Tullian Tchividjian:
The gospel is not about a lifestyle that we live, it's about the law-fulfilling life that Christ lived. So it's Christ-centered. It's ridiculously Christo-centric. It starts with that. Because you hear a lot of people who say we got to live the gospel, we got to do the gospel. That's a poor use of the English language, first of all. The gospel literally means "a good news announcement." It's a pronouncement. The word "evangelium" which begets the word evangelism carries military implications. It is a victory announcement. Victory is won on the battlefield. A messenger runs back to the city and says, "We've won." That's what an evangelist is to do, a gospel proclaimer.
There is a real need to define the gospel properly. It starts there. If you don't have a working, biblical, theological definition of the gospel, I don't know what your church does if the category is confusing. So it starts with the leadership being able to grasp it.
You can say I'm old fashion, but there's no program for this. Preachers just got to get it. They got to understand this. The moralistic, do-more, try harder, preacher that's in the church today has just got to be squashed. Preachers have to get a clear vision on how to preach the gospel from Genesis to Revelation from every text from the Bible. In Luke 24, when Jesus was on the road to Emmaus, he says the whole scripture is about me. It's all about me. So we don't just encounter Jesus when we get to Matthew, Mark , Luke and John. Jesus appears in the beginning of the Bible and he comes at the end of the Bible and everything in between. Preachers have to really figure out how do we preach the Good News on Sunday morning from every text of the Bible. That's huge. That's a mammoth-size challenge because I think real preaching has fallen on hard times.
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