The Importance of the Gospel Intro (Part 1)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the apostle

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Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

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And today we have a message that is a recorded message. I preached at Trinity Presbyterian Church at a conference there with the

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Nebraska Gospel Network. The conference was entitled In Step with the Gospel. That was back in 2011,

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November. And this is the second message I preached. What is the gospel and why is it important?

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Did an earlier show on No Compromise Radio that got our feet wet with that topic, but here, the gospel and why is it important?

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Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 that this is of first importance. And so today, a taped message at a conference

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I did in Nebraska, in Kahnee, Nebraska. It's about three hours outside of Omaha, Nebraska.

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A lot of men there that love the word of God. And today's message is for laypeople and pastors.

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And you'll hear us at the Gospel Network In Step with the Gospel, 2011. I got a good night's sleep last night.

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How many were here last night? Quite a few, okay. I don't recognize you because I was in sleep deprivation mode, but I feel great this morning.

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Before I begin, one of the things I think about is how God changes us and gives us new affections.

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I live in Massachusetts now, about an hour from North Hampton, where Jonathan Edwards was. And Edwards said that when

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God saves you and changes you, regenerates you, you begin to love what you used to hate and hate what you used to love.

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And so Edwards said that you begin by God's work in your life to love what you used to hate and hate what you used to love.

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And I don't know about you, but before I got saved, I would never think about coming to a conference, a

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Bible conference, on a Saturday, and pay for it. And here we have this affection.

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You can think of 1 Peter 2, verse 2, can't you? And these newborn babes longing for the pure milk of the word.

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And so God has given us these new desires. And I just want to commend you for coming out on a Saturday to learn about who the

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Lord is and his word. And God's work performs its work powerfully in those who believe.

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And that's our desire today. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, born in 1960.

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Went to Omaha Northwest, then University of Nebraska at Lincoln, graduated in 1982. And it was just interesting driving down Route 80 again, passing

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University of Nebraska and looking at things. And I moved to Los Angeles in 82 and then out to Massachusetts, to the

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Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And so anyway, I'm really glad to be here. Let's pray and then we'll start.

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Father in heaven, we now commit this time to you. And we are thankful that you have made us born again.

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Thank you for causing us to be made alive. Thank you for giving us this new nature.

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Thank you for making these old things like our old enslavement to sin gone.

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And now you've given us a new appetite. And we'd love to learn more about you. We'd love to learn more about the gospel, about Christ Jesus, our risen

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King. And all these things are because you've given us this heart, this appetite. And so Father, help us to learn and may your spirit be pleased to transform us into one level of glory to the next so that we might look more like Christ in our day -to -day lives.

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Bless these dear people today in Jesus' name, amen. Occasionally I teach a seminary class at Southern Seminary on preaching.

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And so I'm thinking about preaching and how do you preach and what's good preaching, what's bad preaching. And about the same time

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I was in Dublin, Ireland, very popular square, shopping, jugglers, coffee shops.

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And there was a street preacher there, very well dressed in a suit.

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And he was preaching. And he was preaching things like this. Repent, turn from your sins, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, run from sins. And I thought, you know what?

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He's got a lot of courage. And then I thought with his courage and my seminary training, we're gonna make a good marriage.

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So I kind of went up to him in a deferring way, not aggressive way, but I kind of walked up to him.

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He was on a little platform. I mean, literally there are thousands of people there. So I walked up to him.

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He kind of had a little bodyguard. Well, it was not a little bodyguard, but a big bodyguard. And I went over and I said, when

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I teach my men at seminary to preach, I always tell them to talk about who

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Jesus is and what he's done. And then in the light of that, repent and believe. He never looked at me, maybe out of the corner of his eye, but he's telling people to repent and believe.

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And then I said that to him. And then he said, Jesus Christ lived a perfect life on earth for over 30 years.

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He died a substitutionary death. He was raised from the dead and he's coming back.

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And in light of that, you must repent and believe. And I walked away.

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I didn't do this with my body, but in my heart, I went like this. Because I was too chicken to get up in front of 10 ,000 people in Dublin.

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But I thought, that is an excellent illustration of the error sometimes that's in evangelicalism.

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Confusing the good news with the response to the good news. And so today we're gonna talk about the gospel and why it's important.

