Is Your Church a Family or a Social Club?

John Piper: Do You Connect to God by Santa or Jesus?

Every Pastor and Sunday School teacher needs to watch this:

John Piper on the Election

John Piper on the Prosperity gospel

God is the Gospel - Conclusion

I just realized that I failed to post the notes from the final chapter...

• God’s highest act of love is giving us himself to love.
• Oh, how many there are for whom heaven represents merely the absence of
  pain and the presence of eternal happiness! But now comes the absolutely
  decisive question: Is this happiness in God himself or in the
  gifts of heaven?
• the Christian gospel is not merely that Jesus died and rose again; and not merely that these events appease God’s wrath, forgive sin, and justify sinners; and not merely
  that this redemption gets us out of hell and into heaven; but that
  they bring us to the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ as our
  supreme, all-satisfying, and everlasting treasure.
• the power of the gospel to transform us into radically loving
  people lies not only in our being forgiven and our being counted
  righteous, but also in our seeing and savoring the glory of Christ
  in the gospel.
• We will remember that the god of this world wants to blind our minds from seeing
  the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 4:4).

God is the Gospel -- Chapter 11

• The best news of the Christian gospel is that the supremely glorious
  Creator of the universe has acted in Jesus Christ’s death
  and resurrection to remove every obstacle between us and himself
  so that we may find everlasting joy in seeing and savoring his infinite
  beauty.
• Beholding the beauty of God has always been the supreme desire of those who
  know him best.
• We love the praise of man. It feels good. Praise is to the ego what
  sex is to the body. It just doesn’t get any better—as long as we are
  spiritually dead.
• If God can be seen as the enabler of their self-exaltation,
  they will be happy to do some God-exaltation. If God is mancentered,
  they are willing to be, in a sense, God-centered.
• whole systems of imitation Christianity can be built on distorted images of the love of God and the gospel of God. Jonathan Edwards learned this to his own
  heartache as he studied the permutations of hypocrisy in the fallout
  of the Great Awakening.
• So it is possible even to see God as “in a sort, lovely” when we are
  not even genuine Christians. If he can be seen as a servant of our selflove,
  then we can see him as lovely. If he will make much of us, then
  we will be willing, up to a point, to make much of him.
• Conversion is the spiritualdiscovery that being loved by God is not the divine endorsement of our passion for self-exaltation. In fact, being loved by God is the
  merciful destruction of that passion. And the destruction is not an
  end in itself. It is to make room for the supernatural experience of
  truly being loved by God—that is, being enabled by him to enjoy
  God-exaltation as an end in itself. Spiritual God-exaltation is not a
  means to the pleasure of self-exaltation.
• heaven is a world in which all created things have become mirrors, and all of them are tilted to a 45 degree angle. Everywhere we look—in every creature—we see
  the reflection of God.
• First, in letting Lazarus die in order to raise him from the dead
  his aim is to show the glory of God the Father and God the Son.
  Second, in this costly revelation of his glory he would be loving this
  family. From this I conclude that the primary way that Jesus loved
  this family was by doing what he must do to display to them in a
  compelling way his own glory.
• Love is doing whatever you need to do to help people see
  and savor the glory of God in Christ forever and ever.
• Jesus is the one being in the universe for whom self-exaltation is the highest virtue and the most loving act. He is God. Therefore the best gift he can give is the revelation
  of himself.
• The love of Jesus drives him to pray for us, and then die for us, not that our
  value may be central, but that his glory may be central, and so that
  we may see it and savor it for all eternity. This is the greatest good
  in the good news of the gospel.
• Do we feel loved by God because God makes much of us or because God, at great cost to himself, did all that needed to be done through Jesus Christ so that we
  might enjoy making much of him forever? It is a telling question.
• A finite mind cannot fully know an infinite mind. Our finite capacities for pleasure cannot fully know all the joy there is to be had in an infinite fountain.
• Consider some attributes of Christ that we might pursue,
  and ask these questions:
  • Do I want to be strong like Christ, so I will be admired as
  strong, or so that I can defeat every adversary that would
  entice me to settle for any pleasure less than admiring the
  strongest person in the universe, Christ?
  • Do I want to be wise like Christ, so I will be admired as wise
  and intelligent, or so that I can discern and admire the One
  who is most truly wise?
  • Do I want to be holy like Christ, so that I can be admired as
  holy, or so that I can be free from all unholy inhibitions that
  keep me from seeing and savoring the holiness of Christ?
  • Do I want to be loving like Christ, so that I will be admired as
  a loving person, or so that I will enjoy extending to others,
  even in sufferings, the all-satisfying love of Christ?
• The question is not whether we will have all this glorious likeness
  to Christ. We will. The question is: To what end?
• God is glorified in us when we are satisfied in him. Externally, Christ-exalting deeds flow from this enjoyment of Christ.

