Hey, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Today, Jason and I are going to talk about the centrality of the gospel, but I want to read Colossians 1.17. He is before all things, and in him all things consist, and he is the head of the body the church who is the beginning the firstborn from the dead that in all things he may have the preeminence. So this is the Lord Jesus Christ and his father has purposed to give him the place of honor in all things. Yeah and his headship runs through every relationship as Christ is the head of the church, so the husband is the head of the wife.

That means that the husband is a picture of the supremacy of Christ as Christ is head of the church. So you find this supremacy in every category of life, and making sure that's true in a church is what shepherds are supposed to ensure. Yeah, so I think what we're talking about today is really never leaving the gospel for implications of the gospel. So we always want there to be implications for the gospel anytime someone seems to be preoccupied with the gospel but never moves on to the implications. You should be very worried about that and suspicious because the New Testament doesn't know anything about a gospel that doesn't bring transformation.

But at the same time it is possible to have your center become implications of the gospel and not have the gospel be the center itself, which is also very dangerous. So I think this is really what we want to talk about today is keeping the gospel central. Yeah, because none of the implications of the gospel are even possible without the power of the gospel unto salvation for everyone who believes to the Jew first. And also the Greek, It's the power of God that actually even allows any of the implications to exist. So we spend a lot of our time and energy on key implications of the gospel.

The functioning of local churches, the functioning of families, none of those are the gospel. So family reformation is not the gospel, church reformation is not the gospel, but they're impossible without the power of the gospel, and keeping them center actually energizes both family reformation and church reformation. And you need the power of the gospel for those things. So you have to keep the gospel central or the things that we're talking about lose their meaning. The Bible is kind of constructed that way, actually.

The way that the books unfold in the various categories of scripture, they really all affirm the centrality of the gospel. So let's just talk about that. How does that work? So the gospel is full of a tremendous amount of truth. It's all true.

But even among those truths, there is a center. So it's not a random collection of truths, you know, here's all the things that are true in the universe in no particular order. The Bible, nope, that's actually not what it is. The Bible has a center and God revealing himself who he is and what he's like through the person and work of Jesus Christ is the center. So God has purposed to reveal himself to mankind, and Jesus Christ is God in the flesh.

If you want to know about God, watch Jesus come and live and die for sinners, because he is the image of the invisible God. Well, and the central prophecy of the gospel is in Genesis 3.15, where the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. That's the doctrine of salvation and I think it also does imply sanctification that the work of the serpent is broken in the believer. So the New Test... The gospel is not New Testament teaching.

The gospel is Bible teaching. Right. So when you look at the Old Testament, I'm glad you started with Genesis 315. Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Chapter 3 is just barely into the first book of the Bible.

Sin has entered the world and there's already a promise that the seed of the woman, seed singular, would crush the head of the serpent, the mortal enemy of mankind. His head is going to be crushed by one who was promised by God. In Genesis chapter 3, Jesus is the fulfillment of that. It's just one of promise after promise after promise after promise in the Old Testament that Jesus fulfills God promising to save mankind out of this desperate condition. And then the New Testament says, in the fullness of time, Jesus came and fulfilled all those promises.

So the Old Testament is promises like Genesis 315, it's pictures like what? Oh, can I start with maybe one of the first prominent pictures of the gospel in Genesis, chapter 3, where God clothes Adam and Eve with his robes? This is symbolic of the robes of righteousness that Jesus Christ clothes those who are inadequately clothes, Adam and Eve were clothing themselves their own way. God comes and he sacrifices an animal and clothes them properly. So the Bible is full of these pictures.

Here's another one in Genesis, Genesis chapter 22, when Abraham is willing to obey God and to sacrifice his only son by Sarah that he loves. He only has one son from this wife, Sarah. He loves this son, but he's willing to sacrifice him. And then God provides a substitute. There's a ram in the thicket, and the ram dies instead.

And really, the gospel is God actually following through and sacrificing his only son that he loves, providing a substitute to die in the place of sinners. And then you have all the Old Testament pictures of the gospel. Okay, stop, stop. I'm gonna give you a quiz. What is the absolute most often repeated Old Testament story to demonstrate the power of the gospel.

I don't know. It's in Exodus. Okay. It is the rescue of the children of Israel from slavery. But you know, they are pried by the hand of God from the jaws of the devil, of Pharaoh, the abuser of the brethren, the one that gives you no rest, more bricks, less straw.

He's really hard on you. He will beat you to death. And, But the Exodus is the most often repeated Old Testament image of salvation, and it really has to do with breaking the power of sin, release from bondage, bought off the slave market by God and put in the promised land. Then the Old Testament law, lambs without blemish, the innocent dying for the guilty. Scapegoats, laying your hands on is symbolic transfer of sin from the sinner to an innocent then that is then cast out, never to be seen again.