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And I think you'll all be encouraged. I think you'll be refreshed as you think about the gospel again. What is the gospel and why is it important?

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So if you can think of a Bible passage that talks about the gospel and why it's important, that's the passage we should probably go to today.

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What passage do you think we'll go to? The gospel and how it's important, why it's important, of first importance.

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Let's turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. 1 Corinthians chapter 15. I have a pretty easy outline today.

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And the outline first is going to be what is the gospel? And then it's going to be why is it important? How about that,

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Tom? Does that follow your outline good enough? I think I'll preface it a little bit though with what the gospel is not.

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Then we'll look at what the gospel is and then why it's important. Let me give you some definitions of what the gospel is not.

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The gospel is not be good. The gospel is not love the

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Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. The gospel is not the four spiritual laws.

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The gospel is not love your neighbor as yourself. The gospel is not you can have purpose to your life.

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The gospel is not you can have a personal relationship with Jesus. The gospel is not you can have meaning to your life.

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The gospel is not Ben Franklin's maxim,

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God helps those who help themselves. You know, 82 % of people in America think that's a

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Bible verse. God helps those who help themselves. The gospel is not WWJD.

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What would Jesus do? The gospel is not, oh,

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I have so many. Jesus came to be your best friend. The gospel is not

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God loves the sinner but hates the sin. The gospel is not accept

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Jesus in your heart. The gospel is not pray the sinner's prayer and if you really mean it, you're saved.

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The gospel is not, all right, let's turn it up a little bit.

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You ready? Those of you who were here last night, you think, well, the guy at least taught the Bible. Those of you who are just brand new here today, you're thinking,

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I don't know. This is going to be bad. The gospel is not you must be born again.

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The gospel is not repent. The gospel is not, all right, we'll soften it up a little bit.

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You must speak in tongues. The gospel is not put

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Jesus on the throne of your life. The gospel is not making Jesus Lord of your life.

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The gospel is not let go and let God. The gospel is not advice for better living.

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There's a song in our hymnal that I don't like to sing, although I like the tune. We've changed the lyrics. Joyful, joyful, we adore thee.

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The gospel is not all who live in love are thine. So what is the gospel?

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If the gospel isn't anything that must be done, what is the gospel? And could

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I really be right if I tell you that the gospel is not repent and believe and trust and follow and forsake?

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Now, certainly some of the things that I talked about are effects of the gospel, a personal relationship with Jesus.

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I wouldn't argue about that. But what is the gospel? If the gospel isn't repent and believe, then what is the gospel?

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Let's look at 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and answer that question today. And I think at the end of the day, you'll not throw me out.

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I think you'll hang in there with me and you'll say, you know what? I think that's true. Now, whenever you parachute into a book, you like to have a little background information.

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This is the longest epistle in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians. And actually, if you think about what

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Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, he wrote 29 chapters to the church of Corinth, a crazy place near Athens.

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And this is one of those passages in 1 Corinthians 15 that it's got good shock value.

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The guy's a liberal, so I hate to quote him, but I'll do it anyway. Here's what he said to his friend in a letter in 1919 about this very passage.

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Yesterday and today, I sat over 1 Corinthians 15, but I came to a dead stop in the earliest stages as I started to work through it thoroughly.

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The chapter is the key to the entire letter with its profound disclosures on this and that, which have their source in ultimate wisdom.

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Now, here's the punchline. Some of them have struck us recently like shocks from an electric eel.

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This is the electric eel passage. How's that? We have electric eels around here? Maybe not.

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We have gar, right? There's probably a lot of gar in the Platte River. Yeah. I used to go to Gavin's Point Dam and we would fish for paddlefish.

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We'd snag paddlefish. You guys do that here? No? Hey, when

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I say that to the people of Massachusetts, they look like you now are looking, so we'll get back to the text.

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Paul has just talked about disorderly worship in chapter 12 and chapter 13 and chapter 14, and now he's going to slide into another issue and he's going to basically say in chapter 15, you will be resurrected.

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That's the chapter. You are going to be resurrected. I know you've got this Greek hangover and Greek philosophy, body bad, spirit good, this

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Platonic kind of dualistic thing. I know that's where you live and breathe, but you will be resurrected.

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He says that in verse 12 of chapter 15. This is really why the whole chapter is written.