God is the Gospel -- Chapter 10

• One of the strongest biblical warnings not to use the God of the
  gospel just to get his gospel gifts comes in relation to prayer.
• Merciful answers to prayer are blood-bought gifts
  of the gospel. Hebrews 4:16 teaches us that we can “draw near to
  the throne of grace” with confidence and “find grace to help in time
  of need” because “we have a great high priest” (v. 14).
• Answered prayer is based on Jesus’ priestly intercession for us,
  and that intercession is based on the blood he shed to remove our
  sins and release the flood of prayer-answering grace.
• Why does he call us “adulteresses” when we pray? It’s because
  we ask God for things to indulge our desires that are not desires for
  him.
• What we learn is that the aim of the gospel is not mainly to give us God’s gifts,
  but to give us God. All his gifts are good. But in and through them
  all, the aim is to see more of God’s glory and to savor more of his
  infinitely beautiful moral perfections displayed in the gospel.
• gratitude that is pleasing to God is not first a delight in the benefits God gives (though that will be part of it). True gratitude must be rooted in something else that comes first—
  namely, a delight in the beauty and excellency of God’s character.
• Perhaps you have heard people say how thankful we should be for the death of
  Christ because it shows how much value God puts upon us. In other
  words, they are thankful for the cross as an echo of our worth. What
  is the foundation of this gratitude?
• It is a shocking thing to learn that one of today’s most common descriptions of the
  cross—namely, how much of our value it celebrates—may well be
  a description of natural self-love with no spiritual value.
• The creation of the material world, including our bodies with all five senses, was God’s idea. He did not do it mainly as a temptation to idolatry, but mainly as a display of
  his glory.
• The reason that God created what is not God is that this was the best way for God
  to display his glory to beings other than himself. His motive in this
  was simultaneously a love for them and for the display of his glory.
• The highest act of love is the giving of the best gift, and,
  if necessary, at the greatest cost, to the least deserving.
• The danger of eating is that we fall in love with the gift; the danger of fasting is that we belittle the gift and glory in our will-power.
• It is inevitable in a fallen material world that tests and temptations
  will abound.
• Like all God’s gifts, signs and wonders witness to the nature and
  character of God, especially his grace. But, as with material gifts,
  miraculous gifts may lure our hearts to themselves and not to God.
  This is why we must keep emphasizing that God is the gospel.

