The Gospel That Makes Sense of Everything
The Corinthians had forgotten the most important thing: the gospel. Discover how the death and resurrection of Jesus make sense of everything and renew our lives with grace.
Hello, World!
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1 Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 9 For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. 11 Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.
The Gospel: The Thing of First Importance
When you’re cooking with a crockpot, plugging it in and turning it on is of first importance. When you mess up the thing that is of first importance, everything else, even if good and done right, spoils.
As we arrive at 1 Corinthians 15, the Corinthian church had forgotten the most important thing: the gospel. As a result, everything else, even if good and done right, had been spoiled.
The first 14 chapters of 1 Corinthians address the church’s problems, including division, leadership struggles, sexual immorality, lawsuits, disputes over marriage and singleness, conflicts about freedom and idolatry, confusion about gender roles, abuses of communion, and fights over spiritual gifts. All of these things were off and spoiled because they had forgotten the most important thing.
What’s sobering is that what was true for them is easily and often true for us. Time passes, and we make the same mistakes, struggle with the same things, fight the same battles. We all have something in our lives that we hold as the most important thing.
Everyone, including the religious and those who aren’t, is looking for something to make sense of the world around them. We all have blurry vision and want a pair of glasses to help us understand why things are the way they are and to answer the big questions of life.
However, the glasses we often wear don’t work perfectly. They’re a little blurry, or there are scratches and smudges where things don’t align like we want. There will be moments of polarization, dichotomies that get created, boxes of black and white that these worldviews try to force us into, creating inconsistencies that make people feel uncertain.
In these uncertainties, in a culture where people are seeking clarity, we must say with complete confidence, with bold love and clear truth: the gospel is what you’ve been looking for. Hold it with first importance.
Understanding the Gospel
“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
The gospel is most frequently defined as “good news.” It’s an ancient term used to describe the joyful, glad, and merry news of a victorious or conquering king. For the follower of Jesus, the gospel is everything. Romans teaches us that it is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).
The gospel is the story that makes all other stories make sense. This is the truth we base our entire lives on, our entire eternities on. This is the only reality that will matter 100 years from now to us, to our families, our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and to those we come into contact with throughout our days.
But here’s what I’ve found in conversations about the gospel: If a family member, friend, neighbor, or coworker asked you simply, “What is the gospel?”—what would you say? Many people wouldn’t know what to say. Their fear and hesitation have nothing to do with the correctness of their theology, but rather with the confidence in their methodology. Many of us haven’t taken the time to practice or perfect a clear method for communicating the gospel. As the Apostle Paul teaches in verse one, we need to be reminded.
[READ MORE: 4 Tips for Sharing the Gospel and Inviting a Friend to Church]
The Gospel in Three Circles
We live in a world of brokenness. Whether you’re a follower of Jesus or not, you can see that. We feel off with a restlessness that runs deep at the soul level. We feel it in our bodies as we get sick and age. We experience it in relationships through conflict with others. We witness widespread brokenness on a large scale in our city, country, and world, stemming from systemic and global issues that must be addressed.
As followers of Jesus, we see the brokenness but don’t believe this is how God designed the world. At the beginning of the Bible, we see that God’s design for the world was not one of brokenness, but of purpose, beauty, peace, and flourishing. In God’s perfect plan, all these areas of brokenness, whether in our souls, bodies, relationships, or world, existed the way they were meant to.
However, we also see at the beginning of the Bible that, even though God designed humans for these purposes, the first created humans, Adam and Eve, chose to leave God’s perfect plan and go their own way.
When we depart from God’s perfect plan, it is called sin. Sin is departing from God’s design in action and character. When we do this, it always leads us to brokenness, and brokenness ultimately leads to death. Sin is the rock that gets thrown in the lake, and brokenness is the ensuing ripples.
We live our lives stuck between knowing we are designed by God for beauty, but mainly experiencing brokenness. We hate being stuck, so we try to do everything we can to overcome our own brokenness.
Some try to be successful enough, thinking the right job, achievements, money, or power will get them out.
Some try to be loving enough, thinking good relationships, a good family, or a good marriage is the way out.