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Now, if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?

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That's why Paul was writing this chapter, because you will be raised from the dead and he uses Jesus as being raised from the dead as a fact that God raises people from the dead.

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He didn't want them to be functional Sadducees. And so we're only going to look at the first six, seven, eight verses of chapter 15, as Paul is making a case for the reality of the resurrection.

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So let me give you six things that the gospel is.

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I said a lot of things that the gospel is not. Let me give you six components of the gospel, six partial definitions of the gospel put together we'll understand the gospel.

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I had to give disclosure before I start. I came up with this outline and then I was studying some more.

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In the old days, I would just take everybody else's information and put something together. And I think as I've learned and I've grown, lots of times

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I'll do my own work and then I'll supplement. Well, I came up with this really great outline and I thought it was great because it was biblical, simple, and I kind of liked the way it was packaged.

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And then I read a D .A. Carson article on the gospel and he has some of the same points that I do. I thought

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I better make a disclosure because you're gonna think I stole D .A. Carson's outline. But I think our outlines are pretty much similar.

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They're similar because I'm as smart as D .A. Carson. No, that's not what's going on.

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We call him behind the scenes. I've had him as a seminary professor. We call him, his name's Donald Carson. We call him the

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Don, the Don of evangelicalism. But when you are looking at the same text and trying to find authorial intent, then you get pretty much the same outline.

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So my outline is similar, but it's not exact. But in case you've read that article, I wanted to tell you that up front.

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What is the gospel? Number one, the gospel is good news. Six descriptions of the gospel.

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Description number one, the gospel is good news. Let's take a look at chapter 15, verse one and following.

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And as I did last night, I like to go to a passage and I'll actually work through that passage as well as we deal with this topic of what is the gospel and why is it important?

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1 Corinthians 15, verse one. Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel

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I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand. Now remember

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Acts 18, Paul was there for 18 months to preach. Teaching, it's an easy way to remember it, 1818.

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18 months, Acts chapter 18, Paul was at Corinth and you know he taught them a lot.

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When he was at Ephesus for three years, he taught them the whole Bible, all the Old Testament. And here he's reminding them of the gospel preached by him to the church of Corinth.

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And when you see words like received, you see that towards the end of verse one, which you received, that's a very technical term, meaning

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I received some tradition, our teaching, our knowledge, and then

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I formally passed it down to the next generation. You can think of a runner and a runner gets the baton.

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Alison Felix, do you know Alison Felix? She'll be in the Olympics again coming up in 2012.

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Her father is a seminary professor at Master's Seminary. And so it's kind of fun to root for her.

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She gets the baton and then she passes it on. It's a formal passing. That's the exact same thing here.

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It's just not, oh, I received it, but in the long line of one faithful man teaching to another faithful man to passing it down, et cetera.

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And then he says in verse two, by which, he's talking about the gospel, by this gospel, you are being saved.

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And then like Paul enjoys to do, he gives a little warning, if indeed you hold fast to the word

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I preached to you unless you believe in vain. In other words, you can believe with a non -saving faith.

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So make sure you believe with not just knowledge, not just assent, but with volition as well. Now we come to verse three.

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For I delivered to you, again, more language, just like received in verse one. Here we have deliver in verse three, technical in both

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Jewish and Greek context, of formally handing something on to the next generation, valuable knowledge that our generation has, that this generation needs.

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I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received. Now, some people say grammatically, this could be first importance, meaning first in time.

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That could be grammatically the issue, but contextually, it's not at all. This is everything in the

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Bible is important, but some things are more important. Is it important to give thanks always?

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Is it important to rejoice? Again, I say rejoice. Obviously, everything in the Bible is important because we believe in the sufficiency of scripture.

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We believe that everything is given to us for a reason. We don't believe in the opposite of sufficiency, that is deficiency.

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The scriptures are sufficient and God has given us everything we need revealed from his mind.

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But some things are more important. This is at the top of the list of first importance.

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This is not at first, this is first in importance. And then he says, it's the gospel.

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Now, the word gospel is very simple. It means good news. It means glad tidings.

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It means a declaration. Now, we don't really have much news these days in terms of newspaper, boys.

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Is anybody here old enough and willing to admit it where there would be people standing on street corners in larger towns hawking newspapers?

