Josh Broward
January 31, 2010
The Gospel and Salvation
(Working with the Right Picture)
Gospel Series: Week 2
John 3:16-17; Ephesians 2:1-10; Isaiah 25:1-9
Learning Experience:
People gather in groups of 3-4 to put together the pieces of the puzzle. However, the pieces they are given don’t match the picture on the envelope.
Reflection:
What happened?
When you realized that the pieces didn’t fit the picture, what did you do?
Were you more committed to the pieces or to the picture on the envelope?
The picture on your envelope is called “The Bridge 
Illustration.” It works like this. We are the person on the left. God wants us to have life and joy and peace. But we sinned and made a huge gap between us and God. Because we sinned, and because “the wages of sin are death,” death is coming our way. We live a life that isn’t really life, and when we die, we’ll go to hell for eternal death.
Most of us try to bridge the gap. We try to do good things, to help other people. Maybe we go to church or give money to the poor. We try to get closer to God, but we can never be good enough. We always fall short.
But here’s the good news. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. He died instead of us. He made a bridge for us to be close to God. Now we can put our faith in Jesus to forgive our sins so that we can live with God again. Now we can have life with God in heaven.
I grew up with the Bridge Illustration. I have probably drawn it 100 times to explain the gospel to others. The beauty is that it is simple. It is easy to draw and easy to understand.
But over the past few years, I have begun to feel like this picture is too simple. At first, I started to make changes to the picture. I added an arrow for faith – showing that we put our trust in Jesus and cross the bridge. I drew a community of people on the side with God to show that we’re part of the church.
But finally, I decided that I couldn’t make enough changes to this picture to really describe the Gospel that we find in the Bible. This picture of salvation was too small, too individualistic, too much like a business transaction, to stagnant. After the person puts their faith in Jesus, they are done. That’s the end of the picture. They cross over. They become a Christian. The end.
That’s not what I read in the Bible. Becoming a Christian is the beginning of a journey, not the end. When we become a Christian, we still have a lot of work and learning left to do. We need a new picture. We need a new way of thinking about the Gospel and salvation.[1]
Before we talk about a possible new picture, let’s spend some time talking about the puzzle pieces we find in the Bible. Now, I have to confess right now that I’m not going to say enough today. Each one of these pieces deserves a whole sermon, but we don’t have time for that. Today, I’m just going to introduce the pieces so that we can get an idea of the overall picture.
The
N.T. Wright (probably the best New Testament scholar alive today) explains the
The prophet Isaiah … had spoken of God’s coming kingdom as the time when, (a) God’s promises and purposes would be fulfilled, (b) Israel would be rescued from pagan oppression, (c) evil … would be judged, and (d)God would usher in a new reign of justice and peace. Daniel had envisioned a coming time when … God would … set everything straight. To speak of God’s kingdom arriving in the present was to summon up that entire narrative, and to declare that it was reaching its climax. God’s future was breaking in to the present. Heaven was arriving on earth.[2]
In all that Jesus said and did, he was pointing people toward the
Sin: Every last person on earth is sinful. Sin is basically anything we do that is outside of God’s way of life. It could be selfishness, revenge, gossip, ignoring people in need – anything that makes our world less of what God wants.
Sin causes all kinds of problems in our world. (1) Sin separates us from God. Sinning is basically pushing God away from us and choosing our own way. (2) Sin traps us in sinfulness. The more we sin, the more we forget what goodness is. The more we sin, the more addicted and trapped we get. (3) Sin separates us from others and messes up our world. When we live selfishly, that tears apart the fabric of family and community. (4) Sin leads to death. Choosing selfishness leads to self-destruction. When we sin, we ruin our lives here and now until we die. Then, we are stuck in our self-destruction forever.
Cross: Jesus came to defeat sin and to reverse the effects of sin. (1) Through the cross, Jesus reconciles us to God. Jesus took the death we deserved and made peace between us and God. (2) Jesus’ cross sets us free from our slavery to sin and selfishness. In Jesus, we died to that old way of life. (3) Jesus’ cross unites all people. We are all sinners in need of God’s grace, and we are all brought together into God’s grace at the cross. When we are all one family, we stop mistreating each other and start taking care of each other. (4) When Jesus died, the earth shook. When he was resurrected, everything changed and new life emerged from the tomb. I’ll let N.T. Wright explain again:
When Jesus rose again, God’s whole new creation emerged from the tomb, introducing a world full of new potential and possibility. Indeed, precisely because part of that new possibility is for human beings themselves to be revived and renewed, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t leave us as passive, helpless spectators. We find ourselves lifted up, set on our feet, given new breath in our lungs, and commissioned to go and make new creation happen in the world.[3]
Spirit: Forgiving us and giving us a fresh start is good but not enough. We’ll just make a mess of our lives and our world all over again unless God changes us and helps us. This is where the Spirit comes in.
