Chapter 1: What confusion exists about the essential elements of the New Testament gospel?
There is so much confusion out there today about what constitutes the essential elements of the New Testament gospel. And so my conviction is that we are in a period of crisis with respect to our understanding of the actual biblical content of the gospel.
What is the gospel? That is a vital question for a fallen sinner to be able to answer if they are to have the hope of eternal life. So today and tomorrow, R.C. Sproul will help us understand the essential elements of the gospel. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and thanks for joining us today for Renewing Your Mind.
As a teenager searching for truth, even though I asked, many professed Christians struggled to clearly communicate the content of the gospel to me. Then as a new Christian, my understanding of the work of Christ was shallow at best. That's why we don't assume that everyone listening or watching today knows the good news, and why we revisit this topic often.
Chapter 2: Why is it vital to understand the content of the gospel for eternal life?
To help you better understand the gospel and to put some resources into your hands that you can share with non-Christians, we'll unlock lifetime digital access to today's series, Meaning of the Gospel. Send you a copy of R.C. Sproul's book, Saved from What?, and send you two copies of his brief title, What is the Gospel?, when you give a donation before midnight tomorrow at renewingyourmind.org.
Read these books yourself or hand them out to family and friends. So what does the word gospel mean? Here's Dr. Sproul.
Today we're going to look at one of the most important themes that we ever encounter in the Scriptures, and that's the theme of the gospel itself. Recently I was involved in teaching a course for clergy and I had 40 ministers present from 17 different denominations. And I started this seminar by asking the question openly, what is the gospel?
And I went to the Blackboard and more or less moderated their discussion about the content and meaning of the gospel, and we worked on this problem for over an hour before At least in my judgment, we came up with anything that adequately resembled the New Testament concept of the gospel.
And I found that somewhat striking, that those who give their lives to the preaching of the gospel and who are set apart and consecrated to the ministry of the gospel would have such a difficult time giving definition to the gospel. Now, I don't want to suggest that these particular individuals in that class were unusual or derelict or anything of that sort.
It's just that there is so much confusion out there today about what constitutes the essential elements of the New Testament gospel. Again, a year or so ago, at the Christian Booksellers Convention, one ministry organization took a poll on the floor of the convention and asked a hundred delegates to the convention, and these are people who own Christian bookstores, what is the gospel?
And in their estimation, out of the hundred that were polled, only one answer would have really captured the New Testament concept of the gospel. And so my conviction is that we are in a period of crisis with respect to our understanding of the actual biblical content of the gospel. And so I want to spend some time with you looking at
this from an elementary, introductory perspective on the meaning of the gospel as it is declared to us in the Scriptures. And let's start where I usually start, and that's with a little bit of a word study. The word gospel is the English translation for the Greek word aewangelion. The term awangelion is made up of a prefix and a root.
The prefix, which we pronounce awa, is really e-u, and the way that prefix comes over into the English language is by the prefix that we find attached to many words that is pronounced simply e-u, and we pronounce it ewe. The prefix is found in words like euphonics, which means what? Good sound.
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Chapter 3: What does the term 'gospel' mean in its original context?
we see certain ideas or elements that are routinely proclaimed in the initial proclamation of the infant church. And again, they focus on the person and work of Christ. Now, not every one of these sermons contains every element of this basic outline of the pattern of Jesus' work.
but there is a recurring theme of certain elements of his activity that when we put them all together, we call it the kerygma. Now, there's another reason why this term kerygma is important to our understanding of the early church, because the early church had another word that was important to their strategy and to their program, which was called didache.
In fact, there's a book from very early Christian history that's titled simply, The Didache. And the didache comes from the same Greek word from which we get the English word didactic. That which is didactic is that which teaches or instructs.
And so in the New Testament, a teacher was called a didoskelos, one who is involved with the didactic enterprise, one that is involved with didache or teaching. And so there's a clear distinction in the early church between the kerygma and the didache for this reason.
Much of the preaching in the early church, though it began with a proclamation to Jewish people assembled in Jerusalem and in the Jewish regions thereabouts, very soon the preaching of the gospel expanded to Gentile nations. And the Gentiles did not have a background knowledge of all of the content that we find in the Jewish Scriptures of the Old Testament.
And so the preachers of the early church, when they confronted the Gentiles, did not have time to start with Adam and go through Noah and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and David and Jeremiah and all of those things. They would simply give a boiled-down version of the significance of the person and work of Jesus.
And so their strategy was to preach the kerygma or to preach the gospel and call for a response to Christ. And when people responded to that and then entered into fellowship with the early Christian church, then immediately they were engaged in a serious program of instruction. The instruction came after the kerygma.
People responded to the evangelism of the preaching and were brought then into the church, and then they got filled in with the whole history of redemption, going back to Adam and Moses and David and all of that sort of thing, which became part of the didache. We also find in the epistles themselves a heavy emphasis on the didactic.
on the explanation of the meaning and significance and application of what Jesus has done for us in his person and in his work. But again, the basic proclamation, the basic evangelism of the early church was a simple, basic outline
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