Alistair Begg sermon on the Gospel

This sermon is excellent!  I will post the address so that you may listen to the sermon yourselves, but here are two excerpts that are worth pondering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL8mJQ39zjw

~Al

1.  "If you saw At Eternity's Gate, the movie—actually, if you did, you're in a very small group—but it's a movie that was made about Van Gogh most recently, called At Eternity's Gate. And part of that involves his interaction with Gauguin, who ended his life in a miserable situation down in the Islands. And Gauguin, who was brought up as a Roman Catholic and catechized all through his life and painted and abused his circumstances in all kinds of ways, his largest painting is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And he wrote on that painting—and he doesn't write on his paintings! And he wrote three questions up in the corner.:

D'où Venons Nous?
Que Sommes Nous?
Où Allons Nous?

"Where do we come from? What are we? And where are we going?" And he didn't have an answer to the question.

And the average millennial out in Texas tonight has no answer for that question either. They've no answer for the question. They have been raised believing that they exist as a result of time plus matter plus chance. They are a collection of molecules held in suspension. There is no ultimate destiny towards which they are moving; therefore, there is no arc that they're able to navigate through their lives, and they are at sea. And if the message that is then offered to them is a kind of watery substitute for the message of the cross, then we ought not be surprised that they just walk away from it. Because what we have to face up to is the fact of our rebellion against God: that no part of our lives is left intact—our emotions, our affections, our minds, our wills. The anti-God bias which is part and parcel of our human existence comes in at the level of our understanding and our intellect. And there is no intellectual road to God.

David Wells, who has been a friend to me over the years, has a purple passage in one of his books. I can't remember where it is. But he talks about how God is beyond the realm of our "intuitive radar," as he puts it. It's a wonderful line. So he says, "There is an invisible boundary" between ourselves and God—God in his holiness and we in our rebellion and in our alienation. There is no intellectual road for us to get there. And so it is that the only way that it is possible is for him to come in down, as it were, underneath the radar. We cannot access him on our own terms. We cannot access him in our own time. No, we need him to come and cross the boundary so that we might know him savingly. And what is the message of the cross? It is that God in Christ has done exactly that: that he has crossed that boundary and that he has made himself known.

And so, when we think about it in terms of its gravity in the predicament that we face, it also is possible for us to explain to our friends the absolute necessity of God's grace, which means that we either, in our proclamation and in our conversation, preach what the Bible says—that human beings are rebels against God, by nature under his judgment and lost, and that Jesus crucified, who bore their sin and curse, is the only available Savior—we either proclaim that, or we emphasize human potential and human ability, with Christ brought in to boost them, but with no necessity for the cross except to exhibit God's love and inspire us to greater endeavor.

The latter is popular. The former is true. If you go with the latter, no one will say you're a fool. They say, "No, that's fine. God, whoever he is…" I mean, I preach every week to a congregation of people. Many of them, because of their status in life, they are operating on this basis: "A good God, if he exists, will reward nice people if they do their best." That's the story. "If there is a good God and he exists, he'll reward nice people." In other words, "If he's grading on the curve, I'm in with a chance, because there's a lot of really bad people, and they're all sitting just along the row from me. So they are definitely in the F category or the D-minus category. And even if I'm only getting a good, solid C-plus, as long as it's going that way, I'm in with a very good chance." No, no, no, it's not going to work that way. If that was the case, why would we have Jesus dying on the cross? No, see, it doesn't make any sense at all.

So what it does is it establishes the gravity of sin, it reveals the absolute wonder and necessity of grace, and it allows us to say to people, "There is a wonderful opportunity for you now to close with this.""

2.  "And if I don't preach the gospel to myself all day and every day, then I will find myself beginning to trust myself, trust my experience, which is part of my fallenness as a man. If I take my eyes off the cross, I can then give only lip service to its efficacy while at the same time living as if my salvation depends upon me. And as soon as you go there, it will lead you either to abject despair or a horrible kind of arrogance. And it is only the cross of Christ that deals both with the dreadful depths of despair and the pretentious arrogance of the pride of man that says, "You know, I can figure this out, and I'm doing wonderfully well." No.

 

Because the sinless Savior died,
My sinful soul is counted free;
For God the just is satisfied
To look on him and pardon me.[18]

 

That's why Luther says most of your Christian life is outside of you, in this sense: that we know that we're not saved by good works, we're not saved as a result of our professions, but we're saved as a result of what Christ has achieved.

So, it gives to the believer a reminder—and a very important reminder—of the story of God's love that we get to take out into a broken world. It corrects my tendencies to self-aggrandizement. And it gives me a confidence that I couldn't otherwise have—a confidence in the gospel. In the gospel. As a student of church history, which you will be if you've been around at all, then you know that whenever the Church, big C—or wee c, for that matter—whenever the church loses confidence in the truth, the power, and the relevance of the gospel, it loses any compelling sense of mission. Because what is it going to talk about? It's got nothing to say. Nineteen fifty-two, James S. Stewart, whom I've mentioned, is preaching to the faculty and students at Yale Divinity School. And he warned them—1952, the year I was born—of "a theologically vague and harmlessly accommodating" Christianity which, he said, was "less than useless.""