Through the Holy Spirit, we actually have God in us, God living through us, God taking action in our world through us. We can live differently now because God is in us, helping us, healing us, teaching us. Through the Spirit, we become a place where God’s Kingdom is actually a happening in our world.
Grace: Grace is God’s loving, forgiving, healing, empowering presence in our life. We don’t deserve God to help us, but God does. Grace is not a gift from God but the gift of God.[4] God gives himself to us. God stirs our hearts to long for him. God strengthens us to do the good. God works within our hearts to change us to give us hope. We are saved by grace. We live by grace.
Faith: We usually misunderstand faith. We usually think that “faith” means “believing” that God loves us and that Jesus died for our sins. That is definitely part of faith, but that’s not really what the Bible means when it says we are “saved by grace through faith” (Ephesians 2:8). James helps us understand what real faith is:
What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well” – but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do? So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless. (James 2:14-17)
Gary Gulbranson puts it like this: “It’s not what you believe that counts; it’s what you believe enough to do.”[5] Putting our trust in Jesus is more than just understanding theology and prayer. Trusting Jesus means obeying Jesus. If we don’t trust him enough to obey him, we don’t really have faith in Jesus. We just believe some things about Jesus. Having faith means following Jesus.
Following: Jesus was always calling people to “follow” him. Being a Christian is about following Jesus’ way of life, following Jesus’ action in our world. Being a Christian is learning to live the Way of God like Jesus did and does. In fact, the first Christians were called “followers of the Way” (Acts 24:14). Our job is to follow Jesus, to go where he goes, to act as he acts.
Heaven: Heaven is a lot closer than we think. Heaven – God’s “space” – is all around us. Heaven overlaps and intersects earth. It’s like our world is a dirty piece of plastic on an overhead projector and heaven is the light. Our world is real, and heaven is real, but we can’t see the heaven because of all the dirt.
Don’t misunderstand me: there will be life after death. There will be a resurrection, and everyone who has trusted in Jesus will be physically raised with a new body to live in a new heaven and new earth. The Bible is very clear about that, but it doesn’t really explain the details of what that new world will be.
N.T. Wright says, “The whole point of Jesus’ work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there.”[6]
Salvation: Let me quote John Wesley here: “By salvation I mean, not barely … deliverance from hell, or going to heaven, but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, its original purity … the renewal of our souls after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy and truth.”[7] Salvation is the whole process of being saved: forgiveness, transformation, and partnership in God’s mission of healing the world. The good news is that ALL of this is available to ALL of us through Jesus.
When we put all of these pieces together, I think we get a different picture:
We are stuck in a dark land. Our whole country is polluted by our sin and selfishness. We have ruined our environment and ourselves because of our selfish ways. Smog fills the air. Dirt covers our clothes.
But Jesus enters our broken, messed up world. He tells us there is a better way to live. He says we don’t have to live in a world ruined by selfishness.
We decide to follow him, but we are stopped at Customs as we are leaving the country. The immigration officials won’t let us leave until we pay all our debts, but we have a debt of 100,000,000,000 dollars (100 조 원). If we worked a hundred lifetimes, we could never pay that debt. But suddenly, Jesus gives the immigration official his bankbook and says he’ll pay our debt. When the man gives his bank book back, we see that the new balance is zero. It cost Jesus everything to pay our debts.
Once we clear customs, Jesus politely says, “Um. You stink. … You still have the dirt and grime of your old land in your clothes and on your skin and in your hair. Why don’t you take a bath?” So Jesus baptizes us in the
Then, we meet up with the rest of the group that is following Jesus, and Jesus teaches us how to travel in his way. He teaches us how to cross a river, how to find our way through a forest, how to survive in a desert. He also teaches us how to be a community, how to love each other, and how to forgive. Every person on the traveling team has a job. There’s a cook, a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, a scout, a repairman. Everyone does something.
As we travel, Jesus teaches us to notice people in need and how to help. In the mountains we build a hospital. In the forest, the children don’t know how to read, so we build a school. In the desert, there isn’t enough water, so we build a well. Everywhere we go, we help those in need. Everywhere we go, we make the world better. Jesus’ people always add light and healing to our communities, so everywhere we go, more people want to follow Jesus.
Jesus leads this group around and around the world, changing the world as he goes. We are actually remaking, reclaiming, repairing the world through simple actions of love and kindness and healing. The darkness will not win. The darkness cannot last because through Jesus a new light is breaking in.
[1] This idea of a puzzle matched with the wrong picture comes from Steve Chalke (The Lost Message of Jesus), referenced by Brian McClaren in Everything Must Change, (
[2] N.T. Wright, Simply Christian (
[3] Ibid, 116.
[4] Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology, (Nashville: Kingswood, 1994), 86-88.
[5] Richard Stearns, The Hole in our Gospel, (
[6] Wright, 102.
[7] Quoted in Maddox, 145.
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