Gospel

When interviewing NT Wright, Trevin Wax asked him to describe the gospel in two minutes. He described what he had said to a Japanese student on a train who asked a question just minutes before he had to leave the train. Tom Wright was reading a book about Jesus and the student, who knew nothing about him, asked Tom who Jesus was. He said,

Jesus was a Jew, who believed that God’s plan to rescue the whole world was coming to fulfilment in him. He died to take the weight of evil upon himself. He rose from the dead and launched God’s project and invited the whole world to join with it and find themselves.

I like that way of putting it. When I became a Christian at the age of 25, I did not hear this gospel, but it was the gospel that I received and believed.

After looking out on the world from a farm for five years, I had realised that it was a mess. I went to University to find out what was wrong and who knew how to put it right. After completing a degree in economics and politics, I discovered that this was a dry well. No one knew how to fix the world, because they did not know how to deal with the problem of the human heart.

When I heard about Jesus again, I realised that he not only knew how to clean up the mess that humans and the spiritual powers of evil had made of the world, but he had done everything that needed to be done to make it possible. That was the good news that lead me to follow Jesus. I was glad to be part of Jesus project, because he knew what he was doing.

A year later, I discovered that he had sent also sent his Holy Spirit to tell us what to do, and to empower us to fulfil the good news of his Kingdom.