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“Just Once Before I Die, IA: The Confession”

Mark 1:14-15
14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God,
15 and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."

Some of you remember the original 1971 movie version of “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”  Others of you were first introduced to the story by the 2005 movie version starring Johnny Depp called “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”  Others of you will know the story from Roald Dahl’s book.  Regardless, it’s an odd and wonderful story about five children who are lucky enough to discover a Golden Ticket in their “Wonka” candy bars and who therefore get the privilege of touring Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory and the experience of facing all of the adventures that come with the tour.

The hero of the story, the poor boy named Charlie, almost doesn’t get to go.  In fact, when the fifth coveted golden ticket is found by another child elsewhere in the world, all of Charlie’s hopes of getting to go inside the chocolate factory are seemingly lost forever.  But then it is revealed that the fifth ticket was a forgery and a fake and that one more lucky child will still get to go inside.  Many of you know the story:  Charlie finds some money on the street, buys a Wonka chocolate bar and, viola!, discovers the fifth golden ticket!

There is a beautiful scene in the movies in which Charlie comes bursting into his family’s house exclaiming over and over again the good news that he had gotten a golden ticket!  The latest movie version actually captures this moment a little better.  Charlie comes up to the large old bed in the center of his family’s house in which his four elderly, sickly, and immobile grandparents spend their days in perpetual atrophy.  “I’ve got a golden ticket!  I’ve got a golden ticket!” he informs them.

And then, something amazing happens, his old grandfather, Grandpa Joe, bed-ridden, sickly and wasting away for untold years, holds the golden ticket up to his eyes, smiles widely, yells out “Yipeeeee!!” and, to everybody’s great shock and amazement, jumps out of the bed and starts dancing around and rejoicing.

It’s such a great scene!  I want to suggest to you that there’s something very New Testament about that scene as well.  I mean, there’s something very Christian about the idea of good news being so good that it gives life to something that was nearly lifeless, that it gives vitality to somebody who previously had none.

You see, Jesus came to preach “good news.”  That good news is called “the gospel.”  Our text this morning says, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.’"

The gospel is therefore the very foundation of the church.  You will remember last week that we defined a New Testament church as an “authentic community around the whole gospel for the glory of God.” 

To say that the church exists “around the whole gospel” is to say that without a proper view of the gospel and a genuine commitment to seeing it take root and flourish in the body of Christ, all efforts at calling the church to faithfulness will fail.

Put another way, church renewal and revitalization is not a matter of organization, programs, or even structural renewal:  it’s a matter of gospel recommitment.  The church will live and thrive again not when it has the right staff and the right deacons and the right committees and the right Constitution and By-Laws.  The church living again isn’t even a matter of us having a more accurate roll or even some kind of superficial likeness to the New Testament church at her better moments.

No.  It’s none of these things.  The one factor that ultimately determines whether or not a church lives or dies is its faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  And I am convinced of this:  the gospel is such good news and it has such power that if it becomes central again to our life together as a church, we will see days in the life of this church that we can only dream of.   Through the gospel, God breathes life into our old, lifeless bones and He makes us dance with joy!

Today and the next two weeks we will be discussing what this gospel is that serves as the foundation and core of the body of Christ, the church.

I. The church has a content, and that content is the gospel.

Let’s begin with the most important question:  what is the gospel?

If a New Testament church is an “authentic community around the whole gospel for the glory of God,” then it’s crucial that we know what “the gospel” is.

Here is where a word study of the word “gospel” can help us immensely.  The word is used many times in the New Testament, and when we consider what is said about this gospel a picture begins to emerge.

For instance, in Revelation 14:6 John refers to “an eternal gospel.”  Paul tells us in Galatians 1:11 that the gospel is “not man’s gospel,” but God’s.  He tells us in Galatians 1:6 that there are false, counterfeit, or, as he puts it, “different gospel[s],” but then, in Galatians 1:7, he tells us that “there is no another one” in reality, for there is only one true gospel.  In fact, this one, true, gospel from God is exclusive to the point that if anybody, including angels, should “preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed,” as he puts it in Galatians 1:8.  In 2 Corinthians 4:4 we see that the gospel is “the gospel of the glory of Christ.”  In Mark 8:35 and 10:29 Jesus links the gospel with His own person when He speaks of people who make sacrifices “for [His] sake and the gospel.”  In 1 Corinthians 1:17, Paul connects the gospel to “the cross of Christ” and “its power.”  In 1 Timothy 2:8 we also see that the gospel also refers to the resurrection of Jesus.

And these are just a few of the many New Testament references to the gospel!  So when we come to summarize this gospel which is the church’s life, we end up with something along these lines:

"The gospel is the eternal good news that through the person, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ, sin, death, and hell have been defeated and all who come to Christ in repentance and faith receive salvation, eternal life, hope, the blessings of God, strength for right living, and a place in the body and ongoing mission of Christ on earth, the church, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit."

