Remember The Gospel: How To Move Forward In The Christian Life

By Chad Eddy

The essence of the Christian message is The Gospel, the Good News that God is real, God is good, and God has not given up on us! Unfortunately, this essential message so easily gets buried beneath religious agendas, political positions, moral issues, personal freedoms, and ethical beliefs. When we start to feel overwhelmed with all that Christianity seems to be, it's time to Remember The Gospel and rediscover what it truly is!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Access Media Publishing
• Release date: Jan 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995172111

Chad Eddy

Chad Eddy is a speaker and author, husband and father to four boys. Having spent over a decade in pastoral ministry with an emphasis on worship, youth, and church planting, he is passionate about communicating the clear message of the Gospel. He and his family live in Southern Manitoba, Canada.

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Acknowledgements

I first want to acknowledge the grace of God given me to know and understand the Gospel of Christ, and to tell, teach, proclaim, and remind others of the Good News through preaching, worship leading, and now writing. There's no greater honour or privilege!

Thank you Taralyn, my love, for standing with me these many years of highs and lows as we’ve worked through the Gospel in marriage, in vocation, in family, in relationships, and in a hundred other circumstances and situations together. You are my godsend, my reward, and my help. You are more than I deserve, and exactly what I need. I love you always.

To my many mentors, who have both personally and indirectly impacted my journey. Brian West, Rob Stewart, Ron Unruh, David Grauwiler, and the many youth pastors and spiritual leaders along the way: I am eternally grateful for your gift of time and guidance. To my friends who have been alongside me on the journey; Cam, Kristjen, Jordan, and others who have loved and encouraged me, picked me up, supported me. To those who have followed me when I followed Christ; Cory, Bryan, Alexander, Bronson, and many others - this book is written with you in mind.

To my parents David and Cheryl, my brothers Brent and Ryan, my Grandparents, Uncles, Aunts, and cousins. You provided an incubator for my faith in Jesus. You allowed me to fail, and caught me when I fell time and time again. To my boys Caleb, Carter, Chase, and Caiden - you have taught me more about the love and grace of our Heavenly Father than I ever could have imagined!

Special thanks to my editor Anastasia, to those who pre-read the content and provided excellent editorial advice, and to Dr. Ron Unruh for providing the Foreword.

Thank to you, reader, for caring enough about the Gospel of Jesus to read such a book as this, and for allowing my voice to entertain your thoughts.

Chad Eddy

November, 2016

Foreword

Stop trying so hard and just remember. This book speaks to the weariness experienced by many people for whom faith and Christianity have become superficial and unconvincing. The Gospel is gone from life. All that is promised in the world's best ever news story is unrealized and its richness missed over a lifetime. The thematic approach, the writing style and language of this book encourage readers who are uncertain, doubtful, agnostic or otherwise turned off, to keep reading. Chad convinces us early, that the Gospel is the main thing and that if we allow him to tell us about it, we will understand God, creation, history, the world, and our place in it. He implies that intricate theologies emerge into clarity when the Gospel is prioritized.

Gospel history for the amateur is what this is. Chad Eddy has written a layperson's historical theology, at least a history of the Gospel. It's intellectually nourishing as well as spiritually motivating. Someone with formal Bible training will find this to be a beneficial review as it systematically tracks the contexts in which theological touch points were articulated. It's like an easy reader church history and systematic theology. Other readers who wish to learn or to be reminded or even to be corrected will discover a resource. From the Table of Contents one notices immediately a history being developed from the origin of humanity and what God revealed concerning Himself very early in our history, to what students over many centuries have established as axiomatic truths about God. The book is more than this. It is an appeal to be reacquainted with Jesus because He actually is the good news that we each need to know and experience.

The passion for the Gospel that has generated this book has been in evidence during the years that I have known Chad, as he served as a youth pastor in two churches and as a church planter of Access Church in Aldergrove, British Columbia. There he was a pioneer who, with three small rambunctious boys at home and a supportive wife in Taralyn, Chad worked two jobs to pay the family bills while seeking to establish a viable gathering of seekers. He wants more than anything for people to have a relationship with Jesus Christ and whether he is at work or volunteering in the community or communicating online, he speaks about the good news that sets people free for real life that is eternal. 

I read metaphors that enlightened for me in a fresh sense, some old truths. Chad has an ability to winsomely illuminate complex philosophical and theological concepts. He begins by anchoring God's message by its origin, its history, and its etymology and traces it from the first humans through selected guardians of the promise like Abraham, Moses, the Hebrew nation. He juxtaposes remembering and forgetting, citing scripture at appropriate junctions to ensure the reader that the author is not making this stuff up. The emphasis is always on remembering God, His goodness, His mercy and His deliverance and urging people never, never forget. Remembering is the means by which light has come to all the earth's nations.

By Dr. Ron Unruh

Ron Unruh is a past president of the Evangelical Free Church of Canada and lead pastor of four churches over a 40-year period. He is an accomplished visual artist and an author of several books ranging in topic from fiction to commentary accessible at ronunruh.com.

