Episode Details

Hi everyone

Before getting onto this week’s topic, another ‘uncommonly good’ prayer to share with you from The Book of Common Prayer. James wrote in to mention two of his favourites:

I do quite like the collect for peace, and especially the phrase ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. It’s a refreshing reminder of how God’s call to freedom and our world’s modern conception of freedom aren’t the same thing. Another favourite is the Collect for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity, and especially the line: ‘… God, who art always more ready to hear than we to pray’. What a wonderful reminder, and rebuke, about our heavenly Father’s willingness to hear from his children! 

Here’s the full prayer of which that line is part:

Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and art wont to give more than either we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen

Wonderful stuff.

Gospel clarity

There are many possible reasons for a lack of vitality in a church, which of course gives plenty of scope for experts to provide solutions. It could be your structures or programs or staffing mix or welcoming or preaching or lack of discipline or prayerlessness or who knows what combination of these things and many others. Plus there’s the small matter of God’s sovereign hand.

But being a so-called expert myself—on the basis of having helped Col Marshall write a little book about trellises and vines a few years ago—I’ve got another factor to throw into the mix.

It may sound ridiculous, but one simple reason that churches and ministries languish is that they don’t teach the gospel with clarity.

‘Well of course,’ I hear you say, ‘those liberal and heretical and other sub-orthodox kind of places don’t teach the gospel. That’s why most of them are declining and dying.’

True enough, but I’m talking about good solid Bible-teaching evangelical churches. Quite possibly your church.

‘Really?’ you respond. ‘That’s hard to believe. Every second sermon at our church mentions that Jesus died for our sins, that justification is by faith alone, and that salvation comes from God’s free grace not our works. We sing about it; we remember it in the Lord’s Supper. Surely if there’s one thing we all know back to front, it’s that!’

Like I said, a lack of gospel clarity.

It’s certainly true and of prime importance that Jesus died a substitutionary death for our sins, and that forgiveness and salvation and justification flow directly from that fount of every blessing. But to know these truths is not yet to know the gospel with clarity. Not the New Testament gospel anyway.

The big newsflash announcement (or ‘gospel’) of the New Testament is not that Jesus died on the cross for your sins. It’s that the Jesus who died on the cross for sins rose again as the Lord and Christ of the world, and now offers forgiveness and salvation and eternal life to all those who repent and submit to his rule in faith.

That’s what the apostles went around proclaiming. (Have a read of Acts and see for yourself.)

Their big announcement was that the crucified Jesus had been raised by God and thus proven and declared to be the ‘Christ’—God’s promised worldwide ruler and judge in the line of David, whom death could not defeat and who would reign forever over God’s kingdom. When we see the title ‘Christ’ given to Jesus, this is what is being claimed about him.

The gospel, then, is not ‘Jesus crucified’, but ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (1 Cor 2:2). The One who was crucified has now