God is the Gospel -- Chapter 9

• all the gifts of God are given for the sake of revealing
  more of God’s glory, so that the proper use of them is to rest our
  affections not on them but through them on God alone.
• The spotless lamb, Jesus Christ, who was slain for our sins, was foreknown before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:20). Because of this, God gave us grace
  in Christ before the ages began (2 Tim. 1:9). Therefore, Paul says,
  “God predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:5).
  This predestination was God’s purpose to adopt us and make us
  holy and blameless before him in love.
• The glory of grace is the glory of God acting graciously.
• The ultimate aim of the incarnation was that through Christ people would see the
  Lordship of Christ and the glory of God. The whole story of Christ’s
  incarnate life and death and resurrection was the brightest beam of
  glory that has ever shone down from the brightness of God.
• The focus of reconciliation is that we now may enjoy the presence of God without
  condemnation.
• Whether one thinks of the work of Christ as accomplishing reconciliation
  or propitiation or penal satisfaction or redemption or justification
  or forgiveness of sins or liberation, the aim of them all is
  summed up in the ultimate gift of God himself.
• There is no sure evidence that we have a new heart just because we want to escape hell. That’s a perfectly natural desire, not a supernatural one. It doesn’t take a new heart to
  want the psychological relief of forgiveness, or the removal of God’s
  wrath, or the inheritance of God’s world. All these things are understandable
  without any spiritual change. You don’t need to be born
  again to want these things.
• It is not wrong to want them. Indeed it is folly not to. But the evidence
  that we have been changed is that we want these things
  because they bring us to the enjoyment of God.
• The gospel of Christ is the good news that at the cost of his Son’s
  life, God has done everything necessary to enthrall us with what will
  make us eternally and ever-increasingly happy—namely, himself.
• There is an ironclad connection between Christ’s victory over death and our victory
  over death. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead
  dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give
  life to your mortal bodies” (Rom. 8:11). “God raised the Lord and
  will also raise us up by his power” (1 Cor. 6:14; cf. 2 Cor. 4:14).
• “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36). Notice the
  present tense. We have, not just will have, eternal life. This is real and
  precious and permanent. “I give them eternal life, and they will never
  perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28).
• The gospel has unleashed the omnipotent mercy of God so that thousands of other gifts flow to us from the gospel heart of God. I am thinking of a text like Romans 8:32: “He
  who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will
  he not also with him graciously give us all things?” This means that
  the heart of the gospel—God’s not sparing his own Son—is the guarantee
  that “all things” will be given to us.
• God takes “all things” and makes them serve our ultimate good. It doesn’t mean we get everything our imperfect hearts want. It means we get what’s good for us.
• The gospel gift of God’s love is better than life.
• I take him (Paul) to mean that because of the truths
  of Romans 8:28 and 8:32 God takes every hardship and makes it
  serve us, including death.
• This is all very strange. Because of the gospel, God promises to “give
  us all things” with Christ (Rom. 8:32). The “all things” turns out to
  include not just pleasant things but terrible things like tribulation, distress,
  persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword, and death.
  These are all gospel gifts purchased for us by the blood of Christ.
• The aim of the gospel is not an easy life. It is deeper knowledge of God
  and deeper trust in God.
• This goal is not our ease or wealth or safety in this age, but our dependence on Christ and our delight in his glory.
• Faith is not saving faith if it tries to trust Christ for the wrong things. So this makes
  clear that trust per se, without reference to what we trust him for, is
  not the essence of a saving relationship to Christ. Something else
  must be present in faith if it is to be saving faith that honors Christ
  rather than just using him. Saving faith must have a quality to it that
  tastes what is Christ-exalting and embraces it.

God is the Gospel -- Chapter 7

• One of the most simple and profound descriptions of the gospel
  in the New Testament occurs in 1 Timothy 1:11.
• the glory of God is not marginal or dispensable but is
  essential to making the good news good.
• An essential part of what makes the gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ good news is that the God it reveals is infinitely joyful. No one would want to
  spend eternity with an unhappy God. If God were unhappy, then the
  goal of the gospel would not be a happy goal, and that means it
  would be no gospel at all.
• The happiness of God is first and foremost a happiness in his
  Son.6 Thus when we share in the happiness of God, we share in the
  very pleasure that the Father has in the Son. Ultimately this is what
  makes the gospel good news. It opens the way for us to see and savor
  the glory of Christ. And when we reach that ultimate goal we will
  find ourselves savoring the Son with the very happiness that the
  Father has in the Son.
• Three things stand in the way of our complete satisfaction in
  this world. One is that nothing here has a personal worth great
  enough to meet the deepest longings of our hearts. Another is that
  we lack the strength to savor the best treasures to their maximum
  worth. And the third obstacle to complete satisfaction is that our
  joys here come to an end. Nothing lasts.
• We must make plain to people that if their hope stops short
  of seeing and savoring the glory of God in Christ, they are not fixing
  their hearts on the main thing and the best thing Christ died to
  accomplish—seeing and savoring the glory of God in the face of
  Christ with everlasting and ever-increasing joy.

Piper's dad goes home -- a lesson for us all

I had to post this link to the blog/ journal entry made by John Piper after the passing of his father. It reminds me of when my grandpa passed away several years ago. There is no sadness for the loss of life for these great saints as they go home; rather just the sorrow of the tempoary separation and the effect of not having their leadership, friendship, and godly example before us. It reminds me:

1. this is not our true home, there is so much more beyond our few years here
2. I want to live a life that may someday have even a small chance of being remembered this way
3. I need to honor my own parents and the lives of my elders as they live out their examples before me. And pass the importance of this on to my children.