1

A Mouthful of Fries

How do you even know this stuff is real?, Matt asked me, his mouth bursting with French fries. We had met for lunch. A few years before, he had attended the youth group that I had pastored. Now he had outgrown it and had also, unfortunately, outgrown church.

Life is real. Experience is real. Sex is real. A good high, is real. My friends are real. He waited a moment for me to respond, doubtless hoping to shock me a little. He smiled and continued, Your ideas about God and life don’t seem real or relevant to me anymore. Maybe I just believed them because you, my parents, and other pastors and Sunday School teachers told me to. Maybe he did.

I wasn’t shocked. I’ve had more of these types of conversations, with roughly the same narrative, than anybody could have guessed. Christianity didn’t work for these people. After an initial emotional experience, it felt irrelevant to their lives; peripheral at best, guilt- inducing at worst.

The person sitting at the other side of the table always deduced that Christians were no better, no more moral, no nicer or better off than the non-Christian. People like Matt had tried their very best to live their beliefs without much success, because they felt conflicted in their beliefs. Eventually, exhausted, they gave up. Some gave up out of a sense of integrity: because the Christian life didn’t feel true, they could not pretend it did. They left the church, looking for what did feel true for themselves. They tried. It didn’t work. They moved on.

Sadly, I’d seen all of this before. Truthfully, I’ve wrestled with many of my own doubts that were similar to Matt’s.

I believe that much of this loss is due to a fundamental absence of the Gospel in our understanding of our Christian faith. We share the Gospel with those who don’t know it, haven’t heard it, or have committedly resisted it. The Gospel has become synonymous with evangelizing and proselytizing, and of course, it certainly is! But this is where it stops, and it shouldn’t.

Once we ourselves have become converted or we have successfully aided in the conversion of another person, we focus on spiritual maturity. We pursue holiness, without always understanding what that means. We focus on discipline, conformed corporate worship techniques, behaviour modification and sin management, because such thing, we are taught, leads to contentment and victory, peace and happiness, and the good pleasure of God. We shift our focus from the Gospel of God to the rules of man!

We focus on building our faith, becoming baptized, partaking of communion, getting married and so many other rituals so that we can experience God’s blessings, but so many of us never arrive at the blessings. Defeated, we struggle with ourselves and our motivations. Instead of joy, we find sorrow. Instead of finding God’s purpose for ourselves, we find ourselves under the control of the expectations of others. We’ve traded one set of guidelines for another, new set. Where is the freedom in that?

Our new friends might gossip about us. The people we reach out to for help seem to either be judging us or competing with us. We are locked in a new struggle to get to a new level; a new level of holiness, of dedication to the church, of devotion to Jesus. Where does it end?

Our sin has never been adequately managed. We try and we fail, because we can never measure up to our holier neighbours beside us on the pew. When I think about what Christians tolerate in order to identify with the Church, I am far more surprised by those who stick around than by those who give up!

After everything I’ve said, though, I know that, this stuff is real. I have my own doubts and questions, but I also have compelling evidence that the essential Gospel is true. So what do I do about the gap that exists between what I know and what I still doubt? Like this: God knows, and that’s good enough. I can’t know everything! That would undermine faith as a principle of my Christian beliefs! But the Gospel is my evidence. God loves me. He loves this world that He made and all of His creation, so much so that He would commission His Son to redeem it.

In the ninth chapter of the book of John, we read the story of a man born blind. He is brought to the miracle working man Jesus, who makes a paste of spit and mud, and rubs it on the man’s eyes. Afterward, the man is told to complete the process of his own healing by washing in the Pool of Siloam. The man washes as he was instructed to do by Jesus, and he can now see! So that's great, right? Well, not to everybody.

The religious rulers, the Pharisees, were somewhat infuriated. The Pharisees were in charge of shepherding the Jewish people; teaching them the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (what we know as the Old Testament), and also the laws of Jewish observance that had been added later on by other religious authorities.

So the religious rulers demand to know who healed him, and why he would be healed on the Sabbath Day when no work should be done. It is discovered that Jesus healed the man, and the religious rulers get into a debate with one another about whether Jesus is a good man or not. One of them turns to the man who was formerly blind and asks him what he thinks. His response? "Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see" (John 9:25 ESV).

There are many, many debates that religious leaders still have. A lot of them are important, but many of them aren't. It's great to study world history and science and geology and decipher the meaning of Biblical passages through those lenses. But it's also easy to become so mesmerized by the trees that we forget to pay attention to the forest. The religious leaders in Jesus' day missed the point - a person born blind had been healed of his blindness! This wasn't like any other healing, because "never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind (John 9:32). The point wasn't whether Jesus was a good man or not - the point was that Jesus healed a man born blind! Once that point is established, other matters are much easier to answer. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him" (John 9:31).