Some even try religion, thinking that if they can appear good here and maybe volunteer and give back some, they can be good enough to get out.
Others see the folly in these things and think the answer is not fixing but escaping brokenness. This is done through seeking pleasure, numbing out, binge watching TV to distract themselves, drinking or smoking, or doing what makes them happy or helps them forget it.
Here’s what’s true for all of us: None of these things has the power to fix what’s broken. They will all be like rubber bands that snap and pull us back into brokenness.
The good news that Christians believe is that in God’s design, He doesn’t stay distant from us and our needs, and doesn’t tell us to fix ourselves. Instead, God Himself, in the person of Jesus, loves you so much and cares so much about your brokenness that He entered into our world 2,000 years ago. Jesus lived a life that was not one of sin and brokenness, but one of God’s design. Everywhere He went, He brought peace and wholeness back to the sorrows of this world. He came to do everything necessary to be the one true way to lead us out of our sin and brokenness.
“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” 1 Corinthians 15:3-4
Our sin and brokenness lead to death, but Jesus, on the cross, took the death we deserve for our sin. He died for us, putting to death our sins, and then rose again from the grave, giving us the offer of a new, resurrected life.
Here’s Jesus’ offer to us: If we repent, turning away from our sin and brokenness, and believe that Jesus is who He says He is, we will be saved. Jesus becomes the king over our lives, and we start to experience this salvation and fullness of life now, with the promise that it will continue into eternity.
As part of this promise, empowered by the Holy Spirit, we start to grow back towards God’s perfect plan. We become fully devoted followers of Jesus, and slowly but assuredly, we begin to look more like Jesus in the way we think, speak, and act. Our relationships with others also start to reflect the likeness of Jesus, including being part of God’s family, which is called the church. Our relationship with sin and brokenness resembles that of Jesus. Just as Jesus was not indifferent to brokenness, followers of Jesus cannot be indifferent to brokenness, so we go back into it, not to fix it, but to tell people about Jesus, who is the only one with the power to do so.
This is the gospel; 1 Corinthians 15 teaches us that we are to be reminded of this, receive it, believe it, stand on it, be saved by it, hold fast to it, and preach it. It is everything. It’s the ultimate good news. These are the glasses you’ve been looking for. [READ MORE: Sanctification: A Moment and a Process for Every Believer]
The gospel does for us what corrective lenses do for someone with impaired vision. You look at it, and then find yourself starting to look through it; suddenly, everything makes sense. All the big questions of life:
Views on meaning and purpose
Creation
Identity
Goodness
Freedom
Justice
Gender and sexuality
All of these things come together in a clear story when you look at the gospel. With these glasses on, you’re not forced to piecemeal arguments together on separate burning issues. Instead, you find in the gospel a connected story that diagnoses, heals, fulfills, and explains everything that makes for flourishing.
The gospel is what you’ve been looking for. Hold it with first importance.
[READ MORE: Why Did Jesus Have to Die?]
Answering Two Doubts
As you read this, you may have two questions or doubts in response to the gospel shared. The Apostle Paul’s following words provide answers to both.
First Doubt: This Is Too Good to Be True
For some, your doubt is in your head, and you want to say, ‘This is too good to be true.’
“And that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.” 1 Corinthians 15:5-7
You might be saying the resurrection can’t be true; People don’t rise from the dead. The idea is that this notion of Jesus’ resurrection is a fanciful idea from the past that simpler minds believed in, or some religious allegory. But this text doesn’t allow that. The Apostle Paul tells us two things.
First, he grounds this in factual witnesses who could be interviewed or asked if this really happened. The Apostle Paul is coming with the receipts. He says all these people saw Him. He didn’t even list the women here, who were the first witnesses to the resurrection. He declares that many people saw this and can attest to it.
Additionally, what these names have in common is people coming out of the Jewish religion, and in the Jewish religion, bodily resurrection was unheard of and laughed at. Some believed in a life after death in a spiritual sense, but this is something completely different: a resurrected body, “life after life after death” as the scholar N.T. Wright famously labeled it. He’s saying that these people saw this and can attest to it, even though they had no previous framework or worldview that would have made this possible.
