Earlier today I was thinking about sharing a spiritual truth that I had recently learned about. In the middle of thinking about it, I realized I was trying to keep it from sounding offensive in the way I would present it. I found myself dumbing it down, softening the truth, trying to make it sound more appealing. I had to stop and check myself. I was reminded of something that I think many Christians forget or try to avoid when thinking about our faith and sharing what we believe with others who have not heard about our savior. The Gospel IS offensive.

Think about it. If you’ve never heard the story of the gospel, the story of Jesus, it’s pretty offensive. The gospel tells us that we in our flesh are evil, we’re sinners, we deserve death. We’ve sinned against a holy, eternal God and there is nothing we can do to try to earn His forgiveness or earn our way back into a relationship with God. We need help. We need a savior. We have to set aside our strength and be weak before God and let him help us. (1 Cor 12:9-10)

So yes, the gospel is offensive. It’s true, in our flesh we are selfish, self-righteous, sinful. We turned away from God and instead of giving glory to our worthy Creator, we praised creation. We bought into the lie that we’ll find freedom and satisfaction in serving our own desires through created beings and things. Humans spend their lives trying to find happiness and trying to please themselves. Many people see the Christian life as a rule book, as a list of dos and don’ts, as restraining.

But the ironic truth is that until we know and experience the gospel’s saving grace, we are actually enslaved to our own passions. God’s intention when he created the world was for us to be in a relationship with him, to know him and experience his goodness and his glory. He created us to worship him and to find ultimate satisfaction and joy in Him. So when humanity sinned and turned away from Him, He turned us over to our fleshly and sinful desires. (Romans 1:24-25). God doesn’t force us to love him or choose him. He let us have what we wanted; what we thought we needed to satisfy ourselves. So because we lost that satisfying relationship with God in the garden of Eden, we were left to try to satisfy ourselves in whatever way we thought was best. But it wasn’t fulfilling, it was never lasting, it was temporary happiness that left us only searching for more through a never ending cycle of our search for pleasure, satisfaction, and purpose.
(Sorry if I just ruined your day, but keep reading, I promise it gets better!)

So if the Gospel means good news, what is it? I think it can be summed up in a single sentence. Romans 5:8 says “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In the midst of our worst, God gave us his best. God sent His only Son, Jesus, to earth to die on a cross in our place as the perfect sacrifice for our sins. He died the death we deserved, and he rose from the grave to offer us the life we didn’t deserve. Yes, God did turn us over to our sins, and he could have left us there. But he didn’t. He didn’t even wait for us to turn from our sins back to him before he died for us. He died for us, WHILE we were still in the depths of our sins.

So yes the gospel is offensive, but it’s more than that it’s beautiful. It’s freeing. Christ didn’t die for us to follow a rule book. He died to free us from the sinful desires we were enslaved too. Romans 6:14 says “For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace. He has forgiven us and offered us new life, better life; eternal life with God. He died to restore us into a right relationship with God again. And all we have to do is accept and receive the free gift of eternal life. There’s no cost on our side. He paid the price, and he bought us with his blood on the cross.

That’s the gospel. It’s beautiful. But in order for us to see the beauty of the gospel, we first have to see the offensiveness of it. In order to understand everything Jesus went through for us, we have to understand our sinfulness and how undeserving we are. The more we understand our sin, the more we understand and can appreciate His grace and praise Him. We will never be perfect on this side of Heaven. Even with new life in Christ, I still often find myself turning back to old habits or trying to find fulfillment myself. I still have to repent of my sins daily and I’m constantly working on releasing control to God, but I’m no longer ruled by sin or by the law, but by grace. Romans 5:1 says “There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. There is nothing more freeing than the grace offered by our Father.

I’d be doing you a disservice if I wasn’t 100% honest about the whole gospel because I didn’t want to offend you. You deserve to hear the truth instead of a watered-down version of the gospel that may keep from hurting your pride, but it would do you no good in the long run. The joy I have experienced in knowing Jesus is incomparable to anything else on earth, and I want that for everyone else too. I want to share the beauty of the gospel even if that means sharing the offensiveness of the gospel too.