What is the Gospel?

What is the gospel? A simple question and yet complex. When I moved to China and started reaching out to atheist Chinese students, I thought they do not know that God is omnipresent, omniscient, and  omnipotent. How can they avoid seeing God like a super hero?

That proved to not be the problem. Chinese people worried about face as they were insecure as raised in a high criticism culture. They had trouble seeing God loved them and being good enough and could easily jump to see the O’s as it were. They just had a hard time reaching God. So, they might first reject him to protect themselves.

We could say the good news is God made us and loves us, but we rejected him. This made a gap between God and people. Therefore, God took the initiative to reach us by becoming a man and dying in place of us to fix the gap between God and us.

The Gospel (Good News)  is God saved  us when we could not save ourselves. The Bible famously says:

¹⁶ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

God wants to be with us forever. It is good news.

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Great news indeed.

²³for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. ²⁵ God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement,^[i] through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— ²⁶ he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

If, we confess we are sinners and commit ourselves to God and his grace, we can be saved. That is the gospel (good news). It is also the main thing. Be sure it is also joining a new kingdom with its own culture to enter into.