A Question Worth Exploring

The gospel of Jesus Christ was once a story that I heard so much that I almost couldn't hear it anymore.

You know what I'm talking about, that feeling you get when you have over-listened to a song or over-watched a movie.  It is still something you love, but everything in it has just become...assumed.

The movie has lost its ability to awe you...

The music has lost its ability to move you...

The gospel had lost its ability to change me.

Somewhere along the line the gospel message had become so common, so rote, that it had more to do with my past than it had to do with my present.

A few years ago, that all drastically changed when I read a book all about the resurrection.

THE Resurrection.  The first fruit that promised a future for me.  The powerful event that empowered a cowardly, doubtful group of people into the most powerful grass roots movement in the history of the cosmos.

You see, for most of the life the gospel had been all about the cross.  The wonderful cross.  The old rugged cross.  The cross was the gospel, and the resurrection was the afterword.

The resurrection was almost an afterthought.

I don't blame this on my church, my teachers, my parents, or anyone else.  My church was orthodox.  They taught the whole gospel.  They met weekly on the Lord's Day (Resurrection Day!) and celebrated Easter with the best of them.  But for most of my formative years, the cross and Jesus shed blood spoke more important to my soul.

And it is crucial.  The problem is that only half the gospel is not the gospel.  The cross without the resurrection or the resurrection without the cross is incomplete.  insufficient.  lacking.

I needed the whole gospel in my life.

When the resurrection finally became a reality, the gospel itself started to take on powerful meaning again in my life.  It started to excite me again.  I no longer heard the story by rote, but anew!

And recently something crucial has struck me.  A key point of theology has moved beyond knowledge to conviction in my inmost being and has changed some things.  The gospel is not only the offering of grace for the unredeemed.  The gospel is also the power of God to live as Christians everyday.

In other words, the gospel sustains my presently, it doesn't just redeem me historically or resurrect me eternally.

The gospel is my present, my current, my now.

And so the question.  The question that I intend to explore is that if the gospel is my daily power to live as God ordains: what does it mean to live "gospel powered?"

In what ways does the gospel empower us to live?

What ways of life does the gospel lead us toward?

What power for the present is in the gospel?

What avenues does God ordain for living gospel-powered in the present?

Note:  I intend to explore this and share my thoughts as I search.  I don't have a set series or anything like that.  But I intend to write about the power of the gospel once a week or so.