About RCC — What is the Gospel?

The Gospel is both remarkably simple and elaborately complex. But this is it in a nutshell:

The God of the universe is a God who is for You!

Because of WHO God is— a God of love (1 John 4.8) and justice (Psalm 89.14)—He chose in history to act entirely in accordance with His nature and came to earth to rescue us. But wait—rescue us? From what?

Humankind has chosen from the beginning to be our own god, to set our own rules and to determine our own path. This was and is a rejection of God’s kind and good desires for His most treasured creation. This is “sin” at its fundamental root. The Bible also calls it “idolatry” because we make ourselves gods instead of loving and trusting the True God.

Because God is JUST, He could not simply let his creatures off the hook for their blatant rebellion against him. God—as a just God—demanded payment.

But because God is LOVE, He chose to make the payment Himself rather than extracting it from us! (Romans 5.8) In Jesus Christ, all the penalties and debts our sin had accrued, that stood between us and God, are fully and totally paid for. Total forgiveness is ours through the death of Jesus. His death paid for the sins of the world. And after dying, He rose from the dead, conquering death. Death and sin have no more power because of Jesus. We don’t need to be afraid of them anymore. Which is great news!

But there’s more. The Bible says that now God sees us as though WE had paid for our sins – as though we were Jesus! (Galatians 2.20). That means that God does not welcome us as pardoned criminals, but as a conquering heroes! God treated His Son as though His Son had lived your life. So that He could treat you as though you had lived His Son’s life! The Bible says that this is true salvation—being brought into the family of God as His children, being given the Holy Spirit who lives within us enabling us to have the intimate and personal relationship with God we were created for. Salvation is not simply an event in time with a payoff later; it is a full actualization of who you were made to be—a son or daughter of God, living and reigning with Him forever! And to receive this salvation, the only “work” required is faith—faith that Jesus, not ourselves, is what makes us acceptable to God.

Every one of us has, at some point, looked in the mirror and said, “I cannot please God.” Many of us have been led to take the next step, and say, “I can’t, but Christ did for me.” If you believe that with all your heart, then you are a child of God. There is a lot of hope and joy that flow out of that one simple act, but we can truly say it all in six words:

We can’t. Jesus did. Believe Him.