This is the good news that Jesus proclaimed.  This gospel was the central message of the early church, and this good news is the foundation on which Christ builds His body.

As I told you last week, the title of this series comes from an older minister’s statement to me that just once before he died, he wanted to pastor a New Testament church.  If we read the New Testament we find that the key ingredient, the fundamental component, the one, over-arching commitment that makes a group of people a “New Testament church” is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The gospel, as we will see over the next two weeks, is community-forming and it is commission empowering.  It draws us in together as a family and it sends us out in the power of the Holy Spirit and the name of our risen Lord to be salt and light in the world.

Last Sunday I mentioned that there are obvious and irrefutable signs that our church is a healthy church in many ways, but is also showing signs of historical drift.  We defined historical drift as the inevitable drift that all entities experience over time away from their founding vision.  And you may remember that I mentioned Dallas Willard’s three pieces of advice for how to combat historical drift:  (1) accept the inevitability of historical drift, (2) define the founding vision, and (3) determine to “live in the central content of the vision.”

I agree.  We must make a resolute and clear decision to live in the central content of the vision, and the gospel is the central content of the vision.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we posses the most revolutionary, wonderful, precious, beautiful, life-altering, world-changing good news the world has ever heard, and our strength and health and effectiveness as a church stands in direct proportion to our commitment to acknowledge, live in, and live out the radical implications of this news.

The gospel is our life as a church.  It is why we are here.  It must dominate our present considerations and it must dictate all of our future efforts.

And yet, our current church climate would seem to indicate that we are not living in the central content of the vision.  We are not, in other words, rooting our congregational life in the gospel.  Why?

II. The greatest and most debilitating temptation that churches face is the temptation to allow lesser matters to crowd out and cover up the gospel.

Calvin Miller has passed on some disheartening statistics showing that “the average church in America is small and getting smaller.  In 1997 the average church in America had 102 in attendance each Sunday.  But only a year later, this had dropped to 91.  This alarming short-term drop in attendance was accompanied by a similar drop of 15 percent in the operating budgets of those same churches.”  He further notes that “from 1992 through 1999 Protestant church attendance dropped by 12 percent while the nation’s population increased by 10 percent.”   

Furthermore:

David Barrett reported statistics of Oxford University Press that in a twelve-month period, 2,765,100 worship attenders in Europe and North America cease to be practicing Christians - an average loss of 7,600 every day.  This means that every week more than 53,000 people leave churches and never come back.  The percentage of active Christians in the West has fallen from 29.0 percent in 1900 to 23.3 percent in today’s population...We must ask why, “despite glowing reports of surging church attendance, more and more Christians in North America are feeling disillusioned with the church.”1

Why is this happening, especially in America and western Europe?  Let me ask you:  do the churches of America lack proper funding?  No.  Do they lack proper facilities?  Hardly.  Do they lack education?  Not really.  Do the churches of America lack clergymen?  Do they lack ministry training?  Seminaries?  Technology?  Freedom of worship?  Do we lack these things?  No, no, and no.  We don’t lack any of these things.  In fact, we have them in abundance.

What, then, are we missing?  What has led to our sad decline?  It is simply this:  we have not decided that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the greatest treasure of our lives, that it will be the controlling factor of our lives, that the gospel will be the foundation of our homes, of our business practices, of our parenting and grandparenting, of our social, political, and congregational lives.  We have paid homage to the gospel as an abstract truth, but we have not bowed before Jesus Christ to such an extent that the truth of the gospel has washed over us with convincing and life-altering power.

So tragic has our abandonment of the gospel been, that the great poet T.S. Eliot wrote in his book, Christianity and Culture, that, “In the present ubiquity of ignorance, one cannot but suspect that many who call themselves Christians do not understand what the word means...”2
 
Jim Elliff has written that, “The unconverted church member may well be the largest obstacle to evangelism in our day.”3 

The loss of the gospel is the loss of the church, but, regrettably, it is possible for churches to have such an effective machine that they keep on existing long after they have abandoned the gospel.  But when this happens, what we have isn’t the church as God intends it – the New Testament church – but just a group of people with the word “church” on the sign.

Without the gospel, there is no church, and in the absence of the gospel, the church will eventually decline, no matter how efficient and strong its machinery may be.  I would suggest that we are experiencing this today.  The church can run on inertia for a number of years, but eventually somebody is going to stand up and ask, “What’s the point?”  And when our kids or our neighbors ask this question and we cannot answer, they say, “Then I’m not interested.”