Here are a couple of quotes from the post that truly hit home.

That’s it. I rose and waited. Will he breathe again? Nothing. Fifteen or twenty seconds, and then a gasp. I was told to expect these false endings. But it was not false. The gasp was the first of two. But no more breaths. I waited, watching. No facial expressions. His face had frozen in place hours before. One more jerk. That was all. Perhaps an eyebrow twitch a moment later. Nothing more.
I stroked his forehead and sang,
My gracious Master and My GodAssist me to proclaimTo spread through all the earth abroadThe honors of thy name

Thank you, Daddy. Thank you for sixty-one years of faithfulness to me. I am simply looking into his face now. Thank you. You were a good father. You never put me down. Discipline, yes. Spankings, yes. But you never scorned me. You never treated me with contempt. You never spoke of my future with hopelessness in your voice. You believed God’s hand was on me. You approved of my ministry. You prayed for me. Everyday. That may be the biggest change in these new days: Daddy is no longer praying for me

It was 12:55 as I walked out of room 4326. Just before the elevators on the fourth floor in the lounge, a young man in his twenties was sitting alone listening to his iPod with headphones. I paused. Then I walked toward him. He stopped his music. Hello, my father just died. One of the greatest tributes I could pay to him is to ask you, Are you ready to meet God? “Yes, Sir.” That would make my father very happy. You know Jesus is the only way? “Yes, Sir.” Good. Thank you for letting me talk to you.

God is the Gospel -- Chapter 4

• In other words, in the ministry of the gospel through
  Paul the eyes of the spiritually blind are opened, light dawns in the
  heart, the power of Satan’s darkness is broken, faith is awakened,
  forgiveness of sins is received, and sanctification begins.
• God uses weak, afflicted clay pots to carry “the surpassing power”
  of “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”
• More than any part of the Bible that I know of, the connections
  between 2 Corinthians 4:4 and 6 shed light on the ultimate
  meaning of good in the term good news.
• The gospel would not be good news if it did not reveal the glory of Christ for us to see and
  savor. It is the glory of Christ that finally satisfies our soul. We are
  made for Christ, and Christ died so that every obstacle would be
  removed that keeps us from seeing and savoring the most satisfying
  treasure in the universe—namely, Christ, who is the image of God.
• Satan is not mainly interested in causing us misery. He is mainly interested in making
  Christ look bad. He hates Christ. And he hates the glory of Christ.
  He will do all he can to keep people from seeing Christ as glorious.
  The gospel is God’s instrument for liberating people from exulting
  in self to exulting in Christ. Therefore Satan hates the gospel.
• Thus 2 Corinthians 4:4 says that Satan blinds people to keep them
  from seeing “the light of the gospel.” He has more than one way to
  do this. One way, of course, is to prevent the preaching of the gospel.
• But in 2 Corinthians 4:4 the way Satan keeps people from seeing
  “the light of the gospel” is not by preventing preaching, but by preventing
  spiritual perception. The words of the gospel are heard. The
  facts are comprehended. But there is no “light.”
• If you are blind, someone may persuade you that the sun is bright.
  But that persuasion is not what Paul is talking about. When your
  eyes are opened—that is, when God says, “Let there be light”—the
  persuasion is of a different kind.
• But the point here is this: the glory of God in Christ, revealed through the gospel, is a
  real, objective light that must be spiritually seen in order for there
  to be salvation. If it is not seen—spiritually tasted as glorious and
  precious—Satan still has his way, and there is no salvation.
• The glorious person who once walked the earth is now unseen.
  All his decisive acts are in the invisible past. We do not have any
  videos or recordings of Jesus Christ on earth. What we have linking
  us with Christ and with his cross and resurrection is the word of
  God, and its center, the gospel.
• Therefore, when the gospel is preached in its fullness, and by
  God’s mighty grace Satan’s blinding power is overcome, and God
  says to the human soul, “Let there be light!” what the soul sees and
  savors in the gospel is “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.”
  That is the aim of gospel preaching.
• So we must hold fast to two truths, not just one, even if they
  seem to be in tension. First, we must hold fast to the truth that the
  spiritual light Paul speaks about in verse 4 actually streams from the
  events of the gospel of Christ. The other truth is that God creates
  this light in the heart. It is not caused by human preaching. It is
  caused immediately by God.
• The real, bodily face of Jesus matters. It signifies
  that he was a real human being and that he was a person
  revealed in real, historical, physical life.
• His glory is the glory ofGod because Jesus Christ is God. The glory of the only Son—not the creature-sons, like us, but the divine Son—is the glory of the Father
  because they are of the same essence, the same divine Being.
• There is a glory of the Father and a glory of the Son, but
  they are so united that if you see the one, you see the other. They
  do not have the same roles in the work of redemption, but the
  glory manifest in each of their roles shines from them both. No one
  knows the glory of the Son and is a stranger to the glory of the
  Father. And no one knows the glory of the Father and is a stranger
  to the glory of the Son.
• Confessing Christ, the Son of God, results in God the Father’s coming to us and
  manifesting himself to us.
• There is no possibility of knowing God or having a saving relationship
  with God without knowing and trusting the Son.
• The gospel is the light of the glory of Christ who is the image of
  God. It is the light of the glory of God in the face of Christ. This is
  what makes the gospel good news. If the glory of God in Christ were
  not given to us in the gospel for our everlasting seeing and savoring,
  the gospel would not be good news.
• Calvin says it with the kind of amazement it
  deserves: “They do not see the midday sun.”12 That is how plain
  the glory of God is in the gospel.

