My Own Gospel This Instant!

If I was asked to run the world, nothing would be as it is.

Text messages would be allowed 20 more characters each. Ice cream would be good for you. Ghost-white skin would be attractive. Neighbors would be quiet. Traffic lights would stay green. Skinny jeans and mustard yellow would stay “out,” where they belong. None of my friends would be married to their current spouses (not because I don’t like them, but because I was so sure their first-ever boyfriends would take that honor). Doctors wouldn’t get paid unless they actually resolved the issue. And I, placed in any given social situation, would be graceful and beautiful and smooth as a radio disc jockey.

Yes, life would be grand.

But, no. Instead, life just is what it is. Clunky and cumbersome and challenging and downright aggravating.

So, since I’m as “off” as I am on these fundamental matters, what would happen if I was assigned the task of writing the Gospel and figuring out how the entire human race can get right with God? My conjured-up religion would be pretty cut-and-dried:

It would involve me paying penance. It would involve rituals, because rituals make me feel like I’m doing something. My own gospel would involve ruminating, because pondering my sorry state shows that at least I’m aware of it. Rituals and ruminating … couple them together and call me accomplished. A little more effort, a little bit closer to God.

But, praise God, my gospel is not His Gospel. His truth – the real Gospel – is actually completely upside down from anything I would ever dream up … from anything any human could ever conjure up. God’s Gospel is bizarre. It has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with Him. It’s relational, not ritual. It’s grace, not grief. It’s mercy, not misery. It’s love, not lament. It’s truth, not tricks. It’s Jesus, God’s only son, not “woe is me.”

What if you didn’t have to come up with your own gospel? What if the great Almighty, the three-in-one, the One with a crazy plan for redemption is pursuing you now just as intensely as He proved his pursuit 2,000 years ago? What if His truth never changed, yet the ways you could discover and rediscover it were as fluid as the blood that flowed from His side? What if His simultaneously ludicrous and wonderful Gospel could, in fact, set you free from the chains of your own makeshift gospel?

"'For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,' declares the LORD." Isaiah 55:8

"Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 'The time has come,' he said. 'The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!'" Mark 1:14-15