Presbyterian theologian John H. Leith writes that “the primary source of the malaise of the church is the loss of a distinctive Christian message and of the biblical and theological competence that made its preaching effective.”4 

Instead of focusing and centering on the gospel, too many congregations in our country have turned to lesser matters and have focused on cheap substitutes.  Let us consider these substitutes that call out to us and tempt us:

1. Personal Agenda

If we’re not careful, we can put our own personal agendas at the center of the church.  Pastors can do this and laypeople can do this.  We can bring our own power agendas, our own personal preferences, our own plans, and our own ambitions and put them at the center of the church.  When we do so, the church becomes about us and the gospel is not allowed to flourish and to flower.

2. Personal Advancement

If we are not careful, we can even come to put our own career advancement at the center of the church.  I will never forget as a teenager in my home church seeing a couple of church members welcome a visiting couple to the church during the “meet and greet” time in the service.  I was standing right there, and I heard this couple introduce themselves to the visitors and I saw them hand the visitors their business card.  These particular church members were very involved in Amway.  Now, I’m not making any judgment about Amway, but I am making a judgment about using the church for personal career or monetary advancement.

3. Appeasement

Sometimes “appeasement” is at the heart of our congregational experience.  There are people who really care very little for the gospel, but they care a great deal about keeping some dominant family member happy.  But here’s the thing:  you can only ride another person’s commitment so far.  If the gospel is not valuable to you, you will eventually either (a) drop out of the church or (b) stay in it for some false motive, get comfortable, and spend year after year in the church without ever getting the point!

4. Tradition Maintenance

Finally, some people center on tradition maintenance.  That is, they attend because that is what they are supposed to do.  But traditions, even good ones, can only carry us so far if we are not personally convicted about the truth around with the tradition is built.

In short, only the gospel can sustain the church, and the abandonment of the gospel is always to our own ruin.  We are experiencing this sad fact today.

Finally:

III. Until the gospel is allowed to shine in its full glory, the church will lack the power it is intended to have.

But are we allowing the gospel to flourish in us and through us?  Is our commitment to the gospel solid enough and clear enough that Christ can use us to His own ends?

Let us first acknowledge the sad reality that many in the American church do not seem to believe in the gospel, at least not with any great conviction.

Os Guinness writes about seeing a church worship service on television in which a singer sang a powerful rendition of an old spiritual with such honesty and intensity that you could feel the presence of God through the song.  When he finished, one of the ministers stood up, clapped, and said into the microphone, “Fantastic brother!  Fantastic!  Christianity is so fantastic - who cares whether or not it’s true?”5 

Years ago, Soren Kierkegaard wrote of a Swedish priest who was preaching the gospel to the assembled congregation when he noticed that many of the members were weeping.  This sight disturbed him so much that he stopped his preaching, looked at his audience and said,  “Children, do not weep; the whole thing might be a lie.”6 

First Baptist Church, listen to me:  "the eternal good news that through the person, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ, sin, death, and hell have been defeated and all who come to Christ in repentance and faith receive salvation, eternal life, hope, the blessings of God, strength for right living, and a place in the body and ongoing mission of Christ on earth, the church, through the ministry of the Holy Spirit" is not a lie. 

The gospel is not a lie.

Listen closely to me:  the gospel is not a lie.

It is life.  It is our life.  It is the foundation of our life together.  It is living.  It has power.  It can bring us together as a family.  It can send us out as an army.  It is our greatest treasure and our most precious possession. 

Shane Clairborne writes about attending a church which decided to install a $120,000 stained glass window of Jesus.  “I stared at that window,” he writes.  “I longed for Jesus to break out of it, to free himself, to come to rise from the dead…again.”7 

I think I know what he means.  I bet you do too.  Who doesn’t want to see Jesus live again in His church?  Who doesn’t want to feel, when he or she attends church, that they are in the midst of an amazing and awe-inspiring holiness.  Who doesn’t want to sense and to know that this Jesus we read of who turned the whole world upside down can still do so and is still doing so in and through His body, the church.

The gospel has been given to us, because Christ has laid down His life for us.

Do you believe the gospel?

Do you love the gospel?

Do you love the Christ to whom the gospel points?

1.  Calvin Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou?  (Nasvhille, TN:  Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), p.6, 12, 100.
2.  T.S. Eliot.  Christianity and Culture.  (San Diego:  Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977), p.34.
3.  Jim Elliff.  Revival and the Unregenerate Church Member. (Christian Communicators Worldwide), p.8.
4.  Timothy George and John Woodbridge, The Mark of Jesus. (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2005), p.81.
5.  Os Guinness.  The Devil’s Gauntlet.  (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, 1989), p.14-15.
6.  Soren Kierkegaard.  Attack Upon Christendom.  (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1968), p.181.
7.  Shane Clairborne, The Irresistible Revolution. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), p.43.