God is the Gospel - Chapter 3

• Preachers can say dozens of true and wonderful things
  about the gospel and not lead people to where the gospel is leading.
• God is the gospel. That is, he is what makes
  the good news good. Nothing less can make the gospel good news.
  God is the final and highest gift that makes the good news good.
  Until people use the gospel to get to God, they use it wrongly.
• We are not capable of changing God. We cannot pay our own debt.
  “Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his
  life” (Ps. 49:7). Therefore, in his great mercy, God intervened to put
  Christ forward as the propitiation of God’s own wrath (Rom. 3:25).
• Thus justification has these two sides: the removal of sin because
  Christ bears our curse, and the imputation of righteousness because
  we are in Christ and his righteousness is counted as ours.
• Every person should be required to answer the question, “Why is it good news to you that your sinsare forgiven?” “Why is it good news to you that you stand righteous
  in the courtroom of the Judge of the universe?”
• if God is not treasured as the ultimate gift of the gospel, none of his gifts will be gospel, good news. And if God is treasured as the supremely valuable gift of the
  gospel, then all the other lesser gifts will be enjoyed as well.
• Forgiveness is simply a way of getting obstacles out of the way so that we can look at each other again with joy
• Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing
  and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if
  Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to
  get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It’s a way of
  overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don’t want
  God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel.
• morally we are not good enough in our fallen condition and would be consumed
  in the fire of his holiness if we saw him fully for who he is.
• Created beings simply cannot look on the Creator and see him for
  who he is.
• What I am trying to express here is that the glory of Christ, as
  he appeared among us, consisted not in one attribute or another, and
  not in one act or another, but in what Jonathan Edwards called “an
  admirable conjunction of diverse excellencies.”
• The glory of Christ is not synonymous with raw power. The
  glory is the divine beauty of his manifold perfections. To see this
  requires a change of heart.
• The ability to see spiritual beauty is not unwavering. There are ups
  and downs in our fellowship with Christ. There are times of
  beclouded vision, especially if sin gets the upper hand in our lives for
  a season.
• You can’t see and savor God as supremely satisfying
  while you are full of rebellion against him and he is full of wrath
  against you. The removal of this wrath and this rebellion is what the
  gospel is for. The ultimate aim of the gospel is the display of God’s
  glory and the removal of every obstacle to our seeing it and savoring
  it as our highest treasure. “Behold your God!”

