The Good News About the Good News
The word gospel means "good news" throughout the Bible the good news was that we have salvation through the blood of Christ. The gospel is unique in that it cannot be destroyed, it's available for all mankind, it exists in dark places, it continues to result in victory and it gets better and better as your faith grows stronger.
Don't Bury Your Talent
God expects us to be great thinkers. The Bible wasn't written to instruct us on exactly every step we need to follow in order to obey him. When he tells us that we need to love our spouse, He didn't tell us every specific way to demonstrate that love. The same is true with our responsibilities in parenting, studying, growing, avoiding sin, doing good to others and spreading the gospel. God has called us to do things we've never done and in areas of where He's instructed us in general terms, we need to thoughtfully follow Him.
Four Things Every Faithful Church Is Doing
The LORD established His singular church while on this earth and each local congregation received consistent teaching. In every faithful church of the LORD's people, there are four things that must be found among them. There must be sound teaching, they must edify one another, they must be pure, avoiding sin and they must be evangelizing, spreading the gospel of Christ.
What Do You See on the Cross?
People need to know about Jesus and His death on the cross. The Bible provides a lot of details about how He was beaten, spat upon, mocked, tortured and eventually executed. Not only must we see that, but we must see beyond that. When we look at the cross, we should see great strength, love, power, service and victory.
We Need to Be More Specific
When the chief priests and elders questioned Jesus regarding the authority by which He acted and taught, they couldn't have asked a more appropriate question. He was acting by the authority of God the Father and so must we. However, we need to be more specific about that. God's authority is found distinctly in His Word. Furthermore, we are under the authority of the New Testament. It is narrowed further by acting only in those areas where we have direct commands, approved examples or inescapable conclusions. We must understand statements of general and specific authority and respect the silence of the scriptures.
Finding the Balance
The Devil wants nothing more than to destroy us and when we fail to exercise balance, we provide him that very opportunity. As Christians, we must balance acting out of love and acting with knowledge. Taking an extreme view on either side will cause us problems. We must balance teaching to evangelize to those who do not know the gospel and teaching that is to build up Christians in the faith. We must balance collective worship with individual godly living; exhorting those who need encouragement and rebuking those in sin; and doing the work of the LORD to demonstrate faith with a recognition that salvation is only possible by God's grace.