Today’s reading: Leviticus 14; 2 Timothy 2
Pop quiz time!
Who needs to hear the gospel?
I want you to take a second and think about that one. Feel free to answer it from a theological standpoint, but, more so, think about it in terms of how you personally approach life and your faith. By what you talk about and with whom, who do you practically act like needs to hear the gospel?
I think a lot of Christians, unless they recognize the obvious trap I was just setting up, will say that the gospel is for non-believers. Sure, they might also agree that the gospel is the root and base of the Christian life since you have to respond to the gospel to have spiritual life in Christ, but functionally, past the start of things, the gospel is really for non-Christians.
But what is really important to recognize is just how incredibly far this mentality clearly is from Paul’s own perspective. Think about it, this letter, 2 Timothy, is a letter from Paul the apostle to Timothy, his personal disciple who has been planting and leading churches with him for years by this point. Timothy knows the gospel. He has been a Christian long enough that, even in 1 Timothy, he had been left behind to shepherd churches into maturity enough to appoint elders over them, and this second letter we have from Paul to Timothy comes years after the first. So we aren’t talking about a letter to an entire church or community where Paul might be thinking, “There are probably a lot of unconvinced people listening, so I need to make sure the gospel is in there,” we are talking about a personal letter between friends, both of which know the Lord intimately and both of which have been pursuing Him doggedly together for years. And yet, how many times has Paul laid out the gospel already???
It’s hard to count exactly how many times Paul gives the gospel since he keeps talking about it and various pieces of it, but he lays it out at least once or twice in chapter 1, depending on how you count, and then another time or two here in chapter 2. In pretty much every instruction he gives Timothy he couches the instruction in a reminder of the gospel. And Paul is not content, in those reminders, to just say, “Don’t forget the gospel,” but he lays out the theology of Jesus’ death and resurrection multiple times to a solidly believing and actively walking Timothy!
Too many Christians fail to recognize how deeply we need to soak in the gospel from the first day of our Christian life all the way up through the last.
The most egregious example of this I have heard was from a friend of mine who used to play piano for a church. There are plenty of churches out there that don’t actually hold to the gospel (too many of them), but this was not one of those churches; this was a small, believing church. This friend, when he heard the gospel, immediately came to faith in Christ, but was confused why he had never heard it before. He went to that church every week for years to play piano for them, but in all that time he never once heard the gospel. A mutual friend who grew up in the same church said the same thing. He heard the gospel from his parents, but never from the pastor of the church, and since it was a smaller community, he thought the pastor just assumed everyone already knew it so he didn’t need to keep talking about it.
Other times teachers will give the gospel, but it is clearly intended just for the non-believer listening to the teaching. I’m personally guilty of this one. I’ve taught before, including the gospel in my teaching, but when I saw that nobody who didn’t already know and believe it was there, I skipped it to make time for other “more important” content. Other times the gospel gets couched in language like, “If you don’t already believe, here is your application [INSERT_GOSPEL], but for those of us here who already believe, here is your application [INSERT_PRACTICAL_APPLICATION].”
But again, how far is this from Paul’s mentality? As he writes to his beloved disciple, the one person apart from himself who he is probably most sure of his faith and firm grounding in a solid understanding of the gospel, he reminds Timothy, over and over again, of the foundational truth of the gospel for all that he does.
We need more of this. We need more of it from our pastors and teachers, and we need more of it from our friends and family members. The gospel is how we enter into the life of faith, but it is also how we are grounded and walk in the faith day by day. It is a deeper rooting in the gospel that allows us to come to a place where, like Paul, we can say that we are not ashamed of the gospel because we know whom we have believed.
There is more I want to say on this, but we’re already getting kind of long on this post, so maybe we’ll do part 2 on this topic another day. It does come up often enough…
For today though, who in your life needs to hear the gospel?
If a non-Christian came to mind, that’s great, go share it, but realize that there are followers of Jesus in your life, people who know and love our Lord deeply, who also need you to remind them of that same love and grace. Let’s normalize boldly sharing the gospel with one another.
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