Because we feel the guilt and the remaining corruption of our sin on a daily basis, we need to be reminded that Christ has taken the guilt away in His substitutionary death and have broken the power of sin on the cross. Because we are united to Him, we need to be constantly reminded of these truths. … As we preach this Gospel to ourselves, we will grow in the holiness that Christ has purchased for us in His death. If we forget these truths, Peter tells us that we will “lack” growth in grace and holiness.

Ten or so years ago, it was exceedingly common to hear people in the broader Reformed and Evangelical circles saying things like, “You’ve got to learn to preach the Gospel to yourself!” Usually it came in the context of one friend counseling another during a period of struggle with sin, or during a period of painful trial. Occasionally you would hear the phrase surface in pulpits as well. But then there was pushback from certain theologically conservative corners. I remember hearing a well known biblical counselor emphatically say that the idea of “preaching the Gospel to yourself” is nowhere to be found in Scripture. Others rightly suggested that it all depends on what you mean by “the Gospel.” If, by the Gospel, you mean merely justification so that it’s ok that you continue in sinful practices because you’ve been justified, then this is terribly wrongheaded. So, are we to “preach the Gospel to ourselves,” or is that idea foreign to the biblical teaching on sanctification and the Christian life? I’ve heard the phrase less and less over the years, but I’ve also appropriated it more and more into my life since then. In order to give due consideration to this subject, we first have to answer the question, “What is the Gospel?” Then we can scan the pages of Scripture to see if we have any descriptive or prescriptive grounds for preaching such a Gospel to ourselves.

Definition

In 1 Corinthians 15:1-3, the apostle Paul wrote to a  church that he had planted and reminded them of the Gospel that he had preached to them. He summed up “the Gospel” in the following way:

Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.

Here we have a succinct summary of the Gospel–namely, the substitutionary, atoning death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus died for our sins. Jesus was buried. Jesus rose again on the third day. Paul intimates that all of this was according to the Scriptures. The Old Testament had already borne witness to the facts of the Gospel. While we might be tempted to think of the statement “died for our sins” in terms of our justification in Jesus, it would serve us well to see if it includes any other saving blessing.

In his essay, “The Earliest Confession of the Atonement in Paul,” Herman Ridderbos argues quite persuasively that the Apostle Paul has both justification and sanctification in view when he says, “Christ died for our sins.” It is not merely the judicial aspect of Christ’s death to which Paul refers–it is also the transformative. This, argues Ridderbos, is clear from the fact that Paul uses similar terminology in Romans 6 (which is clearly sanctificiationary in nature).” Reflecting on the meaning of Paul’s formula in 1 Cor. 15:3, Ridderbos explained:

The idea of atoning sacrifice is in Paul closely connected to the concept of forensic justification. So, for example, in Rom. 3:25 where it si said that God has put forth Christ as an expiation to show his righteousness (vv. 25, 26), God manifests Himself in the death of Christ as the righteous Judge, who in Christ’s death judges and condemns sin (cf. also Rom. 8:3) and who at the same time justifies and acquits “him who has faith in Jesus.” Therefore it can be said that we are justified “through His blood” (Rom. 5:9). In both concepts Christ appears as the substitute; e.g. when it is said that “one has died for all” in 2 Cor. 5:14, where the “for us” of the atoning sacrifice is closely related to the substitution by the “One” for the “all.” We find the same thought elsewhere, when the justification of the ungodly is founded on their sins having been accounted to Christ and when He thus substitutes for them; e.g. (and again in close correspondence to the terminology of Isaiah 53), in 2 Cor. 5:21: “for our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” In both parts of this statement Paul uses the abstactum pro concreto: God made the sinless One the carrier of sin so that we in Him would be righteousness before God. Substitution and justification are closely related so that it can be said that Christ has delivered us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse (i.e., one cursed by God) for us (Gal. 3:13).

At the same time, Ridderbos contends that Paul has the source of our sanctification in mind too when he says, “Christ died for our sins.”

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