Many Christians labor to reinvent the gospel wheel when there is just no need to do so. We are not allowed to fashion the gospel into a different message, which we believe will work better than the gospel of God. The gospel should not be altered into a message that we think people might more easily receive. The gospel is God’s, and it is the message that God has purposed to bring salvation. However, Christians often, inadvertently, assume that they can put their own spin on the gospel, reinvent the wheel, and make their own version of the gospel work a little better than God’s. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, any reinventing of God’s gospel is ludicrous. The gospel is a message for believing and repeating, but not for amending and recreating. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak.”[1] The message is set, and we must continue to present the authentic gospel with all of its components—omitting nothing and adding nothing—to a world that is perishing without it.
God works through authentic gospel proclamation to bring people to salvation. As Paul reiterated to the Ephesians, “In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.”[2] God saved the Ephesians, but it was the message of the gospel that God used to bring them to salvation. The gospel message is exceptionally unique in that God has ordained it as the message to bring people to repentance and belief in Jesus Christ.
Summary: The Apostle Paul had been given a specific message from God, and it was this particular message that he referred to as the gospel. It was a message that he was to proclaim so that people could believe for their own salvation. It was also a message that those who believed were to continue to repeat to others so that they too could be saved. As Paul writes later in Romans:
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”[3]
There should be no doubt in the Christian’s mind that the message of the gospel was to remain the same. The gospel that Paul received, he preached, and the gospel that he preached, others were to continue to repeat to others. No one was authorized to change God’s gospel by taking from it or adding to it. The gospel that was given to Paul, from God, was never meant to be up to individual manipulation. The same goes for modern Christians as well. We need to understand that the gospel is a specific message with exact components and that it is not a Christian’s job to add to it or subtract from the gospel. We are to proclaim it as God has given it.
[1] 2 Corinthians 4:13
[2] Ephesians 1:13
[3] Romans 10:14-15
Comments