in the life of the believer. One of the best tools outside of the Scriptures for helping us to preach the gospel to ourselves is the book entitled A Gospel Primer by Milton Vincent. Here’s a short quote directly from the book that I hope you find helpful this week in thinking more about what it looks like to rehearse the gospel daily so that you might be built up in your faith.
The New Testament Model
"The New Testament teaches that Christians ought to hear the gospel as much as non-Christians do. In fact, in the first chapter of Romans the Apostle Paul tells the believers in the church that he was anxious “to preach the gospel to you who are at Rome.”1 Of course, he was anxious to preach the gospel to the non-Christians at Rome, yet he specifically states that he was eager to preach it to the believers as well. To the Corinthian Christians who had already believed and been saved by the gospel, Paul says, “I make known to you the gospel, which you have believed....”2 He then restates the historical facts of the gospel before showing them how those gospel facts apply to their beliefs about the afterlife. This is actually Paul’s approach to various other issues throughout the book of 1 Corinthians. In most of Paul’s letters to churches, sizeable portions of them are given over to rehearsing gospel truths. For example, Ephesians 1-3 is all gospel, Colossians 1-2 is gospel, and Romans 1-11 is gospel. The remainder of such books shows specifically how to bring those gospel truths to bear on life. Re-preaching the gospel and then showing how it applied to life was Paul’s choice method for ministering to believers, thereby providing a divinely inspired pattern for me to follow when ministering to myself and to other believers."
My Daily Need
"The gospel is so foolish3 (according to my natural wisdom), so scandalous4 (according to my conscience), and so incredible (according to my timid heart5), that it is a daily battle to believe the full scope of it as I should. There is simply no other way to compete with the forebodings of my conscience, the condemnings of my heart, and the lies of the world and the Devil6 than to overwhelm such things with daily rehearsings of the gospel."
