The gospel isn’t a benefits package.
A call to worship.
Themes
Divine initiative • Revelation • Decentering the self • Apprehended • The saving action of Christ • Encountered • The presence of Christ • Authority • Surrender • Obedient knowing • Awakening • Determined by the Word • Confronted
He comes, and He places us into His presence.
Scripture reading
Matthew 27:50–54 Ephesians 2:1–8
Faith is not a consumer review of Jesus. It is not an argument built on benefits, impressions, or our own spiritual “good taste.” Its core claim is that the gospel is God’s decisive action in Jesus Christ: God speaks, judges, saves, and reveals himself from the Cross outward, not from our preferences upward. This call to worship1 displaces us from the center and relocates everything in a single, weighty reality: Christ encounters us before we ever “decide” about him. And the Spirit generates in us the only fitting response: the response of confession and allegiance. We don’t authenticate Christ; Christ apprehends us. He places us into his presence, confronting us with an Authority we cannot manage, only surrender to.
Matthew tells us about what took place at the foot of the Cross. Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and saw what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly, this was the Son of God!” And to help us understand how it is we human beings can acknowledgment such a truth, the Apostle Paul wrote this: As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and in your sins… gratifying the cravings of your flesh and following its desires and thoughts. We were, by nature, deserving of wrath. But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions… For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.
Prayer
Father in heaven, what is important this morning is that in Jesus Christ, You are the one who has taken action. In Him, You have addressed us. In Him, You have judged us. This is the central point of Your gospel. We are here this morning because in Him, You took action. We are not here because we took action. We are not here because we judged Him worthy enough to be here. We are not at the center. Your gospel is not the story of Christ bringing to us and giving to us so many beneficial things that… that… well… He must then be the Son of God. No. It is the story of Jesus Christ revealing You to us in Himself. Revealing You to us in what He said. Revealing You to us in what He did, in every action and every word — revealing to us: You. And only by revealing You to us do we come to know the truth about ourselves: that we are sheltered in Him, that we are healed in Him, that we are saved by Him. He is the one who takes action on us. He is the one who speaks to us. His action saves us. His word saves us. He is the one who encounters us. He comes to us, not hoping that we might encounter Him. No. He comes, and He places us into His presence. And there, in His presence, before the Cross — not before a beautiful landscape of blessings and benefits — but before the Cross, it is there we exclaim, “Truly, this was Your Son!” And this is not because there exists in us some capacity to make such a judgment. Such a response is only generated in us under the impact of Your Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. He encounters us, and He saves us. And we know that in His presence, we encounter You. And when we do, we can’t help but break out into confession — not into an intellectual decision about You, driven by our own knowledge that we’ve somehow grasped hold of. No. We break out into spiritual awakening driven by the acknowledgment that it is us who have been grasped, we have been apprehended in the power of the Spirit of Christ. And in Christ, we are confronted with an Authority to whom we can only surrender and to whom we can only respond by giving our total allegiance and loyalty. And so, Father, whatever it is we think we know of Him, we know as a matter of obedience, not as a matter of having assessed it and judged it. What we know comes by faith, not by value judgement — not by us judging the value of it. What we know of Him is not from ourselves — it is not from our examination of Him — it is from the examination that He makes of us. To know Christ is not to have sorted through statements about Him and to have judged which ones are true. To know Christ is to have been encountered by Him and by His saving action. This morning, in His presence, Father, in the presence of the Word, let us be told by the Word, let us be determined by Christ, let us be confronted by Him. In the name of Jesus, who is the Word — the Word that tells us, the Word the determines us, the Word that confronts us, Amen
The gospel is God’s good news, His message about His Son. Not ours about Him; His about Him, His about Himself. It’s not something we invented or reasoned toward. It’s something we are swept into. Go just a little deeper. Enjoy this spiritual antipasto:
The gospel won’t carry your cargo.
The gospel is not our idea. It never was. And thank God for that.
A call to worship given to the small assembly of Christians that gathered in Pathway Church, Beaverdam, Michigan, on Sunday, June 22, 2024.