First of all, what’s a “gospel”?

The word “gospel” means “good news”.¹ The Gospel is the good news of what God has done through Jesus Christ.

God had a perfect plan for people.

When God first created the world, He made everything beautiful, and He made us to know Him and live in fellowship with Him. But we rejected God’s perfect plan by choosing our own way, instead of trusting God our Maker to love us best. This turning away from God is called “sin“, and it brought separation between us and God, brokenness, and death.

Our sin created a broken world.

We see it and feel it constantly around us. We experience it ourselves. There are many ways people try to escape this brokenness on our own: money, success, relationships, substances, philosophy, good works, and so on. The problem is that none of these things can fully help people to escape the brokenness of sin. They might seem to help for a while, but then people find themselves back in brokenness.

The good news is that God didn’t leave us in our brokenness.

God, being rich in mercy and love toward sinners, made a doorway out for us. That doorway is Jesus Christ, and we can enter through by turning away from all other ways we try to escape brokenness on our own and by believing and trusting in Him.

Jesus Christ is the only One who can fix our problem of sin.

God sent His eternal Son Jesus down from Heaven into our broken world. As fully God and fully man, Jesus lived a perfect sinless life on our behalf. When Jesus died on the cross, He took the punishment for our sin in our place. When He rose from the dead three days later, He conquered death and sin, and made a way for us to be reunited with God for eternity.

The good news is that the benefits of Jesus Christ’s work can be yours as a free gift from God.

Jesus did everything that was necessary to bring you fully back to God. You simply believe that what the Gospel says about Him is true, trusting in Him alone to forgive and save from all your sins. No matter who you are or what you’ve done, the promise and the power of the Gospel is that you can receive new life and purpose through faith in Jesus Christ.

1. In Greek, occurring in the Bible, it is the word euaggelion, which is where the English terms like “evangelical“, “evangelist“, and “evangel” come from. ↩︎