Most of us can point to events
in our history that have changed our lives radically. That’s particularly so in
our spiritual lives. Things happen that affect our relationship with God and
shape the kind of people we become from that point on. One writer speaks of
these as “marker post” events; events that mark a decisive point in our lives,
and help define the kind of people God wants us to be.
I can identify several such events
in my life, one of which I would like to share with you. My reason for doing so
is not to reveal my personal history so much as to help you appreciate a truth
– a truth that continues to influence my life deeply and one which I believe
needs to be better appreciated by Christians generally. I’m thinking of the
truth that the gospel is the gospel of the
For many years I didn’t really
understand what Jesus meant when he spoke of the “gospel of the kingdom” (see
Matthew 4:23; 24:14). My early views of the gospel had been shaped by John’s account
of the life of Jesus and by the letters of Paul. From John I learned that the
gospel was a gospel of life (John 20:31).
John’s presentation of Jesus as the eternal Son of God sent into the
world to give “eternal life” to those who believed, appealed to me enormously. To
this day it retains its compelling attraction. There is nothing I want more
than to drink the living water that Jesus offers (John 4:14; 7:35), to feed
upon his body and blood (John 6:56-57), and to bear fruit as a consequence of being
united to him (John 15:1ff.). These ideas have dominated my thinking about
Jesus and shaped my spirituality perhaps more than any other.
But added to this was my
appreciation of Paul’s teaching on justification through faith in Christ. I can
still distinctly recall the time more than thirty years ago when I first
understood this great truth. Up until that point I had – like many other young
Christians – only a general notion of how I was “saved” through Christ. I
understood that he died for me, thus taking away my guilt and enabling me to go
to heaven when I died. I believed that to be true and experienced it to be so
as well. But my understanding didn’t go much further than that.
Then, in the course of reading
a series of expositions on Romans, I suddenly came to understand something of
the richness of the idea of being justified by faith. For the first time I saw
that my salvation was rooted in the love of God for me before time, a love that
“gave” me to Christ to redeem and save (Ephesians 1:4; John 6:37), something he
did not simply by dying for me but also by calling me through his Spirit and
Word and enabling me to come to faith in him. Suddenly the idea of belonging to
Christ – of being “in Christ” – and of sharing in all the benefits of his life
and death, was overwhelming. That too was a marker post event in my life.
As valid as these perceptions
of the gospel based on John and Paul were – and as precious as they remain to
me today – there was still something that perplexed me. It was the seeming absence
of these great truths – life in Christ and justification through faith in
Christ – in the first three books of the New Testament. When I turned to
Matthew’s Gospel I didn’t read about Jesus coming from the Father to give life
to people, but found instead the story of the One who came to proclaim the
nearness (or availability) of the kingdom of God. The same was true in Mark and
to a lesser degree in Luke. There was nothing about being “born again” or about
being “justified” or “sanctified” in Christ. I seemed to find myself in another
world, confronted, dare I say, with what seemed another gospel. I just couldn’t see how the gospel of the
kingdom related to what John and Paul taught, and, to my shame (and I now see,
loss), I tended to neglect it altogether. And that left a hole in my thinking
and a gap in my approach to life.
That changed – or perhaps
better, began to change – when I started to teach biblical theology to students
in