Many scholars have examined the evidence beyond these eyewitnesses and the newness of resurrected bodies. They look at the spread of Christianity in the face of persecution, the brutality of the crucifixion, the testimony of women whose testimony wouldn’t even be considered in that culture, and conclude: This is too good to be true, yet the most plausible, rational explanation is that it is.
Tim Keller often told a story about people coming to him with their doubts about Christianity. They would say something like, “I really struggle with this aspect of Christian teaching. I like this part of Christian belief, but I don’t think I can accept that part.” He usually responded by saying, “If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything stands is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”
Church, we do know, and what we know leads us to remember the gospel as of first importance in our lives.
[READ MORE: Why Do Some People Believe in God and Others Don’t?]
Second Doubt: This Is Too Good to Be True for Me
Others of you have doubt not in your head but in your heart, and you want to say: This is too good to be true for me.
“Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me, for I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.” 1 Corinthians 15:8-11
As this beautiful offer of the gospel is laid before you, your doubts are in your heart, and they’re whispering lies to you. You don’t know my story. You don’t know my sin, my brokenness, my shame. This might be good news for others, but not for me.
In response, the Apostle Paul gives us his testimony. He calls himself “untimely born,” a literal translation of the Greek word, which is used to describe an accident. He acknowledges that he is least of all, unworthy, the former chief persecutor of the church. To that, the gospel both doesn’t and does say something important. It doesn’t say, “Eh, that’s no big deal. Forget about sin, forget about brokenness. Just move on.”
Instead, it says something better. It says that by the grace of God, you are what you are, and God’s grace is not in vain. That message is the only one powerful enough to speak to your doubts as well.
That’s grace! Grace is fuel for the gospel into our hearts. It’s a twofold reality: not only are we not punished for our sins, which is mercy, but we have also received God’s favor through Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. This favor empowers us so that we can stand, so that we are being saved, so that we can have our works of growing and going fueled by the power of God.
God’s grace empowers gospel living, which means there is no way for us to be too broken, too messed up, or too sinful to receive it. It’s all a gift, and it’s His empowerment given to us.
There was a time when many felt like they were always striving and never enough. But then they meet Jesus and hear about His grace, and suddenly they have peace and rest because their strivings are not to earn a relationship but are in response to the relationship they have. The Apostle Paul had a similar story. If you are a follower of Jesus, you do too. What we know leads us to remember the gospel as of first importance in our lives.
News, Not Advice
The gospel is of first importance. At its core, gospel is good news. The British pastor and doctor, David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, once said that there is a difference between news and advice.
Advice is counsel about something to do that hasn’t happened yet, but you can do. News is a report about something that has happened that you can’t do anything about. It’s been done for you. All you can do is respond.
He said, ‘Imagine a king who goes out to battle.’ If he wins, he sends back messengers who share the good news; they report a victory, and people respond with joy, then go on with their lives in the peace that comes with this good news. If he loses, however, he sends back military advisors who instruct the city on how to defend itself, and then they fight for their lives.
Every other religion, or for us, every worldview, every pair of glasses you want to put on, all send military advisors to give advice. Their message is one of fear, and they tell us what we need to do to be saved, while also telling us we need to fight for our lives.
But the message of the gospel is one of joy. It tells us what has been done for us to be saved, and then shapes our lives as we do what this passage calls us to do: receive it, stand in it, live in response to its saving power, hold fast to it, believe it, and preach it.
The gospel is of first importance; Don’t forget to plug in the crockpot.
TL;DR
The gospel is of first importance. Like a crockpot unplugged, everything else spoils when we forget the truth of Christ’s death and resurrection.
The gospel makes sense of the world. It’s the story that explains our brokenness, offers redemption, and gives purpose to all of life.
The resurrection is reliable. The risen Christ appeared to hundreds of witnesses, transforming skeptics like Paul into bold preachers of grace.
Grace changes everything. God’s grace meets our doubts and failures, empowering us to stand firm, live in joy, and keep the main thing the main thing.
