The Gospel
“Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his love endures forever.
Let the redeemed of the LORD tell their story—those he redeemed from the hand of the foe, those he gathered from the lands, from east and west, from north and south.”
Today’s Text: Psalm 107:1-22 (Living Life Daily Devotional)
We all have seasons where experiencing the goodness of God feels like it’s out of our reach. But there may be some people who feel that it is impossible to experience the goodness of God, at all. A constant shadow permeates their lives.
We live in a broken world. And we try to do everything that we can to escape that brokenness, because we all have a deep yearning to know the goodness of God in our lives. Some of those things we try are obviously harmful: addiction to drugs, alcohol, gambling, gaming, doom-scrolling, sex, and on and on. And the brokenness of this world is evident in the fact that those obviously harmful avenues of escape are considered socially acceptable to some degree. People say, “As long as you’re not hurting anyone else, you do you.”
But they are hurting someone. They’re hurting themselves. In fact, we know that there are people who literally hurt themselves trying to escape the brokenness of their lives.
There are also other ways that we try to escape the brokenness of this world that are not directly or necessarily harmful; nevertheless, those avenues of escape are harmful because they lead us away from a relationship with Jesus Christ, and so they lead us away from the abundance and fullness of life that God wants us to have (John 10:10).
In a way, those avenues of escape may be even more insidious because the harm that they cause us is gradual, but it goes very deep. In a word, we would call those avenues of escape idolatry. Idolatry is simply placing one’s ultimate satisfaction and hope in anything or anyone other than God.
And those idolatries are insidious because they are in fact good as long as our relationship with Jesus Christ is the priority of our lives. They include things like education, career, entertainment, leisure, and even friends and family.
But when our relationship with Jesus Christ is not the foremost priority of our lives, those good things could very well turn into idolatries, and sooner or later the imbalance of our priorities will cause harm—harm to ourselves and/or harm to those we love.
Whatever the case, all those avenues of escape lead to a crash landing back down into this broken world.
God never intended it to be that way. God wants to bless us. And He created this world in order to bless us. And in order to receive God’s blessing, we have to live according to God’s economy—God’s ways, God’s purpose, God’s plan.
But from the very start, we chose a different way—our own way. Using an image from the Bible, we could say that we continue to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil instead of simply eating from the tree of life.
But God will never give up on His plan, and so God will never give up on us. So He sent His Son Jesus Christ to take upon Himself the burden and the penalty of all the sins of all of humanity across all time. So then, if we receive Jesus as Lord of our lives, we receive the forgiveness of sins, and with it the gift of the Holy Spirit, and with it life as adopted children of God, and with it eternal life.
And one day, Jesus will come back to resolve the brokenness of this world once and for all. Until then, He has given us a mission: “Let the redeemed of the LORD tell their story.”
That is the gospel.
Father, You are good, and Your lovingkindness, faithfulness, and mercy endure forever. My sins are always before me, but You have washed them away by the blood of my Lord Jesus. Thank You for Your amazing grace and mercy and love, for I am not deserving of it. But let me bear witness to this world that You are God and that You are good. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
