Skip to main content

Preaching the Gospel to Ourselves

 What is the point of preaching the Gospel?  Well one might say, "I preach the Gospel so that people might be saved."  For years I would have said the same thing.  The Gospel is the starting place for the life of Christ and once a person receives Christ the Gospel is left behind for the deeper truths of the Scriptures.  Only in recent years has my attitude changed.  The Gospel is not the just the beginning, but also the middle and the end of the Christian life.  As a result, I preach the Gospel to myself each and every day.  This not with the goal being saved again and again and again.  Rather, I preach the Gospel to keep my life centred on that Gospel.  I would suggest that preaching the Gospel to our selves daily is important for several reasons.

1.  Preaching the Gospel to myself daily results in daily praise to my wonderful God and Saviour.  The old cliché says that familiarity breeds contempt.  I might not go that far, but certainly familiarity produces a forgetfulness.  It is too easy for me to forget the depth of my depravity before Christ.  It is too easy to forget how desperately I needed God's grace.  It is too easy to forget the wonder of God's love that saved a wretch like me.  Preaching the Gospel to myself constantly reminds me of the grandeur of God's love and causes my heart to overflow in adoration to the one who gave himself for me.

2.  Preaching the Gospel to myself daily keeps me humble.  The converse of the previous point - the Gospel magnifies Christ - not me.  I was and still am totally and completely in need of Jesus.  I could not save myself.  I needed Christ to do it for me.  In the same way that reminds me that I still cannot do anything to please God on my own.  I still desperately need Jesus every day to continue and finish His good work in me.

3.  Preaching the Gospel to myself daily defeats the lies of the enemy.  We live in a feelings oriented age.  I constantly hear brothers and sisters in Christ speak of the faith life in terms of feelings.  I believe this is a trick of the evil one.  There are many days that I don't feel like a Christian.  There are times when I am more in the pit than on the mountaintop.  At those times the enemy comes and whispers in my mind.  "You don't know Jesus.  A real Christian wouldn't feel like that or do that."  By preaching the Gospel to myself, I put the lie to those whispers.  My salvation is not based on how I feel.  It is based on the fact - the truth - that Jesus died in my place on the cross.  My feelings and circumstances are in constant flux, but the one who saved me - Jesus - is the same yesterday, today and forever.  I trust Him to complete the work He has begun in me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death For a Believer

We picture death as coming to destroy; let us rather picture Christ as coming to save. We think of death as ending; let us rather think of life as beginning, and that more abundantly. We think of losing; let us think of gaining. We think of parting; let us think of meeting. We think of going away; let us think of arriving. And as the voice of death whispers,  "You must go from earth," Let us hear the voice of Christ saying, "You are but coming to me."   Norman Macleod
Post a Comment
Read more

Families' Fridays

From Focus on the Family 10 helpful tips for single parents Imagine this: you’re the sole parent for your children. You get them up, get them fed and send them to school. You do the housework, maybe you go to work yourself, you get home and you’re still the only adult there. There’s no one to relieve you. No one to pass the baton to while you take a shower or take a few minutes for yourself. You make dinner and gather the family around the table to eat. You play with them, read to them, give them baths, get them to bed and there’s no one there to sit with and process your day. There’s no one there to laugh with you or pray with you. Instead you keep working. You clean up the house again. You pack lunches for the next day. And you eventually crash into bed, knowing you’ll be doing the same thing tomorrow. For many, this is not an imagined scenario. When you parent alone – whether due to divorce, the loss of your spouse or having a spouse who works away from home for long periods of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Quotation of the Week

“And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”” (Matt. 26:39) The object of Christ’s attention here is this cup. What is the cup? What’s in it? In Scripture the cup refers to God’s wrath or judgment (Isaiah 51:17; Jeremiah 25:15). Here in this foreboding vessel before Jesus is the fully fermented, undiluted, cup of divine wrath. It is God’s impending judgment that has him sweating drops of blood and in deep agony. Christ is looking down the barrel of heaven’s infinite wrath, and his heart is shredded in agony. As barbaric as the human suffering was, it was not the chief agony of the cross. This was reserved for his assignment to drink the cup. It wasn’t the prospect of martyrdom—wrath at the hands of men—that weighed so heavily upon Jesus, it was wrath of God. Erik Redmond in the article The Dreadful Cup and Our Faithful Savior .
Post a Comment
Read more