Your Gospel Focus Could Lead to Presenting an Incomplete Gospel.


The gospel is summed up in John 3:16...The mistake made in the traditional religious understanding and proclamation of the gospel is the emphases is focused on heaven for those who believe and on hell for those who don't believe. Note...God so loved people, He gave His Son...Jesus is the Gospel! To emphasize the gaining of heaven or the damnation of Hell as the gospel is reducing the Gospel...(Jesus) only as a scapegoat, when in actual fact He, Himself, is the Gospel.


The goal of the religious gospel is heaven to gain and a hell to shun.


The goal of the post-cross gospel, the Gospel of Grace is JESUS!


Jesus is not just the way, He is not just the how. JESUS IS THE GOSPEL!


I am inclined to believe, because of religion's focus on gaining heaven and escaping hell as the whole of the gospel presentation and the failure of focusing on Jesus...the gospel, we have been guilty of presenting the gospel as bad news, not the good news that Jesus says it is. The gospel is much more than get saved, gain heaven and escape hell! John opens by presenting the fact that God is the Word and Jesus is the Word and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Not exactly the easy the believism of repeat the "sinner's prayer", escape hell, gain heaven. I wonder has our reducing the gospel down of these ideas have caused us to miss something.


To a culture that focuses on “going to heaven” based on whether or not they are morally pure, or whether they understand some theological doctrines, or they are very spiritual, renders Jesus as completely unnecessary. At best, He is an afterthought, a scapegoat, a technicality by which we become morally pure.


In a culture that worships the written word about The Word, focus on rule and regulation keeping will always be a barrier to truth seekers. We believe, quite simply, that unless we can chart a person's relationship by something such as obeying religions version of the gospel our salvation is in question. But, you can’t chart relationships. Furthermore, in our attempts to make relational propositions look like chartable realities, all beauty and mystery is lost. And so when times get hard, when life's realities knocks us on off our feet, the bad news if the heaven gaining and hell escaping focus on the gospel is unable to comfort our failing hearts. How many people have walked away from God because their systematic religious theology proved unable to answer the deep longings and questions of the soul? What we need, truly, is faith in a the Gospel Jesus), faith not a list of rules that if kept are we are faithful. We need Jesus, "The Gospel" not the heaven gaining, hell shunning gospel as the focus.


And one should not think our current method of interpreting Scripture has an ancient legacy...The "How can God help me get what I want gospel?" was not the gospel given to Paul by Christ that he preached and lived. He preached and lived "Who is God, and how can I know Him who is the Gospel?"


Imagine explaining the gospel of Jesus that as something like this:


You are the bride to the Bridegroom, and the Bridegroom is Jesus Christ. You must eat of His flesh and drink of His blood to know Him, and your union with Him will make you one, and your oneness with Him will allow you to be identified with Him, His righteousness that allows God to interact with you, and because of this you will be with Him in eternity enjoying His companionship. All you must do to engage God is be willing to leave everything behind, be willing to walk away from your identity (religious or otherwise), and embrace joyfully the trials and tribulations, the torture and perhaps martyrdom that will come upon you for being a child of God by the religious zealot, in a broken world as Jesus works out His own redemption through His redeemed community.


This is a much more accurate summation of the gospel of Jesus than you're a sinner on your way to hell unless you repeat the "sinner's prayer" to gain heaven and escape hell. To many people programmed by religion that is the 

sum total of the gospel...Why such a disrespect for Jesus (the Gospel) shown by religious people.


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