God Is the Gospel -- Chapter 2

• many true and precious aspects of the gospel can be
  affirmed, and yet the final and greatest good of the gospel be missed.
• Interestingly the Bible
  (including the Greek Old Testament1 and New Testament) uses the
  noun “gospel” (eujaggevlion) seventy-seven times and the verb for
  “preach the gospel” (eujaggelivzw) seventy-seven times. In the vast
  majority of these uses the meaning is assumed rather than defined.
• There simply can be no good news without a living God who
  created the universe.
• In other words, the reign of God has broken into this world to set things right for the sake
  of his people; therefore repent and believe this good news. In fact, if
  you do, you are part of his people. In a world so full of brokenness
  and sin, there simply can be no good news if God does not break in
  with kingly authority. If God does not come with sovereign rights as
  King of the universe, there will be only hopelessness in this world.
• when he sheds his blood, it will be for others, and it will obtain the longpromised
  “new covenant” that promised, “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:34). That much Jesus made plain.
• The Holy Spirit is the down payment,
  a guarantee of the fullness of joy we will know in the perfected
  fellowship with the Father and the Son in the age to come
  (2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5).
• The trouble here is that we need to distinguish the experience of
  salvation in particular persons and the promise of salvation through
  believing in Christ. The actual experience of a particular person’s
  being saved is not part of the gospel. But that experience happens
  when the person believes the gospel, and part of what they believe
  is the promise that on the basis of the death and resurrection of Jesus
  they will be saved. So the way we should say it is that the promise
  The Gospel—The Biblical Scope of Its Meaning 31
  of salvation is part of the gospel, but the actual experience of salvation
  in particular persons is not part of the gospel, but the result
  of the gospel.
• The King must die before he reigns. Otherwise the
  justice of his reign would only bring judgment and not salvation. So
  all the kingdom blessings demonstrated in the Gospels had to be
  purchased by the blood of Christ. This is why the cross must ever
  be the center and foundation of the gospel and why the blessings of
  the gospel should only be called gospel in relation to the cross.
• The actual salvation of the nations comes
  through the blood-bought promise of Gentile salvation in the
  gospel. If the gospel were parochial, it would not be the gospel.
• The death of Jesus in our place was the act of God’s grace that makes all acts of grace righteous in God’s sight.
• every blessing that comes to redeemed sinners
  comes on the ground and by the power of God’s grace. By grace God
  sent the Son to die, and by that death everything we need in order
  to be eternally happy in God is ours. “He who did not spare his own
  Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously
  give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). The gospel is the good news
  that because God did not spare Christ, he will not spare any
  omnipotent effort to give us everything that is good for us.
• But for the most part the good things mentioned in this chapter
  as essential parts of the gospel are not the final good of the gospel
  and would not prove to be good for us at all if the unmentioned
  supreme good were not seen and embraced. That good is God himself
  seen and savored in all his glory.
• If you embrace everything that I have mentioned in this chapter about the facets of the gospel, but do it in a way that does not make the glory of God in Christ your
  supreme treasure, then you have not embraced the gospel.
• They have come for one great reason: that you might behold forever the glory of God
  in Christ, and by beholding become the kind of person who delights
  in God above all things, and by delighting display his supreme
  beauty and worth with ever-increasing brightness and bliss forever.

God Is the Gospel -- Chapter 1

I've decided to read this book, broken into parts as a portion of my TAWG (time alone with God). I will then post the notes and any thoughts I have accompanying them by chapter. This will officially be listed as book #5 in my 2007 reading list. Here is chapter 1.

• gospel means good news. Good news is for proclaiming—for
  heralding the way an old-fashioned town crier would do.
• It is easy in our day to lose the sense of wonder and amazement
  at the news quality of the gospel. If we would feel what the good
  news of the New Testament really was, we should not forget the way
  it was announced in Luke 2:10-11: “The angel said to them, ‘Fear
  not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for
  all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a
  Savior, who is Christ the Lord.’”
• The war will be over soon, and there is no longer any doubt as to who will win.
  Christ will win, and he will liberate all those who have put their
  hope in him.
• The good news is not that there is no pain or death or sin or
  hell. There is. The good news is that the King himself has come,
  and these enemies have been defeated, and if we trust in what he
  has done and what he promises, we will escape the death sentence
  and see the glory of our Liberator and live with him forever.
• But the gospel is not only news. It is first news, and then it is doctrine.
• When the gospel is proclaimed, it must be explained.
• Our question is not merely, what is the gospel? Our question is: What is the ultimate good of the gospel that makes all the aspects of good news good? What is the goal of the
  gospel that, if we miss it, takes all the good out of the gospel? What
  do we mean when we say God is the gospel?