It's just this symbol of our sins being parted from us as far as the East is from the West, never to be seen again. The Day of Atonement, a day, actually the Old Testament says if you won't afflict your soul you're to be banished from Israel. You can't be a part of these people unless on the Day of Atonement you're brought to grieve over your sin. The day starts that way, but it doesn't end that way. Then there's a sacrifice where God is saying, I'll accept one to come and bear your guilt and bear the penalty for your sins.

Of course, this is all just symbolic of the Lord Jesus Christ and his work. Pop quiz, another pop quiz. How many Old Testament prophecies did Jesus fulfill? So I Googled that. This is something I preached on last week.

So I Googled it. You get numbers between 200 and 400. So the stingiest prophecy counters get 200, and the most lax get 400. So it's in the hundreds of Old Testament prophecies. You know, my favorite and probably the most comprehensive one is Isaiah 53, this suffering servant who comes and bears the iniquities of sinners.

Who in the world would do that? But it's actually so clearly talking about Jesus, so clearly that Jewish rabbis really don't want their people reading Isaiah 53 because they might get the wrong idea because it sounds too much like Jesus. Actually, what they're afraid of is very right. It really is Jesus who came and bears the sin of a guilty people. So here's what we have so far.

Promises all throughout the Old Testament they're about Jesus and the gospel, his person and work. Pictures, they're about the gospel, Jesus, his person and work. Prophecies, 200 to 400, depending how stingy you are when you do the counting, They're about Jesus, His person and work. They're about the Gospel. So just to say something, re-say something I said earlier, the Gospel is not New Testament teaching, it's Bible teaching.

The Old Testament, the center of the Old Testament is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. So it really is the center of Scripture. A person that we both have appreciation for, Mark Dever, who is a pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC and the head of Nine Marks has written a book summarizing book by book each book, all 66 books of the Old and New Testament. The 39 books of the Old Testament are summarized in volume one and he titled it promises made and then the 27 books of the New Testament he summarized and titled that promises kept so you have promises made about the Old Testament and then promises kept about the New Testament That is such a helpful way to think about the Bible. And the centrality of the gospel in the Bible really is the center of scripture, which probably makes it really plain that the first four books in the New Testament are about?

The Lord Jesus Christ. They are the gospel, the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then all the rest of the books of the New Testament are really about the spread and the establishing of the gospel among the nations. So it's really the fulfilling of the Great Commission, which is gospel-centered as it gets. How do we spread this good news that Jesus has died for sinners, and how do we establish it?

The whole rest of the New Testament is about that. So, you know, you have this rich tapestry of history, of, you know, just through the various categories of the Old Testament, really all coming together in the New Testament with the letters of the Apostle Paul and particularly the Gospels itself. But all this to say that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the center of Scripture. It is that central matter that holds everything together and everything else is connected to it. And here's the key implication of that.

If the book of all truth scripture has such a clear center, and it does, and it's the gospel, It should be the clear center for me and how I build my life, for our home and how Janet and I build the life of our home, should be around the gospel, for our church. It should be the individual center, the center of the home and the center of the church. And it doesn't mean that we never talk about other things, but it means that any of those even important things can never displace it. The gospel has to keep being the center because it is the power center for those other things. Yeah, and I would say because the gospel is the center, then all those other things have to be talked about because they're all implications of and actually manifestations of the gospel.

You know, all the laws of God are reflective of the beauties of the gospel and what they accomplish in the believer's life, which is why, you know, James ends up telling us faith without works is dead. If your faith doesn't produce works, then you don't really have faith. You don't really have the gospel if your life doesn't manifest it. So, you know, these things always have to be talked about together. And that's why they're all mixed up in the Bible, all together.

The Bible doesn't let you say, well, all we're going to do is preach the message of the gospel, that Jesus Christ came in the flesh to save sinners. There are implications of that gospel. The gospel should always be applied And so an undefined gospel is a great evil. And so a lot of times the gospel as a term gets thrown around but it never gets defined. I'm really thankful that the Apostle Paul gives us a summary in a couple of places.

Probably the most condensed is 2nd Corinthians 521 which says that he, God the Father, made him, Jesus, God the Son, to be sin. He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him. So that's about as tightly condensed as it gets. But Another place which I'd like to read is 1 Corinthians 15, 1 through 4, and then just make some comments about this. It's very handy when Paul says, here's my gospel, so he gives us the summary in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 through 4.