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The kids are here saying, what's a newspaper? You know, what's a newspaper? I got our kids the other day some silly putty.

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I said, you know what? Let's go find some newspaper because you can put it on there and then stretch the person's face out.

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You know, you can get the quarterback of the opposing team and kind of stretch out their face. And then

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I go, A, we have no newspapers anymore. And B, the newspapers we have are made well enough that the print doesn't come off.

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So what a shame. The gospel came from a word that had military overtones.

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As I said last night, the battle is won. The guy comes running back. You can hear him kind of panting almost.

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And he's saying, you know, King, we won. The general won the battle and he announces this good news.

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It's news. It's good news in content. It's good news in delivery form.

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Wouldn't it be weird if the runner, the victory runner came back to the King and then said,

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I am the news. Wouldn't that be weird? I'm gonna live the news in front of you.

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That'd be strange. It's kind of a category error. The good news is what

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God has done in his son at Calvary. I think of just off the top of my head, what did

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Spurgeon say? The gospel isn't do, do, do. The gospel is what? Done, done, done.

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It's happened and it is good news. There's a lot of bad news in this world, but this is actually really good news.

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And this reporter comes to announce that we need to be better parents, better husbands.

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No, this is what God has done in his son. Lorraine Bettner said, the gospel is the good news about great salvation purchased by Jesus Christ, by which he reconciled sinful men to a holy

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God. Bettner said that in reality, there are only two types of religious thought, the religion of faith and the religion of works.

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And so we need good news because when we're born, let's think theologically, we're born Pelagians. When we're born, we think we can be good enough to get to heaven.

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Then God saves us and we're born again lots of times like semi -Pelagians where we contribute with God.

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We work together with God. It's kind of a synthesis, God and I. But the gospel is about what

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God alone did, how God was alone working. So number one, it's good news, the gospel is.

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Number two, it's about God. It's good news about God. Now this is really neat when you take a look at it and dig into it a little bit.

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And I think you'll be fascinated and encouraged. If you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verses three, four, five, six, seven, and eight,

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Christ is the subject of every verb except for two relative clauses around verse six.

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When you see this, in other words, if you don't know clauses and phrases, and by the way, when I train men for gospel ministry, the first thing

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I tell them to do is go take an English class because the more you understand English, the better you can understand the

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Bible and God reveals himself to us now in print. I have my friends, they'll tell me,

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I'm a visual learner. And I'll say, well, that's nice, but God's not a visual teacher unless you're talking about general revelation, the sun and the moon and the sky, but God teaches through print.

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Sorry, I thought I was on no compromise radio for a minute there, Gordon. I'm a visual learner.

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Okay, well, but God wants you to be a learner too. And here, if you study this,

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Christ is the subject of all these verbs. Take a look at verse three of chapter 15.

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Christ died. Verse four, He was buried. He was raised.

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Verse 15, verse five, it doesn't even say someone saw Him. He appeared.

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He appeared. His own volition, His own discretion, His own free will, He appeared.

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It doesn't even say, does it? They buried Him. Does it say that in verse, sorry about that voice, in verse four, they buried

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Him? No, but to keep everything right side up,

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Paul recounts the message in a way that Jesus Christ is the one doing.

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He's the one acting. We are passive in salvation. Christ is active.

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God is the Savior. So if you take a look at it again, God is, the gospel is all about God.

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Christ died. He was buried. He was raised. He appears, et cetera. This is a lot different than Charles Finney who had a sermon entitled,

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I couldn't make this up if I tried, Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.

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It says, God is the actor. God is the king. God is the Savior. Now, back where I'm from, which is

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Nebraska, so funny when you talk to somebody else, you say, well, I'm from Nebraska. Now you know.

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There has been a shift in evangelicalism. Actually, it started after Calvin and Luther. Instead of talking about what

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God has done at Calvary, we talk about how we receive and how we appropriate what

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God has done. There's an emphasis that's gone from what God has objectively done, whether you were born or not,

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He did it, to then how we receive it, how we experience it, how we personally appropriate it.

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Now, do we personally believe? Yes, God doesn't believe for us. Do we personally repent? Yes, that gift that God has given us, we still have to do.

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But the language has moved from this kind of Pauline apostolic language to this is how

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I received Jesus. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.