In Christ, the Gospel is the very ground we walk on. To leave it behind is to leave the faith behind altogether. Christians are people who, by God’s grace and not by any merit of their own, have been clothed in Christ’s righteousness and welcomed into God’s family. If we don’t return to the Gospel again and again, we will fall into worldly thinking.

Many Christians who sit in a church on a Sunday morning can say that they have already found the answer to the question What Is the Gospel? They have understood the saving grace of God in the cross of Christ, have taken hold of Christ by faith, and now find themselves in Christ, clothed in His righteousness, adopted as children of the Father, and walking in the Spirit’s power. In other words, at a particular moment in time, they were born again.

Yet while the Gospel may be the beginning of the Christian life, it is not simply an initiation. No, it is a fundamental principle to which we return again and again, not because we must be saved again but because our standing with God and our hope of redemption, once established, remains forever founded on that work of Jesus for us.

So, even for those who have been saved and experience assurance of their place in God’s family, a ministry of reminder is necessary. We need to remember the essential truths of our faith. And we may do so by considering the Gospel’s source, its substance, its scope, and its ongoing significance.

The Source of the Gospel

Throughout Scripture, the Gospel is described specifically to be “the gospel of God” (e.g., Mark 1:14; Rom. 1:1; 1 Thess. 2:2; 1 Peter 4:17). In other words, the good news of Jesus is not a manmade contrivance, but it is a divine revelation. It begins with God Himself.

In Galatians 1:11, Paul writes, “I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel”—or, as J. B. Phillips paraphrases it, “no human invention.” The Gospel ministry of Paul and his fellow apostles was not a matter of calling people to listen to what they had to say. It emerged from their responsibility to proclaim the message God had entrusted to them.

When we proclaim the Gospel, we’re proclaiming God’s message on His behalf. We’re saying to humanity that the God who made them in His image has presented, in His Son, the only means whereby they may find salvation and meaning.

And this Gospel is not a contingency plan. It’s not as if God had one bad go with Adam, and then another with the law, and now He’s trying it another way with Jesus. God didn’t send His Son to fix His own mistake. No, the Gospel has been His eternal purpose since before the world’s creation (Eph. 3:11). Long before Jesus was born in the stable in Bethlehem, God was unfolding His eternal purpose. Peter tells us that the prophets and even the angels knew that something was coming, but they didn’t yet know it in its fullness; they longed to see it because they knew that it had its origin in God’s heart (1 Peter 1:10–12).

Temptations will confront us to leave the Gospel story behind for one reason or another, for this or that strategy, for an exciting new idea. But the Gospel is not a human story that we can take up or put down as we please. Indeed, we proclaim Jesus because “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). And so we must hold firmly to God’s message of salvation for us through faith in the Son.

The Substance of the Gospel

In Romans 1:17, Paul says that in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed.” John Stott explains this “righteousness of God” well when he writes, “It is a righteous status which God requires if we are ever to stand before him, which he achieves through the atoning sacrifice of the cross, which he reveals in the gospel, and which he bestows freely on all who trust in Jesus Christ.”¹ The four verbs of this definition can help us to grasp what the substance of the Gospel is.

This “righteousness of God” is first of all the “righteous status which God requires.” To stand before a holy God, we must be in a state of moral and spiritual perfection. Yet we can never attain such a state by our own power. The law shows us our imperfections, making it clear that “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6 KJV).

But nevertheless, it is also a righteousness that God “achieves” in the death of His Son. In the cross, God satisfies His perfect justice by meting out the punishment for sin upon the sinless God-man, Jesus Christ. And because Christ has taken the punishment for sin, God pardons those who believe in the Lord Jesus even though we have sinned and deserve condemnation.

Thirdly, God then “reveals” this righteousness in the proclamation of the good news of Jesus. That’s why Christians are Gospel men and women. That’s why we want to be about the Gospel. That’s why we want to declare the Gospel: because in this Gospel, in this great story, is God’s answer to our problem.

And fourthly, God “bestows” this righteousness on those who come to Christ in faith. Our sin is counted to His account, and His righteousness is counted to ours, so that we stand before God with the innocence of Christ.

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