Paul writes, moreover brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preach to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which you also are saved if you hold fast that word which I preach to you, unless you believed in vain. For I have delivered to you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures." And then in the verses that follow, Paul talks about all the eyewitnesses, including 500 eyewitnesses at one time. So he gives us this summary of his gospel and then he gives us these reasons why we have such a strong basis for confidence in the gospel. There were hundreds of people that actually saw the resurrected Jesus 500 at once at one time. Here's some comments on Paul's summary.

First, he says he's delivering what he received. So Paul never represented himself as the creator of the gospel, the inventor of the gospel. The gospel didn't come out of the mind of Paul. He actually received it. As an apostle, he actually received it directly from the Lord Jesus Christ.

And he sets it forward as something that must be received and stood in and held fast to. So the gospel is a set of propositions, truth propositions, but they do you no good unless you receive them and stand in them and hold fast to them. That's really what gives you a claim on the personal work of Jesus Christ is receiving this. That tells us something as preachers of the gospel that we should actually always call for a response. The end of the gospel is a command to repent and believe it.

That's how Jesus preached the gospel and that's how Paul summarizes it here. He says you have to receive it, you have to stand in it, you have to hold fast to it, and then it is a saving gospel to you. And then he says at a couple of points, according to the Scriptures. So it's very condensed, it's a summary, but to me it's sort of like a paper that has been folded up. So you only see this, but there are these creases that show you the fullness of it.

If you just pull at the edges, and Paul's left us the edges, like according to the Scriptures, okay, this is actually a homework assignment for us, to go look up, well, what does it mean that he died according to the Scriptures? Well, you go to the places, and we're talking about all these promises and pictures and prophecies. We go to learn about what the Bible says about Christ dying for sinners, and we actually learn it in its fullness there. This is just a summary of it but he's sending you, you know, these are the creases that if you pull at the edges you get according to the scriptures and then you go look in the scriptures what it says. So This is more than just the summary, but it's helpful to have a summary.

And then he calls Jesus the Christ. Christ is actually just a word that means the anointed of God. God set apart the Lord Jesus Christ for saving work, and the Bible talks about his saving work in the Scriptures. So many of the false gospels out there are because we have a Jesus at the center of those false Gospels that actually isn't the biblical Jesus. So Christ actually tells us, no, no, no, it has to be the Jesus of the Bible, the one who was actually anointed by God to do the saving work.

You know, John Piper wrote a book several years ago called God is the Gospel. And I think what he is trying to say in that book is that the Gospel encompasses God and is an expression of God. And that's why the Scriptures define the Gospel. They explain every part of it. And everything in the Bible points in some way to the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of Jesus Christ.

And that's why, you know, church shepherds are charged to preach the whole counsel of God. And that does, and that includes all the commands of Jesus Christ. Every command in the Bible is a command of Jesus Christ. And all these pictures point to him. So It's such a blessing to be able to actually have a center in the church.

And it's the good news of Jesus Christ. So the church that I'm serving just preached through Romans and I know your churches in Romans as well. One of the verses that we memorized as a church in Romans was Romans 12, 1 where Paul says, I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable, which is your reasonable service. So, Paul is actually calling for obedience based on the mercies of God. In other words, the power to obey, the motivation to obey is rooted in the mercies of God.

And there's also... God is so merciful, there's mercy in every category. But the core mercies of God are gospel mercies. And you were saying this early, there is no power or motivation to obey God except for when we consider who Jesus is and what he's done on our behalf. And when that's set before our eyes, presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice becomes a reasonable service.

It all makes sense in the light of what Jesus has done for his people. You know, just this morning I was reading in the Psalms and it's a Messianic Psalm and it's The voice of Jesus, but it's also the voice of all of Jesus' followers. I delight to do your will. Oh my God. Your laws are within my heart and that happens because of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Well, there you have it. So, the gospel as the center of the church and absolutely everything else because he is already. Two parting shots. Parting shot number one, beware of a gospel that doesn't transform. The church is muddled up with a gospel and there's no expectation of transformation.

Anytime you see a gospel that doesn't transform, the gospel is not really taken root there. The gospel of Scripture, the gospel that the New Testament knows about, that the Bible knows about, actually transforms people from the inside out. So anytime you see a gospel in action that's not transforming anybody, that's actually not the gospel of scripture. Secondly, the last thing that I want to say is just to look in the camera and say something is always trying to unseat the gospel at the center of things. I feel the pull of other things, even lawful things, worthy things, good things, but things that were never designed by God to be at the center.

Jesus Christ, who he is and what he's done for us is always meant to be top of mind, and we should wake up in the morning happy in Jesus because of who he is and what he's done. Amen. Praise the Lord for a solid center around which everything turns. Okay, Jason, the centrality of the gospel. Thanks a lot.

Lovely. Great. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com