Once the main thing is the main thing, secondary things start to make more sense. But Christianity has, in a lot of ways, lost the main thing. Religious leaders argue about creation and justification and atonement and predestination, instead of looking at the main thing, the Gospel, and agreeing one thing we know is that though once we were blind, now we see. Churches keep talking about morality and about worship styles and about political issues and about how the world is getting much darker since we started warehousing the light, and we take the’ attention away from the main thing, the Gospel. We sing about how we're feeling, we pray pithy statements about how we'll change and behave better, and we forget about the God who has saved us and is in the process of changing us for His glory and our good.

So no, I'm not surprised when dozens of my friends and thousands of others have thrown up their hands in disgust with the religious institution. I am far more surprised and indeed in awe with the ones who remain. They got it! They got the Gospel and did not let go. They know they were blind and now they see. They are totally focused on Jesus and His person. No matter what anyone around them says, they know, I was blind and now I see! So you can say all you want. I know what is true! Jesus is true! Jesus is the Gospel.

Reader, that is where I want you to be. That is where I want my dear friend Matt to be. That will get you through the complexities of church life. That will lead to spiritual maturity. That will lead to freedom and victory. That will help you manage sin and modify behaviour and produce authentic worship in your life. I was blind and now I see. My sins are forgiven! It's the Gospel - Jesus did it for me, He gave it to me, you can’t take it away from me, and I am not giving it up!

2

God is the Gospel

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:1-5, New International Version

Before God, there was nothing. God is necessary for the existence of everything.

God is above all good. We frequently reduce the concept of goodness to an abstract, relative judgement. Ice cream is good, we say, because it is yummy! Ice cream is bad, in another viewpoint, because it is high in sugar. So, what is it?

The ending of a marriage may be good by one standard and not good by another. When we don't know or trust the One Who makes all things good, good is determined by the person making the judgment, and that is further influenced by what one minute part of the issue he or she has the inclination or ability to focus on. We are all limited in our perspective, and it is therefore increasingly difficult to say, with certainty, what is good in our society. There are so many competing ideas.

Biblically, goodness belongs to God. Goodness is defined by God, the only One with unlimited perspective. Only He can see all the facets of the diamond perfectly at once, and declare it to be tarnished or good.

The Gospel is Good News. That is literally what the word Gospel means. The Old English words combined to create Gospel are god, (good) and spell (message). Notice that the word for good is god? It was understood that God and goodness were so interrelated, they were thought to be interchangeable.

The combining of the words good and message had an ancient precedent. The Greek word euangelion, combines eu (good), and angelion (message). This is the term that was used to describe the runner Pheidippides, who ran from the Battle of Marathon to Athens with a single message: "Nike!" - victory. His message was euangelion – good news to the Athenian Greeks.

From the beginning, God has always been the giver of good news, or the Gospel, because God has always been the source of all good things. God is goodness and apart from Him, no goodness exists. Anything that is not good is a distortion of what has come from God. Much like darkness is the absence of light and coldness is the absence of heat, evil measures the absence of goodness provided by God. For evil to exist, good has been distorted, changed or perverted.

What comes from God is good, and so all that He had created was good. It was good because it came from God and because He declared it to be so! From the seas to the land, vegetation to animals, from the deepest oceans to the grandest galaxies, all was good and without any blemish. After creating everything else and then making humankind, God declared it all good, like Him.

Of all creation, man and woman were most like Him. To them were given the ability to create, like Him, to choose, to think, to discern. They were given the ability to love and to give honour to one another and God. Man and woman were certainly most good. So good in fact, they were said to have been made in His image.

God gives only good, perfect gifts. Certainly, in the place God had made for humanity to dwell, the Garden of Eden, perfect would be an accurate description! Food, beauty, nature, friendship, taste, sex, water, land, thought and idea were all good, all the time! Man and woman were enjoying their Creator and themselves in the land He had given them. God had given them everything to enjoy, and because it was all from His hand it was all good. Any choice they could make would result in praise to Him for His goodness, His blessing, His character. Everything was Gospel; they lived in a perpetual state of goodness!

God’s command was good, and man and woman obeyed because they knew and trusted in His goodness and His person. This man and woman or Adam and Eve, as they were named, lived in proximity to God’s glory.

But something happened that altered the goodness that existed, and goodness which is altered ceases to be goodness at all. Someone who had been created by God originally as a good being, an angel of light, or Lucifer, had already himself changed the goodness that he had been created with, and bent the definition of goodness for the man and woman. Appearing to them in the form of a serpent, he convinced them to distrust and ultimately disobey God. Choosing to indulge a gift that was not given, and therefore not good, resulted in sin, or a perversion of what God intends.

After they sinned, they immediately saw both good and evil. Prior to their sin, evil had been shielded from their eyes. It was not a part of their existence or understanding. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine not being bothered by evil and its effects, because it doesn’t even form part of your world?

But now, goodness had been distorted. In the presence of evil, goodness was diminished. They saw one another and realized they were naked. They felt shame for the first time! Now all good things including nudity had not only benefits but properties that caused embarrassment!

They were afraid too. And their action had consequences that affected the world outside of their own bodies and souls. Even the animals were afraid. Fear, and the reasons